Reframing Hrm in Smes: Challenges and Dynamics

ISBN-13: 9783031342783 / Angielski

Ciara Nolan; Brian Harney

Spis treści

Regulation as a Management Challenge in SMEs

Authors: Robert Wapshott, Associate Professor in Entrepreneurship & Innovation, Haydn Green Institute, Nottingham University Business School Robert.Wapshott@nottingham.ac.uk

Oliver Mallett, Professor of Entrepreneurship, Management, Work and Organisation, University of Sterling oliver.mallett@stir.ac.uk

Business regulations are a common source of difficulty and complaint for SMEs and employment regulation is often singled out for owner-mangers’ ire. This includes the rules around unfair dismissal, health and safety or minimum wages and the costs of employing staff. Yet, academic research into the topic consistently finds that such complaints are based on poor levels of understanding among owner-managers, both on the specific regulations being criticised and on the direct ways in which they impact the business.

We argue for a reframing of employment regulation as a management challenge within a broader regulatory context and argue that this can lead to better understanding of the difficulties reported by SMEs. Our reframing is rooted in an understanding of the distinctive characteristics common to many smaller businesses and an understanding of the regulatory context encompassing all forms of social and economic influence. Employment regulation represents one more thing for the owner-manager to deal with (while being less malleable than other management tasks) and so the specific details do not gain the attention required, reflected in the concerns around a lack of knowledge. We conclude by setting out a research agenda for the field of employment regulation in SMEs.

 

Offering HR support to encourage SMEs to invest in people management and leadership capability

Authors: Carol Atkinson, Professor & Faculty Head: Research and Knowledge Exchange Manchester Metropolitan University Business School c.d.atkinson@mmu.ac.uk

Ben Lupton, Professor of Employment, Deputy Director of Manchester Decent Work and Productivity Research Centre, Manchester Metropolitan University Business School

SMEs, and particularly small firms, typically lack internal HR support and demonstrate a lack of understanding as to the value of investing in people – and associated HR policy and practice. Drawing on a project that offered free HR support to small firm, we report here on the process of offering external HR support, the extent to which owner managers perceived this to be beneficial and the resulting change to their attitudes towards the value of investment in HR. The project comprised 449 firms receiving any form of support and 17 case studies that received in depth support. Our results suggest that owner managers valued the support offered and the opportunity to work with HR specialists as opposed to more generalist business advisors. They also indicate an increased recognition of the value of investing in people management and leadership capability. Firms in the project were compared to non-engaging firms and were found to be more likely to have invested in staff training and development, more likely to feel that investing in staff training, qualifications and leadership training represented money well spent and that investment in staff training, leadership training and staff qualifications improved key business performance indicators.

 

Owner managers and environments of learning in SMEs

Author: Alan Coetzer, Senior Lecturer School of Business and Law, Edith Cowan University

a.coetzer@ecu.edu.au

Much of the research on employee knowledge and skills development in small businesses has focused solely or primarily on employee participation in formal training.  Overall, these studies find that employees in small businesses get less access to formal training than their counterparts in large businesses. Such studies appear to equate training with learning and convey the impression that small businesses are workplaces that provide restrictive learning environments. However, research that concentrates on a single mode of knowledge and skills acquisition overlooks much, if not most, employee learning. This is because the majority of learning in organisations takes place outside of formal training.  In this chapter we develop a more complete view of how small business employees learn through participation in practice. The chapter examines how distinctive characteristics of small businesses, such as personnel and financial resource constraints, informality, and simple, flat structures, affect employee learning processes. It also explores the role of the owner/manager as an enabler of employee learning and how small business settings help and hinder the owner/manager’s role enactment. The chapter outlines opportunities for future research and provides practical guidance for small business owner/managers who wish to create more expansive learning environments.

 

Challenging the Dehumanisation of HRM: Developing an Alternative Resilience Scaffold to the Theory of Firm’s HR Application in SMEs 

Author: John Mendy, Senior Lecturer, People and Organisation University of Lincoln jmendy@lincoln.ac.uk

Despite the acquiescence that HRM practices have enabled organisational and societal challenge resolution, the fundamental problem of how human these practices are when applied by HR practitioners in SMEs has evaded scholarly attention. This empirical and theoretical chapter highlights a dual people-management problem. Firstly, Coases’ seminal Theory of the Firm’s attempts to address firm composition, how the productivity (or performance) can be effectively and efficiently organised/managed and how internal and external cost (or resource) challenges are resolved have remained unchallenged in the context of SMEs’ adaptability to adversity. Secondly, the unquestioning use of Coase’s recommendations has paradoxically led to the dehumanisation of HRM in SMEs. To address the dehumanisation of HRM and fill the theorisation gap this has created for HRM and SME scholars, this chapter’s 85 qualitative interviews highlight results including how to 1) humanise HRM’s applicability; 2) develop an ‘Integrative Employee Resilience Framework’ showing humanising principles and characteristics missed by Coase and his adherents 3) produce a ‘Resilience Scaffold’ theory for HRM and SMEs. The implications of the proposed framework and its theory and their impacts on the future of HRM and SME studies are identified and discussed.

 

The control-based HRM typology:  Examining the temporal stability of HRM configurations in SME’s

Author: Brigitte Kroon, Department of Human Resource Studies, Tilburg University, the Netherlands B.Kroon@tilburguniversity.edu

It has often been noted that HRM in small organizations is different from large organizations and should be studied from theories that take their characteristics of smallness into account. In this contribution, we compare the HRM systems of three small organizations using the control-based HRM typology (Kroon & Paauwe, 2021). Since the control of workers and work is the core of any organization no matter its size, it serves as an analytical starting point for analyzing HRM in a broad diversity of small businesses. In this chapter we will first briefly outline the three dimensions of (in-)formality, authority and input-output of the control-based HRM typology. Then we will present three organizations from the greenhouse horticulture sector, describe their strategies to manage work and workers and position their HRM configurations on the typology. In the comparison of the organizations, we examine the proposition that there is temporal stability in the HRM configurations, by indicating which presenting issues challenge and gradually change the ways in which work relationships are controlled.

The role of joiners for the development of new firms – a literature review and future research agenda

Authors: Evy Van Lancker, PhD Candidate Evy.VanLancker@ugent.be & Mirjam Knockaert, Associate Professor Ghent University, Belgium  Mirjam.Knockaert@ugent.be

Joiners – early-stage non-founder entrepreneurial employees – are crucial in the development and growth of new firms, however finding and keeping them proves to be a particularly challenging hurdle. Joiners are characterized by a preference for autonomy, risk, and non-pecuniary motives and typically work in an unstructured, informal, and volatile environment. As such, theories and practices typically established in larger firms are not readily transferable to the context of new firms. Therefore, understanding the specific nature of joiners, their motives, and how they affect firm development, becomes irrefutable to fully comprehend HRM and its effect on new firms. In this study, we provide an overview of current research on joiners as well as an agenda for future research. More specifically, to advance our understanding of this phenomenon, we conduct a systematic literature review in which we synthesize studies on joiners and, more importantly, in which we propose multiple relevant themes for future research, hereby coalescing and advancing the literature on HRM and entrepreneurship.

Dynamics of formality and informality

Authors: Ciara Nolan, Lecturer Technological University Dublin ciara.nolan@tudublin.ie & Brian Harney, Professor Dublin City University brian.harney@dcu.ie

Much HRM research plays off formality and informality against each other, where the former is seen a progressive and natural and the latter is dismissed as backward or deficient. Richer insights have come from employment relationship scholarship which recognizes the dynamic nature of informality, but has not provided a systematic lens for comparison across firms. This chapter explores this tension- arguing that HRM research, by definition, must acknowledge the operation of informality in all types of firms if it is to capture the reality of workplace relations. By the same token, current employment relations understanding and operationalization of informality needs to be more nuanced and considered if this feature of small firms is to form part of a systematic and coherent research agenda. The chapter draws on on-going research to capture informality with respect to the operation and impact of institutions on one hand, and with respect to the agency of owner-managers on the other. The result is a research agenda to further progress our understanding of informality.

HRM in SMEs under Turbulence

Author: Margarita Nyfoudi, Assistant Professor of Human Resource Management & Organisational Behaviour, Birmingham Business School, University of Birmingham M.Nyfoudi@bham.ac.uk

SMEs increasingly operate within a volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous (VUCA) context, turning often to their employees as a source of flexibility and extra-role performance. Yet, internal or external turbulence may shake the survival of the firm and lead to cuts in financial resources and layoffs as well as employees’ suffering of negative employer attitudes and fearing of losing their jobs. As a result, during times of crisis, employees may deviate from exhibiting “expected” behaviours concomitant with a family-oriented SME environment. The aim of the chapter is to examine how internal or external turbulence may influence employees’ experience of work and what are the existing HR-related practices that can help remedy any negative repercussions. Specifically, the chapter elaborates on the potential positive, withdrawal and antagonistic consequences of adverse working conditions for employees in SMEs under crisis. In contrast to previous work that focused more on espoused processes reported by SME owners/managers, the chapter adopts an employee-centric perspective and pays attention to implemented HR processes as experienced by SME employees, including employee voice, communication, information sharing, and HR skunkworks.

O autorze

Ciara Nolan is a Lecturer in Management at Technological University Dublin, City Campus. Her research interests focus on the dynamics of managing and developing people in small firms, with a particular focus on professional service firms and the hospitality industry.

Brian Harney is a Professor of Strategy and HRM at Dublin City University Business School. Brian’s research focuses on the intersection of Strategy and HRM, with a particular focus on SMEs, growth and knowledge-intensive sectors.

Blurb

"It's refreshing to encounter a scholarly work on human resources that genuinely respects and delves into the unique challenges and opportunities presented by small businesses. This distinguished group of academics skilfully reshapes, refocuses, and reinterprets crucial discussions surrounding the complex yet underexplored realm of human resources within small-scale enterprises."

- Professor Monder Ram OBE, Director of the Centre for Research in Ethnic Minority Entrepreneurship at Aston Business School, UK

SMEs face unique challenges directly stemming from their size, which create

pressures, tensions and dilemmas with regard to people management. These

include the liabilities of smallness and newness, as well as resource challenges

pertaining to the attraction, development and retention of the workforce. In turn,

these challenges can give rise to unique HR dynamics in the SME setting. This

edited collection brings together insights from thought leaders in the field of

HRM in SMEs to consider how the interplay of a range of external and internal

factors coalesce to shape the nature, form and meaning of HRM in this setting.

 

This volume moves beyond traditional accounts which are organised by HR

function or practice area (e.g. recruitment, performance, training) or by

considerations of the applicability of HR (e.g. HR and performance, best practice).

Instead, the contributions are divided in two sections, HR Challenges and HR

Dynamics, demonstrating how the unique setting of the SME must inform any

successful HRM intervention. This collection/volume will be of great interest to students and academics ofHR, employment relations and entrepreneurship, as well as those exploring

professional qualifications.

Ciara Nolan is a Lecturer in Management at Technological University Dublin, City Campus, Ireland. Her research interests focus on the dynamics of managing and developing people in small firms, with a particular focus on professional service firms and the hospitality industry.

Brian Harney is a Professor of Strategy and HRM at Dublin City University Business School, Ireland. His research focuses on the intersection of Strategy and HRM, with a particular focus on SMEs, growth and knowledge-intensive sectors.