The importance of multinational companies (MNCs) in the UK economy is not inquestion. One way in which this is evident is that Britain is a major recipient offoreign direct investment (FDI) by MNCs, accounting for 8.7% of the inward stockof global FDI. In addition, large numbers of...

The Leicester Business School Occasional Papers reflect the scholarship and research of staff, postgraduates and others associated with the school. Many of the papers take the form of preliminary reports of research in progress or explorations of theoretical ideas. Publication of such work in...

Government policy emphasises five ‘drivers’ of productivity: competition, enterprise, innovation, investment and skillsand each of these has been the subject of major programmes of reform (HM Treasury, 2006). Despite this, andnotwithstanding some improvement, UK productivity in terms of output...

The role of human resource management practices in promoting the performance of firms is widely debated. Yet much of the debate has reached an impasse, with uncertain results as to which practices in fact work and why. It has, moreover, rarely gone beyond the context of large firms. This paper...

The concept of the High Performance Work System (HPWS) is a comparativelyrecent development in Human Resource Management (HRM). An HPWS is a worksystem comprising of various employment relations practices intended to createcompetitive advantage by integrating the firm’s strategic objectives...