Human resources are increasingly crucial to the growing economies of East Asia, which are striving to diversify economically toward higher value-added productmarkets to continue their growth. Human resource management (HRM) in Taiwan, based on Confucianism and influenced by Western management research and practice, has been experiencing a major paradigm shift of sorts in recent years. With Taiwan’s rapid economic growth followed by its industrial and institutional transformation, HRM in the region has been developing to cope with the increasingly competitive and fast-changing business world. As such, this study reviews HRM’s development in Taiwan over the recent decades. The reviewed studies were gathered from work published from 1990 to 2016 appearing in the Social Sciences Citation Index or Taiwan Social Sciences Citation Index Chinese journals. A detailed discussion of HRM development in Taiwan is made, along with a summarizing scheme and some comparison to HRM in other select economies in East Asia, including those of Mainland China and Hong Kong which share the same cultural lineage and values.

Human resource management (HRM) is recognized as very important to the success of firms and the economies in which they reside (Ahlstrom, 2014; Bloom & Van Reenen, 2010; Pfeffer, 2007; Pfeffer & Veiga, 1999). This is increasingly true in emerging economies where HRM is generally in an early stage of development and deployment, in terms of both research and practice (Ahlstrom, Bruton, & Chan, 2001; Bruton, Ahlstrom, & Chan, 2000; Cooke, 2014; Cooke, Saini, & Wang, 2014; Schuler & Jackson, 2014). The time has passed when Asian firms simply established personnel departments and gave little thought to the active management of their human resources (Chen & Ahlstrom, 2017). Taiwanese enterprises, particularly those in the electronics-related industries, are well recognized globally for their technical and productive capabilities (Steinfeld, 2005; Young, Ahlstrom, Bruton, & Chan, 2001). For example, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing (TSMC) is the world’s largest dedicated semiconductor firm. Taiwanese subsidiaries of foreign companies (e.g., Bayer, 3M, and Coca Cola) also occupy an prominent strategic position in global competition (Steinfeld, 2005). Nonetheless, with a population of about 23 million on a main island of moderate size (along with several smaller outlying islands), Taiwan’s land and natural resources are relatively scarce. HR is a key resource for Taiwanese firms and is emerging as a major contributor to their performance (Chen & Ahlstrom, 2017; Pfeffer, 2007). HRM did not get much attention in Taiwan in its early economic takeoff years of the 1980s and 1990s (Lin, 1997). However, management practices in Taiwan in general started to attract more attention from researchers and HR practitioners as Taiwan’s economy developed (Liu, Ahlstrom, & Yeh, 2006). Being one of the fast growing BAsian Tigers,^ together with Hong Kong and Mainland China, Taiwan has kept pace and continued its solid growth and development of the past few decades, as shown in Fig. 1 (Chen & Ahlstrom, 2017; Lau, 2012). With Taiwan’s economic growth, HRM has started to gather in attention in the form of research and an increased emphasis on practice and the professionalization of the HR discipline there (Chen & Ahlstrom, 2017; Uen, Ahlstrom, Chen, & Liu, 2015; Uen, Ahlstrom, Chen, & Tseng, 2012). In addition, HRM development in Taiwan has been influenced by Confucianism values (Chen, 2008), which is one of the core philosophies in ethnic Chinese societies (Chen, 2001). Following the influence of local cultural values and economic development, the focus (and context) of HRM in Taiwan and associated East Asian economies has undergone a major shift in the past few decades based on the increasingly competitive business environment, economic growth, and institutional change there (Ahlstrom, Young, Nair, & Law, 2003; Peng, Sun, & Markóczy, 2015). Firms that saw HRM as a purely administrative function have started to appreciate the competitive advantage conferred by a strong HR system (Chen & Ahlstrom, 2017; Pfeffer, 1998, 2007; Uen et al., 2012).