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Many large companies in the Arab world have been emphasizing HRM in their organizations as they learned about the benefits of HRM in the west. But what is the real picture? This case study of international luxury hotels in Lebanon shows that although the managers of these hotels stress that employee involvement is applied in their organizations, the reality on the ground is rather different. Hotel employees noted that they are not involved in the design of their jobs and that their input is often left out in performance appraisals. The paper ends by offering some valuable recommendations and insights.
INTRODUCTION
The emergence of human resource management (HRM) in the 1980s came as a response to the hard economic pressures brought about by high competition from international markets. Organizations were under global competitive pressures to lower costs, make employees more productive, and do things better and less expensively. In this context, new ways of people management were sought: enter human resource management. Ultimately, the developments in HRM are seen as a response to the changing context of work brought about by intense competition (Redman and Wilkinson, 2001). Centralized organizations, characterized by rigid hierarchies and traditional personnel management policies, were no longer feasible for firms facing global competition (see Warner, 2004, for example). Downsizing, delayering, and decentralization have characterized the new organizational structures to meet the challenges of intense competition; flexibility was the main objective, with complementary culture change programs such as total quality management, performance management, and lean production, to name a few. Eventually, the highly competitive market environments, with the resultant organizational restructurings that followed, have naturally pressed for new forms of people management that would accompany these restructurings (Redman and Wilkinson, 2001). Notably, the new designs of people management break away from the traditional management style of strict employee control by offering employees higher discretion in performing their tasks and responsibilities needed to fit the logic of the new business structures of decentralization.
Compared to traditional personnel management, HRM offered employees more autonomy in the workplace (Guest, 1987). While personnel management seemed to focus on compliance-based systems of control (i.e., strict rules and close employee supervision), HRM advocated a commitment-based approach to managing people (Guest, 1991) by empowering employees (Walton, 1985). Indeed,...