High Performance Human Resources (HPHR)

The phrase ‘high performance human resources’ (HPHR) is generally taken to refer to human resource management (HRM) practices that have positive effects on the performance of an enterprise, typically a business enterprise. During the past 20 years, a substantial body of research literature that apparently provides strong quantitative evidence of the positive contributions of sets or bundles of certain HRM practices to business performance has emerged.1 Whether causal, this literature developed during a period in which HRM practices ostensibly became considerably more strategically focused and considerably less operationally focused. This transition – some would say transformation – is to some extent reflected in the supplanting of the older ‘personnel management’ by the newer ‘human resource management’.2 Nevertheless, one can question whether and to what extent HPHR constitutes a new paradigm for the management of people in organizations and for the employment relationship more broadly.