Assessing the adoption of HRM by small and medium-sized manufacturing organizations

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Abstract
This paper reports on exploratory research which uses a comparative case-study approach with sixteen organizations to study the extent to which HRM has been adopted in traditional brownfield-site, small and medium-sized UK manufacturing organizations. The paper begins with a comparison of HRM practices across the sixteen organizations. It is argued that the most common HRM practices in these firms appeared to relate more to a traditional small firm approach than to any proactive attempt to adopt HRM. The analysis shows that very few of the organizations adopted a strategic approach towards HRM with an integrated set of policies related to corporate strategy being put forward. Instead, the dominant approach seemed to be one of reactive, opportunistic pragmatism, showing little development from the standard modern approach identified as most common in the early 1980s. On the other hand, three organizations are shown to approximate quite closely to the model of strategic HRM and contextual analysis is undertaken to attempt to differentiate these from the other organizations. A comparison is also made between the findings of this research and a telephone survey that was conducted to assess the use of HRM in Leicestershire. The results of this show that a certain degree of caution should be exercised when accepting reports of organizational practices which do not involve researchers actually entering the organizations. Finally, the paper concludes that in order to get a better understanding of the situation facing these and other organizations we need to broaden our scope and consider the impact of changing economic, social and political conditions on management worker relations.