Power and Influence in the Boardroom: The Role of the Personnel/HR Director

Citation

Procter, S. (2002), "Power and Influence in the Boardroom: The Role of the Personnel/HR Director", Employee Relations, Vol. 24 No. 5, pp. 556-558. https://doi.org/10.1108/er.2002.24.5.556.1

The role and status of the HR or personnel function are issues that are of long‐standing concern to both practitioners and academics. While historical studies of personnel managers in the UK have portrayed them as being in a weak position in relation to other professional groups, the emergence of human resource management in the 1980s opened up the possibility of their assuming a much more important role in organizational decision making. In the term coined by John Storey (1992), much of the debate came to centre on the extent to which (now) HR managers could assume – or, indeed, had assumed – the role of “strategic changemaker”. More recently, the work of David Ulrich (1997) has generated a great deal of interest on the basis of his contention that HR managers should adopt “multiple roles” in their relationships with other organizational actors.

It is against this background that we can welcome this contribution by James Kelly and John Gennard. The focus of their book is one important aspect of these wider issues. Rather than the HR function as a whole, their concern is to investigate those at its apex: the HR directors. The findings of this UK‐based study are derived from two main sources: a programme of around 80 interviews, carried out over the period 1995‐1999 and including interviews with managing directors (MDs) as well as with the HR directors themselves; and, to supplement this, three small‐scale questionnaire surveys of large companies, SMEs and HR directors respectively.

Perhaps the first point that should be made about this book is that its title is somewhat misleading. Indeed, one of the most important themes running through it is that much previous work in this area has been misguided in its concentration on the issue of whether or not the HR function is represented at board level. While this might be an indication of the HR function’s standing that is relatively easy to obtain, Kelly and Gennard argue that what it fails to take into account is that it is not really at this level that the strategy of an organization is developed. The board might be where ultimate formal authority lies, but it is the managing director’s executive group – or its public sector or SME equivalent – that makes strategic decisions.

Looking at things in this way produces a rather different picture of the position of the HR function. Kelly and Gennard’s most striking finding in this regard is that while an HR presence is recorded on only 15 per cent of the main plc boards in their survey, the corresponding figure for presence on the MD’s executive group is 73 per cent (p. 44). Thus although the former figure would offer support to what the authors call the “pessimistic” view of HR influence, the latter seems to open up what, from an HR manager’s point of view, might be considered to be more encouraging possibilities.

The question then, of course, is what HR directors make of these possibilities. For Kelly and Gennard, the key to this is the balance HR directors are able to strike between the work of their own function and their broader, organization‐wide responsibilities. Taking the HR directors on PLC boards together with those on executive groups, it is estimated that just under half their time is spent on the latter set of activities. This, the authors conclude, offers some support for the view that HR directors are “seriously concerned with business decisions” (p. 54). Functional responsibilities continue to be important, however, with the HR directors themselves placing particular emphasis on the areas of recruitment and training and development.

This combination of roles gives rise to what Kelly and Gennard call the “T‐shaped” HR manager. At the apex of the organization – represented by the bar of the T – the “effective” HR director is involved in the development of strategy across all business areas; at the same time – represented by the T’s stem – the HR function continues to carry out its own specialist work. Linking this to the general issues with which we began this review, the authors refer in this context to Storey’s “changemaker” role. The stronger parallels, however, would appear to be with the multiple roles described by Ulrich.

In the working out of these roles, Kelly and Gennard pay particular attention to the relationship between the HR director and the MD. What is interesting here is that there is some difference between what MDs require of their HR directors and what the HR directors think their MDs require. Thus while the MDs value professional competence above a general business focus, the HR directors perceive this ranking to be the other way round. On the whole, argue Kelly and Gennard, the MD is convinced of the business case for HR involvement, and HR directors might even be working against their own interest in pushing this part of their case too hard. Some observers might require confirmation of the claim that the HR directors have arrived at this position, but it does at least make sense to argue that a point might be reached at which sacrificing professional distinctiveness for business credibility would actually weaken their standing in organizations.

The findings set out in this book can thus be described as very positive with regard to the HR function’s involvement in organizational decision making in the UK. Indeed, on this basis, we might go so far as to say that HR directors themselves do not realise how strong a position they are in. These are important argument to make, but I would like to have seen some of their implications explored more fully. One aspect of this is the precise nature of the relationship between the MD and the HR director. Kelly and Gennard are keen to portray this as one of mutual dependency, but the implication of a lot of their analysis is that it is very much the MD who has the upper hand. In other words, although the HR director’s position is a relatively strong one, there is also a degree of vulnerability associated with it.

A second area that also might fruitfully have been explored a little further is the relationship between HR directors and the HR function as a whole. The chief concerns of Kelly and Gennard are HR directors and their relationship with MDs, but a question that is barely touched on is how this might map onto the more general issue of the standing of the HR function as a whole in organizations. Does it allow us, for example, to say anything about the relationship between the HR manager and the line manager?

But perhaps these are questions for further research. Questions about the role and standing of HR managers are ones that continue to be of great interest, and Kelly and Gennard are to be applauded for the important contribution they have made to these debates.