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"Personnel? That's for assholes," commented "Dirty" Harry Callahan on being assigned to the police department's personnel office in the 1976 hit film The Enforcer .
In his book The Human Equation , [2] Pfeffer (1998) reports that only about half of executives believe that human resource management (HRM) practices really matter, and a scant half of that half acts on those beliefs. Pfeffer gives evidence, through case studies backed by scholarly research, that a company may gain sustainable competitive advantage by treating employees as its most valuable resource.
Drawing on [4] Katz and Kahn (1978), who suggested that all open systems have maintenance and production subsystems, [1] Gong et al. (2009) developed a dual-concern model of HR systems for China. The performance-oriented HR subsystem is concerned with developing HR and providing motivation and opportunities for the productive use of such resources. The maintenance-oriented HR subsystem is concerned with employee protection and equality.
The decline of employment security and the rise in inequalities of status among different employees are two important features of contemporary HRM in China, as the country moves to a more market-oriented economy.
"Employment security and the reduction of status distinctions fit into the maintenance-oriented HR subsystem because they protect employee well-being and equality and are decided in terms of values unrelated to input-output ratios," say [1] Gong et al. (2009). There is evidence that employees in China are choosing to stay with their current employers, rather than move on, because they are concerned about losing their...