The future of people at work: A reflection on diverging human resources management policies and practices in organizations.

As a consequence of continual change pressures on everyday organizations, a gradual but noticeable shift is taking place in the way managers and employees view the employment relationship. Expectation patterns between both parties are starting to diverge into what seems to be new forms of managing people, based on different assumptions regarding their importance in the (knowledge based) economy. Traditional differences in employment expectations between superiors and their subordinates, between higher and lesser educated and between intrinsically and extrinsically motivated employees, are currently making place for differences between younger and older knowledge workers and for diversity and professionalism. In this article, HRM is contrasted against two emerging approaches towards the management of people, which are currently subsets of HRM, but gaining momentum as potential replacements for HRM. First, we identify ‘Transaction-based Management of People (TM)’ in which the employment relationship mirrors that of a financially driven exchange relationship, similar to transaction economics. We refer to the second approach as ‘Professional-based Management of People (PM)’ in which the nature of the employment relationship reflects the recognition of people in organizations as ‘true’ professionals who know best what constitutes superior business performance. These approaches have been empirically examined by means of a representative survey among Dutch directors and managers.