Introduction
The study of human resource management (hereafter HRM) is, in its broadest sense, concerned with the
selections that organisations make from among the myriad of policies, practices and structures for
managing employees (Sisson, 1990; Boxall and Purcell, 2003). In its more strategic guise, however, HRM
is conceptualised in terms of carefully designed combinations of such practices geared toward improving
organisational effectiveness and hence better performance outcomes, as with Wright and McMahan‟s
definition (1992: 298): „the planned HR deployments and activities intended to enable [an organisation]
to achieve its goals‟ (see also Delery and Doty, 1996: 805). This latter conceptualisation is our interest
here.