Line management responsibility for HRM: what is happening in Europe?

The notion of line management accepting greater responsibility for human resource management (HRM) within employing organisations is now received wisdom. This paper presents data on the variation in practice across Europe, noting the evidence that the HR role is increasingly assigned to line managers, and that the extent of such assignment varies from country to country. This first presentation of data from 1999/2000 updates previous work the authors have presented on this topic: the evidence shows that in terms of that assignment, countries tend to remain in the same relationship to each other.