continue to practice people management in a largely tactical, administrative, and
cost-focused manner. With regard to academic research, this last issue highlights
the fact that at any point in time a wide frequency distribution ofWrms exists
ranked by their breadth and depth of HRM practices. This frequency distribution
also varies in systematic ways among countries, depending on their respective
histories, business institutions, legal environments, and cultures. A considerable
portion of recent academic research on HRM has been focused on the top tier of
companies in a small number of countries, leading to an unbalanced and overly
ethnocentric and normative (prescriptive) account. But the evidence provided in
this review also suggests that the progress of research in these areas is surely in the
right direction.
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