National Cultures and HRM

Paper Summary:

This paper shows that social and cultural context play a significant role in the shape and content that HRM practices, both in theory and on application to organizational activity, assume in a given culture. The paper discusses how the attributes of social, economic and political culture affect, for good or ill, organizational behavior in general and the employment experience of individuals so affected in particular. It shows that no national culture has an unmediated positive or negative effect on HRM practices and that the lessons of the interplay of national culture and HRM in a given culture might profitably be discerned by organizations that seek to do profitable business in a variety of cultural venues.

From the Paper:

"Frederick Taylor's methods of "scientific management," which dominated management theory in the early part of the 20th century, were applied with some uninterrogated success in the UK and US in the attempt to overcome the adversary relationship of managers and workers: "Management and labor need no longer quarrel over how hard a man must work or how much he should earn; science, the impartial arbiter, would decide" (Kanigel, 1996, p. 45). "Taylorism" ineluctably gave weight to top-down, hierarchical management practices that were in place as heavy industry became increasingly mechanized, increasingly less dependent on expertise or craftsmanship of individual workers. With worker-facilitated mechanized assembly lines, Taylorism provided management with an objective rationale for work rules aimed at enterprise efficiency: "Taylor's experts and engineers did the thinking, while you were consigned to mindless doing" (Kanigel, 1996, p. 51)."

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