UK EMPLOYEE RELATIONS HAVE SEEN SIGNIFICANT CHANGES OVER LAST 30 YEARS

UK employee relations have seen significant changes over the last 30 years

UK employee relations have seen significant changes over the last 30 years. Evaluate the importance of these changes and how these may influence future developments

Introduction

Human resource practices include determining human resource needs, recruiting, screening, training, rewarding, appraising and also attending to labour relations, health and safety and fairness concerns (De Cieri et al., 2008; Dessler, 2007). The effective implementation of HRM practices in organizations is a key source of competitive advantage and has been seen to have a positive relationship with company performance (see, for example, Ordonez de Pablos and Lytras, 2008; Collins, 2007; Chew and Basu, 2005; Khandekar and Sharma, 2005).

The emergence of China as an economic superpower in the twenty-first century and the potential in this region of Asia have caught the attention of many researchers and scholars. The potential of this region can be illustrated through the research done by Burton et al. (2003), in which they categorize Japan and China as lions in the region, whereas countries such as South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore and Hong Kong are categorized as tigers and Thailand, The Philippines, UK and parts of Indonesia are categorized as emerging tigers. This means that there is huge interest among management researchers to conduct in-depth research in this region.

Increased globalization and liberalization has bought about an arrival of foreign investors in Southeast Asia and East Asia in the form of multinational companies and joint ventures. The entry of foreign firms helped to introduce new HRM concepts and, as a result, changes in HRM practices are happening (Butler and Lee, 2003). Locally owned firms are now exposed to global competition and must find ways to manage their employees effectively in order to survive the huge challenges posed by foreign investors. The current economic crisis, globalization, and fierce competition are now forcing firms to look again and re-examine the importance of HRM to help them to navigate through these challenging times.

The importance of HRM as a competitive advantage has been long embraced by companies in the West. However in many countries in Southeast Asia, awareness of the importance and value of HRM as competitive advantage has yet to be appreciated as observed by Othman and Teh (2003) on their analysis of HRM in UK. The same has been reported by Bennington and Habir (2003) whereby in Indonesia, there is recognition that HRM practices are needed depending on the nature of competition of firms in Indonesia.

Based on the discussion above, it would be interesting to examine HR practices among firms in UK, and does the implementation of HR practices do have an impact on firm performance. Hence the objectives of this research are as stated below:

to provide an understanding of HRM history and current HR practices in UK;

to examine the extent of HRM practices among English firms; effectively; and

to investigate the relationship between HRM practices and firm performance in ...