The real problem: The deadly combination of psychologisation, scientism, and normative promotionalism takes strategic human resource management down a 30-year dead end

This paper engages with Troth and Guest (2019) on psychology in HRM. I argue they misframe the central issue in debate. The real problem is not psychology per se but psychologisation-the drive to reduce explanation of macro-level HRM outcomes to individual-level psychological-behavioural factors and individual differences. Accordingly, the most visible and harmful effects of psychologisation are in strategic HRM, and the HRM-performance literature but Troth and Guest's defence of psychology does not cover them. I use this response to re-establish that it is psychologisation, not psychology per se, that is, the critics' focal concern and describe how the three-decade advance of psychologisation, along with scholastic scientism and normative promotionalism, have created severe theoretical and empirical problems in the high-performance research programme and taken the strategic HRM field down a 30-year dead-end. Suggestions for a turn-around are provided.