Human resource management in the project-oriented organization: Employee well-being and ethical treatment

Abstract

As part of a wider study into Human Resource Management (HRM) practices in projectoriented companies, we investigated the issue of employee well-being. Project-oriented organizations adopt temporary work processes to deliver products and services to clients. This creates a dynamic work environment, where additional pressures can be imposed on the employee from fluctuating work-loads, uncertain requirements, and multiple role demands. Those pressures can create issues for employee well-being and ethical treatment, which need to be managed. HRM has traditionally had two roles, a management support role, providing the organization with competent people to undertake the work processes, and an employee support role, caring for the well-being of employees. In this paper we report our results on the HRM practices adopted in project-oriented organizations to fulfil the second role. We find that by and large in project-oriented organizations the management support role dominates, and they are not very good at caring for employees. The need for profit and responding to client demands often takes precedence over employee well-being. However, some of the organizations we have interviewed have adopted HRM practices to care for employees, and we report those. Also providing employees with career development opportunities is as important for the individual as it is for the organization, and we report practices for that.

Editorial

“…This has been addressed over the past few years by a number of authors who have applied HR issues in the context of the temporary project organisation (Bredin, 2008b, Bredin, 2008a, Turner et al, 2008, Hölzle, 2010, Bredin and Söderlund, 2011, Bredin and Söderlund, 2012. Particularly informative work has been published by Bredin (2008b) on people capabilities in organisations.…”

“…Significant recent work in this area relating to project based organisations can be seen to be provided in a thesis and associated book and journal articles by Bredin (2008a) and journal articles by Crawford et al (2013), Huemann et al (2007) and (Turner et al, 2008). The research methodologies used are generally a combination of quantitative and qualitative although explorative case study based research appears to be favoured due to the (Pitelis and Teece, 2009) contextual understanding that is required particularly in complex organisational settings.…”

“…Important themes appear to be the temporary organizational arrangement of projects (Turner et al, 2008, Huemann et al, 2004, Huemann et al, 2007, Bredin, 2008b) and the management of temporary workers (Koene and van Riemsdijk, 2005, Cacioppe, 1999, Jarvinen and Poikela, 2006. The people capability issues for temporary organizational structures such as projects include:  The culture of the organization such as empowerment of employees, teamwork and organizational change (Gareis, 2005) including the reward and incentive structure to support the organizational culture.…”

Liminality at Work : Mobile Project Workers In-Between

“…Likewise, Garsten (1999) Several researchers have proposed that the particular nature and specific challenges of project-based work has a set of important effects on human resource management within project-based organizations (Bredin, 2008;Huemann et al, 2007;Turner et al, 2008). Adding to these claims, I argue that in order to learn more about how to organize purposeful HRM within project-based organizations, we must first know more about the human resources that work in them.…”

Perceptions of the impact of training, compensation and recruitment on project effectiveness

“…27 julio-diciembre 2015pp. 5 -26 · ISSN 1692-0279 · eISSN 2256 Turner, Huemann, & Keegan, 2008), siendo las más mencionadas la capacitación, la selección de personal y la compensación.…”