Article on Hrm

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ER 25,3

Line manager involvement in HRM: an inside view
Douglas Renwick
Management School, University of Sheffield, Sheffield, UK

262

Received September Keywords Line management, Employee relations, Strategy, Human resource management 2002 Revised December 2002 Abstract Although line managers have always been involved in managing human resources Accepted December 2002 (HR), it is within human resource management (HRM) that their involvement has been placed centre-stage as a core element of an HR approach. This article reports findings from 40 interviews with line managers on their experiences in handling HR work that has been devolved to them, from a study of three different UK work organisations. The study finds that significant organisational benefits and costs exist from involving the line in HR work. The article concludes that participation of both line and HR managers in HRM needs to be re-assessed, as line involvement in HRM is a problematic initiative for organisations to adopt.

Employee Relations Vol. 25 No. 3, 2003 pp. 262-280 q MCB UP Limited 0142-5455 DOI 10.1108/01425450310475856

Introduction The involvement of line managers[1] in human resource management (HRM) has always been noted in the literature (Guest, 1987; Legge, 1995; Storey, 1992), but in recent years the line have been seen to play a more prominent role in HRM due to more HR work being “devolved” to them (Brewster and Larsen, 2000; Currie and Procter, 2001; Guest and King, 2001; Storey, 1992, 2001; Ulrich, 1997, 1998, 2001). Although devolution to the line in the UK is low compared with other European countries, and the dominant pattern across Europe is of sharing human resouces (HR) work between HR and the line (Brewster and Larsen, 2000), WERS ’98[2]

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