Treating Employees Equally or Differently? Towards a Theory of Idiosyncratic Human Resources Management

Abstract

Under the environment of VUCA (Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, Ambiguity), organization’s development is increasingly relying on human resources with specific skills and abilities. But it is becoming more and more challenging to manage such employees. The traditional standardized human resource management (HRM) mode, which pays attention to the "best fit" or "best practice" has been unable to play its role effectively any more. In the past several years, scholars have proposed the idea of differentiated management (Marescaux & Sels 2013) used to direct the management of talent resources. However, there still lacks an in-depth investigation of differentiated HRM, especially from the perspective of employees' characteristics. This research aims to develop a theory of idiosyncratic HRM which implements differentiated management to different people (or groups) in recruitment and selection, training and development, performance appraisal, salary and welfare, and employee relationship according to employees’ personality and need characteristics. This research not only provides a new perspective for HRM research, but also has practical significance for the reform and innovation of organization's HRM system.

Keywords: best fit, best practice; idiosyncratic human resource management

DOI: 10.7176/EJBM/13-3-01

Publication date: January 31^st 2021