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date: 06 July 2022

Abstract and Keywords

This article examines a range of frameworks, theories, and research contributions that throw some light on the goals of HRM. As a business school discipline, much of the literature in HRM is normative, designed to support management education and thus setting out an argument about what managers should do or, more modestly, offering an analytical framework to assist practitioners to shape their own policy prescriptions. Fortunately, it also contains studies that test the predictions of theoretical models and thus provide a descriptive picture of what employers actually do. The article reviews both normative and empirical contributions within the HRM canon but its prime objective is to outline the goals of HRM in practice and what needs further research.

Keywords: HRM goals, business school, management education, theoretical models, HRM practice, HRM literature

Peter Boxall

Peter Boxall is Professor of Human Resource Management and Associate Dean for Research in the Business School at the University of Auckland. His research is concerned with the links between HRM and strategic management and with the changing nature of work and employment systems. He is the co-author with John Purcell of Strategy and Human Resource Management (Palgrave Macmillan), co-editor with John Purcell and Patrick Wright of the Oxford Handbook of Human Resource Management (Oxford University Press), and co-editor with Richard Freeman and Peter Haynes of What Workers Say: Employee Voice in the Anglo-American Workplace (Cornell University Press).

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