Documents Boselie, Paul 5 results

"The relationship between human resource management (HRM) and firm performance has been a hotly debated topic over the last decade, especially in the United States. The question arises as to whether the domination of US-oriented models, however appropriate they might be for, say, the USA, holds in other, for example, more institutionalized contexts. Now we have the opportunity to study recent empirical data on the effectiveness of human resource management in the Netherlands, using control versus commitment HR theory (Walton, 1985; Arthur, 1994) in combination with New Institutionalism (DiMaggio and Powell, 1983). We were able to include three different Dutch branches of industry, i.e. health care, local government and tourism. Empirical results suggest that the effect of HRM is lower in highly institutionalized sectors (hospitals and local government) than in a less institutionalized sector like hotels."

"In this paper the focus is on how organizations select, adapt and retain best practices in HRM. Based on recent developments in two streams of thyeoretical thinking, i.e., new institutionalism and strategic management (especialy co-evolution and absorptive capacity), this paper contrasts economic rationality with normative rationality in the selection, adaptation and retention process. In this way we are able to construct the life cycle of a HRM best practice, the way in which companies differ in their speeed of selection and adoption of best practices, and the consequences this has for whether or not being able to achieve a competitive advantage. After presenting and describing our framework for the adoption and life cycle of best practices in the field of HRM, a range of hypotheses is presented to be tested for in follow-up research."

"A buy-out is a fundamental change in the structure of ownership that may affect the way employee relations develop within an organization. Little is known about the impact of buy-outs upon employee relations. This paper aims to address this gap. We focus on two main questions. First, what are the effects of a buy-out on employee relations in an organization? Second, does the national institutional context affect the impact of buy-outs on employee relations? The paper reports changes to employee relations in buy-outs in the contrasting institutional environments of the UK and the Netherlands. Overall, we find that buy-outs positively affect HR practices with increases in training, employee involvement, the number of employees and pay levels. The positive effects appear to be significantly stronger in a less institutionalized environment like the UK than in the more institutionalized environment of the Netherlands. Buy-outs raised HRM practices in the UK to a level closer to, although still below, that of Dutch buy-outs."

"Regulatory authorities, politicians and trade unions across Europe have recently accused private equity institutions of improving the performance of buy-outs merely by reducing employment costs with negative implications for jobs, working conditions and training investments. These claims are assessed by analysing high commitment management practices and changes in these practices in private-equity backed and non-private equity backed buy-outs in the UK and the Netherlands using a large-scale representative sample that combines both questionnaire and archival data. We find that both private equity backed buy-outs compared to non-private equity backed buy-outs, and Dutch buy-outs compared to UK buy-outs, are less likely to report introducing new high commitment management practices but do not on average reduce high commitment management practices. The findings suggest private equity backed buy-outs represent only a limited adaptation of the European social model."

"Human capital is an important construct in a variety of fields spanning from micro scholarship in psychology to macro scholarship in economics. Within the various disciplinary perspectives, research focuses on slightly different aspects and levels of human capital within organizations, which may give opportunities for integration. The current paper aims to increase knowledge about human capital within organizations by integrating two streams of research which focus directly on human capital, but have approached human capital in different ways: strategic human capital (SHC), and strategic HRM. We describe both SHC and strategic HRM research streams and propose areas of integration, and directions for future research on human capital in organizations. "