مقاله سال ۲۰۱۶

 مجله اسکاندیناویایی مدیریت – Scandinavian Journal of Management

The interest of this article lies in scrutinizing how HR practitioners draw on institutional and societal values that are linked to the discourse of well-being at work to legitimate their position in Finnish municipal organizations. In studies of HR practitioners, their concern regarding well-being at work is a constant bone of contention (Keegan & Francis 2010; Renwick, 2003). The historical background of HR practitioners as promoters of welfare in the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century, and as developers of the quality of work life in the 1970s (Jacoby, 2004), is something both public and private sector HR practitioners have shunned away from. Instead, their focus has been on managerial and market logics of strategy and performance (Harris, 2007; Wright, 2008), in line with the adoption of New Public Management (NPM) in the Nordic context (Christensen & Laegreid, 2007). Still, the strategic aspirations of HR practitioners in public organizations have been difficult to realize, due to the absence of transparent linkages between long-term planning, line management and their contributions to performance (Harris, 2004). Kochan (2004, 132) has also stated that the HR profession ‘faces a crisis of trust and a loss of legitimacy’ due to overlooking employees as stakeholders.

Among academics and practitioners, the weak status of HR practitioners has been a recurring concern (Caldwell, 2003; Wright, 2008). In the public sector, the position of HR is even more precarious (Farndale & Hope-Hailey 2009). HR practitioners are affected by both external and internal expectations arising from municipal top management demands for strategic contributions to services needed by citizens (Lindström & Vanhala, 2011; Truss, 2008). Moreover, the pressures of managing a proportionally smaller staff in larger entities due to municipal mergers – which seek cost-effectiveness in all occupations – cause uncertainty for HR practitioners, such as the risk of being outsourced themselves.

Adding to these pressures, over the last decade, well-being at work in the Nordic context has evolved into a large-scale societal concern. The number of senior workers in Finnish municipalities is growing, as in the other Nordic countries (Lindström et al., 2008), spurring the agenda for well-being at work. The financial impact of ill-being at work through absenteeism, underachievement, turnover, and early retirement has prompted employers to implement diverse well-being programmes and practices in Nordic organizations. The institutional pressures on municipal organizations to improve well-being at work stem from policy-makers, employer organizations and trade unions jointly propagating well-being at work as an objective, and from discussions regarding the ageing workforce and the raising of the retirement age (e.g. Ministry of Employment and Economy, 2012). Since institutional pressures create a situation in which HR practitioners need to evaluate and possibly reconstruct their work (Boon, Paauwe, Boselie, & Den Hartog, 2009; Boxall & Purcell, 2008; Guerci & Shani, 2013), this study asks how the strengthened well-being at work discourse is adopted and employed by the HR practitioners themselves.