Strategic Human Resource Management Corporate Rhetoric and Human Reality

Life is tough in organizations, both for managers and the managed. Negotiating the rapids of restructuring, downsizing, and refocusing the core business brings with it huge upheavals in job security, the smashing of traditional career structures, and a constant imperative for employees toupdate their skills while working in an environment of great uncertainty. Based on close collaboration with a number of high profile organizations - BT, Citibank, Glaxo Wellcome, Hewlett Packard, Kraft Jacobs, Suchard, Lloyds-TSB Group, the NHS, and WH Smith - this book sheds light on theorganizational responses to large scale changes and details the changing demands made of employees in the process. This book goes beyond fashionable management rhetoric to uncover the reality of human resource management. The team of top researchers examines: the organizational strategies pursued in the face of fast-changing circumstances the links between what is intended and what is realised the way in which HR interventions impact on the individual the influence which HR strategies have on everyday management behaviour This book is a key source of new information for both managers and students about the current state of human resource management and its possible future direction.

All four authors worked together on this project at the London Business School. The team has now dispersed to other leading UK business schools.