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Introduction
Devolvement, and the related notions of decentralization, suggests that fewer human resource management (HRM) professionals will be required in the workplace of the future. In the 1990s, large numbers of jobs were lost due to downsizing, restructuring and privatization (Sparrow and Cooper, 1998). These trends have had profound impacts on HRM, and Sparrow and Cooper suggests that such trends result in the inevitable need for new, more flexible organizational forms. The impact of technology means that fewer people are doing more of the work, necessitating a more generalized approach to HRM and an increased need for understanding devolvement. Line managers will execute the required judgment in managing the HR function, with less emphasis on the routine aspects of managing the workforce.
Devolvement may well reflect broad changes occurring in the way we manage modern work. The "second machine age" (Brynjolfsson and McAfee, 2014) is a fundamental part of the elimination of many middle-management jobs, and HRM is certainly included in this trend. With increasing digitization, many jobs are being reframed in ways we could not anticipate, and the impacts will be easily as profound as those resulting from the Industrial Revolution. Computers and information technology are changing the fundamental nature of work in the modern era. Not all jobs, however, are undergoing the same degree of change (Levy and Murnane, 2004). The change among management jobs is notable in that computers "substitute for the part of managers' work that involves gathering and transmitting routine, easily understood messages" (Levy and Murnane, 2004, p. 94). It is precisely those aspects of work that can be easily formulated into rules of behavior that can most easily be assumed by the digital side of employment.
Our goal is to explore the relevant devolvement literature through the lens of contingency theory (Fiedler, 1964) in order to identify important organizational contingencies for the successful implementation of HR devolvement. In this way, we help to eliminate confusion about its meaning and function and, by identifying the necessary pre-conditions for successful devolvement, we hope to stimulate a reassessment of its effectiveness. To accomplish this, in the spirit of Hammersley (2001) and Harvey and Moeller (2009), we present a descriptive, narrative review of devolvement in order to gain a better understanding of its...