How HR and the Line Work Together

Research into HR management and the line conducted by the IPD (Hutchinson and Wood, 1995) produced the following findings:

● Most organizations reported a trend towards greater line management responsibility for HR management without it causing any significant tension between HR and the line. 

● Devolution offered positive opportunities for the HR function to become involved in strategic, proactive and internal consultancy roles because they were less involved in day-to-day operational HR activities. 

● Both HR and line management were involved in operational HR activities. Line managers were more heavily involved in recruitment, selection and training decisions and in handling discipline issues and grievances. HR were still largely responsible for such matters as analysing training needs, running internal courses and pay and benefits. 

● There is an underlying concern that line managers are not sufficiently competent to carry out their new roles. This may be for a number of reasons including lack of training, pressures of work, because managers have been promoted for their technical rather than managerial skills, or because they are used to referring certain issues to the HR department. 

● Some HR specialists also have difficulty in adopting their new roles because they do not have the right skills (such as an understanding of the business) or because they see devolution as a threat to their own job security. 

● Other problems over devolution include uncertainty on the part of line managers about the role of the HR function, lack of commitment by line managers to performing their new roles, and achieving the right balance between providing line managers with as much freedom as possible and the need to retain core controls and direction.

If line managers are to take an effective greater responsibility for HR management activities then, from the outset, the rules and responsibilities of personnel and line managers must be clearly defined and understood. Support is needed from the personnel department in terms of providing a procedural framework, advice and guidance on all personnel management matters, and in terms of training line managers so they have the appropriate skills and knowledge to carry out their new duties.

The research conducted by Hope-Hailey et al (1998) in eight UK-based organizations revealed that all of them were shifting responsibility for people management down the line. In practice, this often meant that responsibility for decision-making on HR issues had been devolved to line managers, but that the HR function continued to be responsible for operational functions such as recruitment and pay systems. As they commented: ‘There seemed to be little indication that this move had reduced in any way the level of necessary bureaucracy associated with the implementation of personnel policies and procedures.’ However, they noted that ‘personnel was no longer seen as a rule maker or enforcer, but it was still regarded – in part – as an administrative function’. With reference to the activities of the HR functions in these organizations, the research established that there was ‘more emphasis on achieving behavioural change through a more “nuts and bolts” systems approach rather than large scale organizational development activities’.