Human Dignity in the Workplace

HRM research has primarily used the Resource Based View (RBV) of the firm (Barney 1991) to explain how people can be managed in organizations. This theory states that employee behavior is crucial for organizational performance, as competitive advantage may be created when organizations hire employees who have skills that are valuable, rare, not imitable, and not easily substitutable (Barney 1991; Huselid 1995). Moreover, when the organization implements HRM policies and practices that obtain and develop these skills among the employees, organizational performance should increase. This notion has become a popular theme for HRM research, with decades of studies investigating the why and how of the relationship between HRM and organizational performance (Paauwe 2009). Although the RBV has had some success, one of its downsides is that employees are perceived to be merely instrumental to organizational goals, which have become increasingly defined in financial terms, such as profits or Return on Investments (Huselid 1995). In recent years, critique of this view has increased (e.g., George 2014; Greenwood 2002).

For instance, when organizational profits receive the highest priority in organizations, short-termism may ensue, which often entails a strong focus on cost-cutting and downsizing through employee layoffs (Thompson

• 2013). One obvious trap with such short-termism is that future growth might be jeopardized as the very resources which created a competitive advantage are not rejuvenated or are even reduced. Additionally, instrumentality neglects the idea that organizations exist to fulfill societal needs which cannot be attained (or attainted only less ‘efficiently’) by other forms of human collaboration. Hence, an alternative paradigm, which goes beyond the use of humans as being merely instrumental resources for short-term profits, is needed to explain how and why humans work in and contribute to organizations,. Human dignity offers such a paradigm, and creates the opportunity to reformulate principles of HRM in a new way, and to use the RBV in a novel. However, until now, there has been little research integrating ideas of human dignity with HRM (Godard
• 2014) .