Having briefly touched upon some of the core ideas of the so-called 'soft' and 'hard' approaches to HRM, Boxall's discussion of the driving forces behind these HRM strategies are important to note as he adopts an excellent historical approach demonstrating the underlying forces that have brought about these approaches to HRM. As it was pointed out above in discussing Boxall's overview of HRM literature, one strand argues for improving condition of employees and hence rendering unionizing unnecessary. This is the so-called 'soft' approach which is also often associated with the
Excellence Literature and the Harvard School (see e.g., Druker, et al., 1996;
Boxall 1993, 1996). In this approach to HRM people are seen as the most important asset of organizations. According to Boxall the meaning of HRM in this approach is fundamentally driven from the idea that HRM should be concerned with putting into place:
“a set of conditions where more interesting work, various participative mechanisms , improved security, demonstratively fair treatment and extensive development opportunities bond workers emotionally to the firm and make it unnecessary for them to organize” (Boxall, 1993, p. 651).
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As it can be seen from the above passage, Boxall (1993) analyses show that historically the 'soft' approach to HRM has embraced progressive reforms in order to make labour organization (that is unionization) unnecessary. In the context of his discussion Boxall also mentions the Human Relations
Approach which was discussed in the beginning of this chapter as a good
example of early management strategies that were based on the 'soft' approach (Analoui, 2007).
It may be recalled that by improving conditions of work environment, such as improving lightning and reducing the level of noise, Mayo studies (1933) showed that employee commitment to firms' cause increased. The Human Relations approach (Mayo 1933) certainly demonstrated early on that workers can be better bond emotionally to the organizations through management strategies that show involvement with workers. Thus, some of the early roots of the employee commitment approach (often referred to as the 'soft' approach to HRM) can be traced to the early results of Mayo studies (1933) which demonstrated the central role of emotional boding to the work environment through management policies.
Today HRM ideas that stress creating emotional bonding of employees to organization through HR policies such as participative practices and improved security can be seen in seminal works of the Harvard School (for example, Beer, et al., 1985) that advocate for a pluralist position often embracing "a non-union form of labor management which works through a positive kind of union substitution rather than through a negative kind of union suppression", argues Boxall (p. 652).
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As it can be noted here, one important aspect of Boxall's discussion is contextualizing the commitment ('soft') approach to HRM in relation to management attempt to render unionizing unnecessary. Throughout his discussion of the 'soft' approach to HRM, Boxall certainly makes it clear that the 'soft' approach to HRM evolved as a set of managerial innovations in non-unionized firms with the overall objective of avoiding labour organizing unions (Boxall, 1993, p. 651).
As it can be noted form the above discussion, one important aspect of Boxall's particular approach to analyzing and discussing the various meanings that have historically evolved to designate a host of practices related to HRM certainly is that one of the main driving ideas behind the commitment ('soft') approach has been to implement labour management policies that aim at avoiding open suppression of unions.
Looking at the development of the commitment/soft approach (which as it has been noted above is associated with the Excellence Literature and the Harvard Model), from an historical vantage point is important here as it uncovers the driving forces and motivation behind the development of this approach. David Guest (1987) of the London School of Economics and Political Science is a scholar outside of the US that has focused on the development of the commitment/soft approach to HRM extensively and is most often referred to when it comes to discussion of the commitment/soft approach and the Harvard Model of HRM. Guest work is central to the
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overall line of argument in this chapter because of two important aspects in Guest work when it comes to management theories (Analoui, 2007).
Firstly, one of the most important aspects of the analytical lens that Guest has applied to the whole field of HRM is to try and isolate HRM theory from the old personnel management approach. That is, as Boxall (1993) points out in discussing the important contribution of work of Guest to the field of HRM, Guest began his analyses by focusing on the issue of operationalization of HRM (1993, p.652). For Guest if HRM is anything other than the old personnel management, then it has to be operationalized and a set of testable propositions must be laid out to prove the predictive power of HRM as a theory. Two important aspects of Guest's work will be focused on in a separate section in the following.
The second important aspect of Guest's work as it pertains to the remaining discussion in this chapter is his view that the commitment/soft approach, in order to be successful from the very beginning, focused on employee motivation (Guest 1987, p. 505). This aspect of the commitment/soft approach is also central to the context of the present discussion and is discussed in detail in a following section on the role of the factor motivation in the employee commitment/soft approach to HRM. To these two important aspects of Guest work we now turn in the following two sections.
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