3

HRM and

performance: can

partnership address

the ethical dilemmas?

David E. Guest

Introduction

Human resource management has become established as a focus of study
largely on the basis of two core propositions. The first is that people are a key
source of competitive advantage for organizations (Barney 1991; Barney and
Wright 1998; Wright, Dunford, and Snell 2001a) and, as such, should be prop-
erly managed. The second is that effective management of HR should result
in demonstrably superior performance. These combined propositions have
led to an interest in HRM among specialists in business strategy, concerned
with the analysis of strategic choices about the most effective deployment
of HR (Boxall and Purcell 2003). It has also begun to interest accountants
and national policymakers, reflected in consideration of the management of
human assets or human capital. The Kingsmill Report (2003) in the UK, titled
Accounting For People, is one illustration of this. The government-sponsored
Task Force that led to this report started from the assumption that if human
assets are so important, the state of these assets should be systematically
presented and explained in annual company reports.
From a rather different perspective, HRM has also attracted the attention
of many academics from an IR background who have been interested in the
question of whether HRM either supersedes or obviates any need for indepen-
dent trade union representation; or, indeed, whether it is overtly anti-union.
Building on this general interest in the management of HR, there has been
a renewed interest in the role of HR managers and whether they have used
the opportunity offered by HRM to become what Ulrich (1997) described as
‘Human Resource Champions’ (Guest and King 2004).
Behind each of these perspectives is a concern for human resources as key
assets that are there to be managed, utilized, or possibly exploited to improve
organizational performance. In many respects, therefore, these issues cohere