ETHICAL LEADERSHIP IN EMPLOYEE DEVELOPMENT 193practice is more likely to be present in organizational settings said to be resis-
tant to HRM. This is not to say that the work on employee voice commends
unions as being essential to the practice of HRM rather it proposes there exist
continua of choices (Marchington and Wilkinson 1996) ranging, for example,
from ‘trade unionized’ to ‘non-trade unionized’ organization and from highly
‘individualized’ settings to highly ‘collectivist’ settings (which may not be
union-oriented).
In our view, a strongly managerialist prescription for HRM runs the risk
of short changing employees in both the economic and ethical senses. Paul
Kearns’ book (2003) on HR strategy is illustrative of the way HRM thinking
consonant with managerialism underplays desirable outcomes for employ-
ees (Pinnington 2004). Kearns rails against ‘blame cultures’ and organiza-
tions where political infighting or rigid command structures exist contend-
ing that Toyota is the only place he has come across that has a long-term
business strategy simultaneously combined with a long-term HR strategy.
Kearns recommends HR strategy nonetheless as appropriate for maximizing
organizational performance although he paints a somewhat dismal picture
of the effectiveness of HR strategies in most organizations. He defines HR
strategy, however, in normative terms as the ‘conscious and explicit attempt
to manage the organization’s HR to gain a competitive advantage’ (Kearns
2003: 10).
The principles Kearns considers to be fundamental to HR strategy are:
honesty, added value, ‘individually centred’, measurement, and accountability.
HR strategy he portrays as being about working within these principles to get
the best out of people, which he asserts must mean ensuring that employees’
values are aligned with the values espoused by the organization (2003: 76). In
the closing pages, he says that business leaders are not guided primarily by eth-
ical considerations, but that many of them feel that they have to work within
two different and distinct parameters: (business) value and ethics (2003: 197).
His overriding message is that to contribute to organizations and society, HR
strategy must focus on (business) value rather than ethics.
Lepak and Snell (1999, 2002) take a very different line approach on
HRM to the managerial instrumentalist line of argument articulated by
Kearns, although their approach is similar in so far as they highlight
HR–organizational outcomes and correspondingly reduce attention to HR–
employee outcomes. Lepak and Snell predict that there will be observable
relationships between employers’ employment policies and configurations of
HRM practices. Their position is broadly consistent with configurationist
approaches adopted in the strategic management literature (Miller 1987)
and more recently configurationist research within the academic discipline
of HRM. The fundamental assumption here is that different types of HRM
orientation and implementation will be characterized by different ‘bundles’ or
configurations of organizational policy and practice (Delery and Doty 1996).