Human Resource Management in Project-Based Organizations

In many companies today, people spend most of their time working in various types of projects. This book addresses the important question of what this means for the management of human resources at the operational level in the firm. The authors address questions such as: How do first-line managers handle their HR responsibilities when people work in co-located project teams most of the time? What role do project managers have in performing HRM activities? What strategies do individual project workers use to manage their own development while moving from project to project? And, what role do HR specialists have in adding value to the HRM system where operative HRM is really performed? This book summarizes empirical research in a number of industries and firms, most notably in engineering and development contexts. The authors introduce a framework for HRM - the HR quadriad - that expands traditional views on the important relationships that are at the core for HRM activities at the operational level. The framework builds on the idea that HRM is carried out in interplay among four actors in the organization, namely line managers, project managers, individual workers and HR specialists. Accordingly, it seeks to identify the major challenges for each one of these players and illustrates the value of the framework to explain how some of the world's leading companies have responded to these challenges.