Human Resource Management in Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean

The need for research in Human Resources Management is vast in the geographic North, Central American and Caribbean countries that include Belize, Costa Rica, Cuba, Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Guatemala, Haiti, Honduras, Jamaica, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama and Puerto Rico. In this chapter, we document a systematic review of the literature that identifies 111 HRM articles published since 1990 about these nations to show the state of the discipline, detect gaps and recommend courses of action. Among our main findings, this review shows that Mexico is the nation with the largest coverage (73.9% of studies), followed by Costa Rica (11.7%), Nicaragua (10.8%), Honduras (7.2%), Cuba, El Salvador, Guatemala (6.3 each), Panama (5.4%), Puerto Rico (3.6%), Jamaica (2.7%), and finally, Belize and Haiti (0.9% each). The large gaps in coverage signal the need to extend research on all HRM subfields to Central American and Caribbean nations. We also found that excluding studies in Spanish and French would have severely constrained our contribution; many research lacunae become evident by inspecting our thematic groupings of the extant literature