ISSUES IN HUMAN RESOURCE MANAGEMENT IN CENTRAL EUROPE

A.D. Jankowicz School of Business and Management, University of Teesside, Middlesbrough, UK

Introduction: a brief glance at the area of discussion

The process of change from command to market economy in the Central and Eastern European (CEE) states has been convincing definitely, for its participants, but not less so for the western agents who have tried to provide expertise and assistance; clearly, for management practitioners in general, but particularly for specialists in HRM/HRD. This is no surprise when one considers the importance of labor policy and strategy within the two challenging economic systems. If one were to take the existence of a range of secondary and tertiary sources as a measure, then it is probably true to say that the general management literature devoted to postcommand developments in CEE is well established, if not fully mature. For example, after an early expansion which saw the number of journal publications on management development in CEE rise from a pre-1991 total of 81 items to an annual average of 265 items during 1992-94 inclusive, the current literature also includes a variety of monographs; special sections appear in basic texts; and collections on single themes are in evidence. There is also a specialist journal, Journal of East-West Business. Perhaps a more pertinent indicator is the appearance of indigenous monographs and textbooks which are not simple translations of western authors, but have been produced by local authors for their particular circumstances. Another indicator is the way in which academic conferences currently tend to address general management ideas through local, rather than invited western, important speakers: (as with the Polish Educational Enterprise Foundation series on business ethics). Whether the same level of development characterizes the HRM/HRD literature is a doubtful point. Certainly, successive issues of major western journals such as Human Resource Development Quarterly, International Journal of Human Resource Management, Management Learning, Organization Studies and the present journal carry articles on more specialized HRM/HRD subjects nevertheless, proposals for a journal to be devoted exclusively to issues of HRD in the post-command economies have been seen as premature by six western publishers approached. Western monographs and collections have appeared, together with some tertiary sources, (usually collections of conference papers) as have textbooks and monographs written after the conversion period by authors original to the CEE. One purpose of the present issue is to provide readers with evidence on the maturity of our understanding of HRM and HRD in CEE. One way of addressing this might be to review briefly the process by which this issue appeared. A total of 35 enquiries resulted in 25 proposals accompanied by an abstract; these were largely from western authors seven abstracts were received from authors within post-command economies. Though the proposals deal with personnel/HRM issues in Poland, Bulgaria the Czech Republic, Romania, Slovakia, and eastern Germany in order of frequency, in the event no papers were submitted dealing with Bulgaria or eastern Germany. Of the total of 16 full papers submitted, four concerned issues of general, cross-CEE relevance, and the remainder provided descriptions and analysis of personnel/HRM/HRD topics in just four countries: Poland, the Czech Republic, Romania and Slovakia in order of frequency. Given the fundamental emphasis which this issue places on matters of cross-cultural relevance, it is worth mentioning in passing that the review process involved one western

reviewer, and a second reviewer from the main country involved, for each individual paper. It may be problem-solving, or it may be a simple outcome of the delicate relationship of language and concepts in translation when knowledge is transmitted, that, in the event, all five senior authors are of western origin and located in western institutions, and authors from the CEE countries do not, unfortunately, make an appearance in what follows. The issues involved But the major purpose of the issue was dual. The authors were requested to emphasize analysis as opposite to simple explanation, choosing from the wide range of issues demonstrates in the term for papers those which represented an important idea in the process of transition from command to post-command HRM/HRD practice, strategy and policy. However, they were also encouraged to highlight knowledge which is mutually transferable: while descriptions of the westernization of post-command HRM/HRD are important, so are explanations predicated on a model of transfer in which influence is necessarily mutual if the changes, involving deep cultural, social, and societal differences as they do, are to be effective at a level which can influence the conduct of HRM practices by individual practitioners in particular firms in CEE. The basis and justification for this kind of model of knowledge transfer are given elsewhere, but the value of mutual exchange is, surely, obvious. HRM practitioners have not sought to learn from the West because the market economy represents some generally preferable, current, and fashionable alternative to what came before, but for a very specific and practical reason. It is the HRM function which has been troubled with one major outcome of systemic change in the ownership of the means of production: the delegation of strategic responsibility for human resources from the state to the individual firm. If western practitioners ever since Legge (1978) have recognized the centrality of the HRM/HRD function to the strategic direction of the firm, it is sensible and thought-provoking to regard the changing post-command economies as a proving ground for the concepts and practices involved. It may be a more extreme test-bed, maybe, deprive of the support structures enjoyed in the West, (well-developed monopolies and mergers controls, employment contract and equality provisions, a well-developed system of professional associations regulating standards and so forth); but it comprises a productive ground for comparison, at least. What can western practitioners learn from their post-command counterparts experience? According to Mills paper, we notice that the stakeholders involved in the transformation process, and in the maintenance and development of structures which support human resourcing, (government, financial institutions, foreign investors, local trade unions and employer associations, and local managements) are likely to direct their influence towards ends and through means which are faintly different from their Anglo-Saxon counterparts. The voucher distribution, which saw ownership pass into eight million private pairs of hands, was exclusively Czech; the sales of most of those shares to the investment companies pretended developments in popular Thatcherite capitalism in the UK; yet the state has protected many companies from the debt provision of its bankruptcy legislation in a specifically localized, Czech way. One is aware to the option that the instruments for support of industrial development, organizational growth and, with these, human resource utilization within individual organizations may take forms which are specifically Czech in operation: no longer state centrism, but not necessarily Atlantic capitalism or Rhenish capitalism either some other arrangements adjusted to local possibilities are likely to emerge. An awareness of what

these might be should develop our knowledge of industrialist forms and their appropriateness in different circumstances. As it progresses away from the communist ideal, government involvement in industrial development and market creation is likely to take exclusively Czech forms which differ from western forms of corporatism, keeping significant controls over market forces in order to buy social peace; corporate human resource and development strategy is similarly likely to take localized forms, affecting relationships between individual companies, trades unions, and employer associations, in a local way. The paper by Garavan similarly covers macro systemic influences on the transformation process, although in a different post-command economy, Poland; as well, however, it also evaluates a number of characteristics which apply to individual organizations, dealing with personnel policy, the role of the personnel department, responsibilities of personnel specialists within the firm, and a range of practices in recruitment, training & development, and health and safety provision. The paper is structured around an important issue: the practicability of two challenging models of the scope and role of human resourcing within individual firms. Are Polish organizations likely to evolve a personnel administrative function or, given the opportunity created by privatization for greater involvement in strategic issues, seek to implement a strategic HRM/HRD role? His evidence, which reflects a series of interviews with chief executives and personnel directors within 25 companies, leads Garavan to suggest that the attitudes and techniques learned under the command economy, and the current lack of appropriately trained personnel specialists, will restrict practice into a relatively traditional, administrative support mode. It would appear that the options available to the practitioner are expected to remain similar to the conformist innovator of the western 1970s, with deviant innovation available as a relatively unusual choice in the absence of a general managerial knowledge with the values and perspectives which characterize modern western strategic management thinking.

The issue raised for the western practitioner may well be one of permeability. It would appear that the development of our own, western model of the personnel practitioner as strategist has been possible only to the extent that general management are prepared to recognize the potential for the personnel function to contribute to competitive advantage and corporate strategy setting. As Reynolds Allen put it, It is difficult to make progress without top management support and a corporate human resources direction. Without the understanding and support of middle managers, even a corporate direction loses drive. Acceptance of the strategic contribution by top managers seems based on the existence of a chief executive with a peopleoriented management style, or on his/her openness to arguments that the resolution of personnel/HR problems makes commercial sense. If the function is to develop further, on what similar developments in general management thinking is such an evolution likely to be predicated? What changes in the policy of organizational governance are conditions? To put it in simple operational terms: if I, as a senior personnel manager, wish to broaden the scope of my strategic contribution, what particular values, concepts, and attitudes would I wish my chief executive and board to have? Bearing in mind that senior and middle managers are, after all, involved in human resource issues on a daily basis, Storey reminds us that managerial willingness to acknowledge

HRM practitioners to a role that is more than advisory depends, in part, on the acknowledgment by general managers that their role involves the essentially political activity of managing organizational meanings, and that HRM practitioners are powerful associates in this project of corporate renewal. The older central European manager is well exposed to, and highly experienced in, the necessary skills, as the literature on corporate life in the command economy from Mil to Czarniawska points out; unfortunately, as suggested by Letiches article, it would appear that central European managers are likely to view such skills with distaste, as the historical object of an undesirable past, and imprison their expectations of the HR function to the simple operational effectiveness in personnel management which western innovation promise to provide. In the case of Slovakia in particular, it would appear that powerful forces, such as joint-venture ownership and hence foreign responsibility for corporate strategy setting, and the forces of relationship, social class, and other law interests, plan to remove even the possibility of a redefinition of corporate purpose and, with it, the hopes for a strategic role for HRM/HRD practitioners in such activities. Letiche discusses the kind of analytic framework from which, in these circumstances, one might hope to draw successful instructions for HRM/HRD development in Slovakia. His paper highlights the similarities and differences in managerial practices, labor policy, productivity planning, and philosophies of competitive advantage in three Slovak companies: a westernpartnered joint venture, a wholly owned subsidiary of a western firm, and a locally-owned firm. In searching for a framework by which one might evaluate and, if pressed, advocate particular forms of systemic development for, human resource management in Slovakia, he concludes that fully adaptive, self-organizing mechanisms are required: a societys adaptive capacity its capacity to cope with its environment, instead of just inactively reacting to it; and, given the current situation of balance, he advocates the Parsonian theory of modernization, as particularly suited to an understanding of the process of transformation in Slovakia. Letiche also highlights the cultural specificity attaching to processes and activities which the most alert and well-meaning of us tend to take for granted unless we have worked in the culture in question. He points out that conflict has solely negative implications within the Slovakian culture; it is never taken as creative, as a mechanism for renewal, a process systemically manageable for kind purposes. In their mind-frame conflict is total, absolute and terrifying, to the point that general, day-to-day interpersonal relations are affected in characteristic ways. (One might thereby gather a variety of constraints and restrictions relating to the use of process-based management development techniques in HRD work, incidentally. The trainer who seeks to utilize interpersonal conflicts or to create a programme built round OD-based argument meetings had better step very carefully indeed when contracting for these activities with Slovakian participants and sponsors.) Conflict forms the subject-matter of Lees paper, a conceptual analysis based on her experiences of participating in a collaborative learning programme based in Slovakia, in which academic staff and students from Taiwan, the UK, Canada, The Netherlands, and Slovakia took part. The richness and closeness of her story result in a number of key points on the subject of conflict management. We can see conflict in terms of fundamental threat or in terms of competitive game; while, admittedly, related to the mythography of determined and achievement associated with our particular culture, our personal construing of conflict is not necessarily culture-bound or completely culturally specific.

Perhaps the most thought-provoking in terms of its suggestions for the development of a strategic HRM direction in organizations, despite of the culture in which these might be located, is the point that the line managers involvement in decentralized personnel activities may require a variety of highly developed skills depending on the particular way he/she chooses to see processes such as conflict. It appears that a position of fundamental threat calls for greater sensitivity and flexibility if situations characterized by the need for negotiation are to be successfully resolved, and western practitioners experienced in conflict as a competitive game might wish to learn from their Slovakian counterparts in order to extend their personal collection of negotiating skills. If sensitivity and flexibility of response are indeed qualities to be valued in the personnel practitioner, it is clear from Crows paper that the general perception of the effective manager in a Polish organization does not particularly emphasize them. She draws on a series of depth interviews with female personnel practitioners in a company distinctive of many in CEE (the state- owned monolith in the course of transition and restructuring into independent business units) to provide a description which is useful for its detail about working life under systemic change, quite apart from the contribution made to the analytic subjects of this issue. On the latter, her conclusion confirms Garavans and Letiches; that the view of a strategic role for the personnel function remains inaccessible in these large organizations. Indeed, the implications for female employees working in personnel management are negative: the greater involvement of line management which characterizes strategic HRM would, if anything, divert from the power and independence of the female employee in personnel, given the relatively high proportion of females in that function and their lower representation in general line positions. However, a high work attachment, ability to organize personal time, and experience in handling the double burden of employment, compensated by employers and unpaid at home, does, she argues, offer the possibility for women to improve their position, especially if the greater availability of training opportunities, and the availability of mentoring support, are targeted with purpose and discrimination. Nevertheless, her analysis of structural characteristics, socio-cultural factors, and genderlinked personal characteristics, in what remains a clearly masculine culture according to Hofstedes frame of reference, suggests that the opportunity of improvement energized by the particular contribution of female personnel practitioners in so far feminine remains low. It would appear that, in spite of the differences in structures and culture between Poland, the remainder of CEE and elsewhere, women in supervisory and managerial positions are disadvantaged by the stereotype of management as a particularly masculine area of enterprise and certainly, in a culture so noticeably masculine it would appear that any improvement in position will be achieved at the cost of the greater effort a female must use in the face of the structural and sociocultural factors described.
Provides a number of basic indicators in support of the declaration that, while the general-management literature on post-command developments in central and eastern Europe is well established, the corresponding literature in HRM/HRD is probably less well advanced. Highlights the issues identified by each of the contributors, two organising themes being involved. The first declares the value of mutual knowledge transfer, through which the western academic and practitioner might benefit as much as his/her central European counterpart; the second considers the extent to which personnel managers can make a strategic, as distinct from administrative-operational, contribution to the organisation in the post-command economy.