Literature Review Human Resources

ABSTRACT

Human resource management (HRM) has been around for many years. Through these years the duties and agendas of the HRM team have changed considerably. They have gone from being in one business to helping operate many businesses and even entered the global economy in more recent years. The challenge today is strategizing human resource management to be the best it can be.

PURPOSE

The purpose of this review is to compare three articles and discuss the main points made in them. These articles include a historical and global prospective, China compared to the United States, and the last is based on issues in the United States over the last thirty years.

THEORETICAL PERSPECTIVES

These articles discuss the dominant perspectives. There are four dominant perspectives that the SHRM researchers draw their conclusions from right now even though the process is still evolving. They are: the universalist perspective, the configurational perspective, the contingency perspective, and the last is the contextualist perspective.

UNIVERSALIST PERSPECTIVE

In order to develop the universalist perspective you take two steps. The first is important strategic HR practices must be identified. The second one argues that relate the individual practices to organizational performance must be presented. (Delery and Doty p.805) China has adapted to the universalist perspective in more companies. (Liang, Marler, Cui) With more than 300 studies there were only 19 that came back from China. Out of the 19 studies 12 focused on the universalist HRM practices and only 7 were based on the contingency model. (Liang, Marler, Cui)

CONFIGURATIONAL PERSPECTIVE

The second SHRM configurational perspective discusses how systems, clusters, or groups of human resource management practices interact with each other to reach their goals. (Janet M. Marler)

CONTINGENCY PERSPECTIVE

Moving toward the third theory, contingency perspective describes the relationship of HRM practices and the...