The strategic approach to the high-performance paradigm: a European perspective

Human Resources Management (HRM) has been viewed in the last decades as a serious competitive advantage capable of create differentiation while contributing to organizational overall performance. In recent years, a growing body of research goes even further and argues the strategic value of human capital to organizations' performance and success. The high-performance paradigm argues that employee involvement is critical for organizational performance and the set a practices to do so are, according the American approach, universal and should be implemented in as a system. However, recent developments, mainly in Europe, argue that, despite the indisputable importance of human resources to organizational performance, there is no universal or system approach, no definitive set of practices capable of fostering performance. Using data from 30 European countries, this research tries to understand if there is a European approach to the high-performance paradigm, namely a system or a bundle approach. Furthermore, this research tests the relation between the high-performance practices and performance. (C) 2012 Published by Elsevier Ltd. Selection and/or peer-review under responsibility of the 8th International Strategic Management Conference