Employee reward within

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Employee reward within HRM

• Systemic integration?

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Locating the new pay a perceived dichotomy

• From stable contexts, mass production and
  hierarchical organisation for scientific
  management and standardised, incremental pay
  progression

• To unpredictable, globalised competition, fluid
  organisation, service orientation, needing
  management- workforce shared responsibility for
  performance and contingent reward

Heery (1996)
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Strategy, HRM and reward

• If HRM is synonymous with (proactively defined)
  strategy, it appears to be a logical progression
  that, consequent on choosing an HRM approach to
  people management, there will be a strategic
  approach to reward as an HRM sub-system.
• But while this model assumes business-goal
  directed and unified rational organisations, with
  integrated managerial strategies, in the complex
  and socially constructed world of eg large
  multinational firms, empirical evidence suggests
  an opportunistic mix of corporately planned and
  locally situated reaction towards employment
  practices, with reward management as a dynamic,
  flexible and emergent phenomenon (eg Bloom et al,
  2003 Brown and Perkins, 2007).
• Influences on reward design and practice may be
  understood in this way, accounting for factors
  such as equity, as well as ethical and moral
  considerations beyond unquestioning acceptance of
  strategic reward as a self-evident choice
  (Kessler, 2007).

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Employee reward keeping the big picture in
perspective
Source Perkins, White and Cotton A ripping
yarn an intelligent approach to a complex
subject, People Management, October, 2008
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Actors in employee reward management under the HRM
HR specialists encounter expectations about
people and the role expected and tolerance for
procedure or ambiguity when advising specific
organisation managements. Strategic reward
implies a unitary view of the employment
relationship where management provide the
objective lead. But even in the most hard-edged
individualised contexts, line management
aspirations willing pluralism to go away in
relations with employees may not be enough. One
implication is for HR to move beyond traditional
concerns with designing and administering pay
structures and/or incentive arrangements, salary
market survey and review planning, in reaction to
internal or external stimuli, to a more proactive
engagement to synchronise organisation-wide
people management top-down and bottom-up.
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Summary

• HRM is an idea about socio-economic organisation
  as well as a set of employment relationship
  practices.
• HRM ideas reflect sources do they transplant
  across contexts?
• Strategic reward ideology within HRM reflects not
  only orientations to relations in employment but
  also strategy pre-determined or emergent.
• There is a significant opportunity for HR
  thinking performers to diagnose contexts and
  shape action choices mindful of the logical
  consequences.