An Exploration of the Role Duality Experienced by HR Professionals as Both Implementers and Recipients of HR Practices: Evidence from the Indian Railways

Internal marketing in a higher education context – towards an enriched framework

Purpose

The concept of “internal marketing” (IM) has gained the attention of researchers over the past three decades. Though a lot of research has been carried out on this topic, it remains a concept yet to be completely understood and captured, with ambiguity in terms of its definition and scope. The purpose of this paper is to utilise the higher education (HE) context in an emerging country, United Arab Emirates (UAE), to argue that the term “IM” needs more unbundling and hence the authors propose an enriched framework with a renewed and relevant identity, which the authors term as “corporate fusion” (CF).

Design/methodology/approach

The authors do so with a renewed framework and philosophy that tries to capture new constructs and dimensions of IM in line with the emerging corporate milieu and has been applied to the HE sector of the UAE in this paper.

Findings

The proposed new conceptual framework identifies a CF philosophy building on the existing literature and captures the essence of IM orientation, albeit with its new constructs, dimensions and justifications. Furthermore, the authors argue that this new model is relevant to the contemporary environmental trends surrounding present day HE organisations, more so ever in emerging markets such as the UAE, given their growth needs in a competitive global marketplace.

Originality/value

In this paper, the authors take a close introspection at the contemporary role of IM in the HE landscape available in the UAE using a renewed framework titled “Corporate Fusion”.

Human resource management and performance at the Indian Railways

Purpose

High-performance work practices (HPWPs) have been well documented within private organisations in developed country economies. Such practices, however, remain under-investigated in the public sector and in emerging economies. The purpose of this paper is to work towards filling this void, by empirically evaluating HPWP within an Indian public sector undertaking (PSU), also the world’s largest commercial public sector employer: the Indian Railways (IR).

Design/methodology/approach

The authors investigate whether the practices implemented in this organisation are consistent with the idea of HPWPs, and analyse how they are influenced by different stakeholders and ultimately associated with different indicators of organisational performance. The authors focused on six railway zones and interviewed a total of 62 HR practitioners.

Findings

The results show that most practices implemented are aligned with the idea of HPWPs, despite the existence of context-specific unique practices. Furthermore, the authors identify the influence of multiple stakeholders in decision making concerning different practices. The authors additionally found that the measurement of performance goes beyond financial indicators and several context-specific non-financial indicators are identified and their social importance is reiterated.

Originality/value

Theoretically, this paper utilises and contributes to the resource-based view of firms by identifying a distinctive bundle of competencies in human resources through HPWS in the IR.