Human resource management, institutionalization and organizational performance: A comparison of hospitals, hotels and local government

The relationship between human resource management (HRM) and firm performance has been a hotly debated topic over the last decade, especially in the United States. The question arises as to whether the domination of US-oriented models, however appropriate they might be for, say, the USA, holds in other, for example, more institutionalized contexts. Now we have the opportunity to study recent empirical data on the effectiveness of human resource management in the Netherlands, using control versus commitment HR theory (Walton, 1985: Arthur, 1994) in combination with New Institutionalism (DiMaggio and Powell, 1983). We were able to include three different Dutch branches of industry, i.e. health care, local government and tourism. Empirical results suggest that the effect of HRM is lower in highly institutionalized sectors (hospitals and local government) than in a less institutionalized sector like hotels.