Us Hrm Model and European Model of Hrm

US HRM model & European model of HRM

On the basis of the article about Human Resources Management models in the Western world by Goodham/Nordhaug (2010), I will give an illustration of which companies represent them. In order to apply each, the US Human Resources Management model and a European model of Human Resources Management to a company, I want to use the North American manufacturer of sportsequipment Nike Inc. and the Austrian steel company Voestalpine AG.

First, I would like to start off with Nike Inc. as a representantive for the US HRM model, which was founded in the United States of America and therefore primarily acts from an LME country. Hence its most important goals are to maximize their profits and increase shareholder value. For this purpose, companies usually often have to take certain measures, if they want to stay competitive within their industry. Especially outsourcing of the production is a major issue for manufacturers with sales figures like Nike. As far as this aspect is concerned, recent information provides that by now, Nike Inc. has relocated most of their factories to Asia (China, Indonesia Taiwan and India to only name a few). In addition to the various advantages like cutting costs, increasing their competitiveness and the opportunity to pass risk to subcontractors this move provides, there are also disadvantages which Nike Inc. had to discover in the recent years. When having a subcontractor produce your products, you always have to be aware of the fact that you will never have full control of the actions he decides to take. In this particular case, their employees often had to face questionable working conditions. These included exposure to hazardous materials, abuse from employers,days with more than 14 hours working hours at a minimum wage and even a case of child labor. For a long time Nike claimed, that they did not know about all that but eventually began to pressure their subcontractors to improve the conditions. After...