Human resource management in Europe: evidence from ten countries

The subject of human resource management (HRM) and its development has been much contested in the literature.Most of the relevant theories originated in the United States of America.There is in the literature no distinctly "European" approach to HRM and, indeed, our knowledge of comparative HRM practices in different European states is limited.This paper draws on a major new research project which has gathered data from ten European countries to argue that practices in these countries can be categorised, inter alia, by the degree of integration of HRM into business strategy and the degree of devolvement to line managers.Using these two dimensions gives a quite distinct picture of differences in HRM practices in the ten European countries.These differences are analyzed and the validity of the model is discussed.Such a categorisation raises the need to consider different conceptual approaches to HRM.