Organizational culture and human resource management reform: evidence from the UK higher educational institutions

Public sector organizations have sought to be more business orientated, customer focused, service focused and more flexible. However, there are some factors affecting an institution’s ability to respond to change effectively and to achieve these objectives. Organizational culture (OC) is one such factor that has become central to public sector reforms. Although there is a call in the literature for wide-scale cultural change in public sector organizations in order for them to change effectively after applying NPM, there is an argument that changing public sector culture is the main challenge in applying public sector reform. In this paper the concept of organizational culture is analysed and, in particular, the idea of the HR ‘management’ of OC will be presented in a critical way to highlight different perspectives in the literature. There will also be a discussion about managing culture in the higher education sector. This is achieved via a consideration of the role of HRM professionals in managing organizational culture that includes consideration of organizational identity. This paper intended to explore the role of HRM in managing organizational culture in the UK higher education (HE) sector. The paper argued that HRM approach in managing organizational culture in HE is following the ‘hard’ version of HRM which focuses on performance management, achieving economic outputs and meeting targets rather than the ‘soft’ version which considers stakeholder commitment and satisfaction. This means that HRM reform in HE might be used as a managerialist project oriented toward achieving the instrumental and economic rationality of the employer (Instrumental Rationality (IR) model) which is different from the old model that based on satisfying the stakeholder needs (Stakeholder Satisfaction (SS) model). This also means that the role of HRM professionals in HE sector deliberates to apply strategic perspective through the strategic partner and change agent role and less focused on operations based roles (employee champions and Administrative Expert role). In this paper we would like to explore the HRM professional viewpoints regarding managing organizational culture in the HE sector and their opinions about the reform in HR role. The HRM professionals indicate that the main challenge in HE reform is bridging the gap between management objectives of moving in a strategic direction and academics’ objectives of keeping academic freedom and autonomy. Based on this, the HR professionals state that managing organizational culture to be more associated with the IR model’s values may conflict with the academic culture. This study has brought to light the complex and multi-faceted nature of HRM in HEIs.