‘good’ HR practices in the Universalist context include careful selection systems for recruitment and training, information sharing, clear job design, local participation, monitoring, performance appraisals, good grievance procedures, and promotion and compensation schemes that reward high-performance. This theory is widely accepted in the US, but in other countries such as list is contrary to their experience or even what would be considered as good practice. In contrast, the contextual paradigm looks for an overall understanding of what in contextually unique and why. It’s focussed on understanding what is different between and within HRM in various contexts, and what the causes of those differences are. The policies and practices of ‘leading-edge’ companies are of less interest to contextualists than identifying the way labour markets work and what more typical organisations are doing. The case of the Channel Tunnel was the subject of international comparative organisational and cultural research to explore the behaviour of British and French managers working to a common purpose. Of the measurements taken across some 200 managers, the French managers had significantly more work and decision-making autonomy and were less procedurally oriented than the British, but provided less feedback and opportunity for adjustment. The French had more control of their work and power emanated more from the personal responsibility of the senior managers that from control systems. The French were more action-oriented and the British more procedural. The British were more motivated through the use of feedback involving praise and encouragement but this was important to French managers. The British were more directly job-motivated, in that they expressed unhappiness when performing badly. The boundary between work and home life was more porous of the British and reported stress was lower. By contrast the French managers were more distant from colleagues and shouldered more responsibility, and therefore more stressed. The implication for HR is that not all HR management methods are transferable in the same enterprise, even when employee values have converged, and the effectiveness of any universal or in this case pan European concept of HRM is constrained by the different institutional contexts across Europe.

Environment

Zanko and Ngui (2003) argue that there is a growing recognition that HRM is shaped and shapes, influences and is influenced by the environments in which it is embedded. A survey of some 21 count