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Caldwell, Raymond (2003) The changing roles of personnel managers: old
ambiguities, new uncertainties. Journal of Management Studies 40 (4), pp.
983-1004. ISSN 0022-2380.
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The Changing Roles of Personnel Managers:
Old Ambiguities, New Uncertainties
Raymond Caldwell
Birkbeck College, University of London
There have been notable attempts to capture the changing nature of
personnel roles in response to major transformations in the workplace and the
associated rise of ‘HRM’. A decade ago Storey (1992) explored the emerging impact
of workplace change on personnel practice in the UK and proposed a new fourfold
typology of personnel roles: ‘advisors’, ‘handmaidens’, ‘regulators’ and
‘changemakers’. Have these four roles changed now that HRM has increasingly
become part of the rhetoric and reality of organizational performance? If Storey’s
work provides an empirical and analytical benchmark for examining issues of ‘role
change’, then Ulrich’s (1997) work in the USA offers a sweeping prescriptive end-
point for the transformation of personnel roles that has already been widely endorsed
by UK practitioners. He argues that HR professionals must overcome the traditional
marginality of the personnel function by embracing a new set of roles as champions
of competitiveness in delivering value. Is this a realistic ambition? The new survey
findings and interview evidence from HR managers in major UK companies
presented here suggests that the role of the personnel professional has altered in a
number of significant respects, and has become more multifaceted and complex, but
the negative counter-images of the past still remain. To partly capture the process of
role change, Storey’s original fourfold typology of personnel roles is re-examined and
contrasted with Ulrich’s prescriptive vision for the reinvention on the HR function. It
is concluded that Storey’s typology has lost much of its empirical and analytical
veracity, while Ulrich’s model ends in prescriptive overreach by submerging issues of
role conflict within a new rhetoric of professional identity. Neither model can
adequately accommodate the emergent tensions between competing role demands,
ever-increasing managerial expectations of performance and new challenges to
professional expertise, all of which are likely to intensify in the future.
Journal of Management Studies 40:4 June 2003
0022-2380
© Blackwell Publishing Ltd 2003. Published by Blackwell Publishing, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford, OX4 2DQ ,
UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.
Address for reprints:Raymond Caldwell, Birkbeck College, University of London, 26 Russell Square,
London WC1 5DQ , UK (R.Caldwell@bbk.ac.uk).
INTRODUCTION
Changes in the nature of managerial work over the past two decades have had a
profound and often disconcerting impact on the roles of personnel managers and
other functional specialists. New modes of organizational flexibility, the levelling
power of information technology and relentless cost pressures have undermined
occupational structures, middle management positions and functional roles, allow-
ing managers to increasingly assume tasks once performed by the personnel func-
tion or to outsource them to external consultants. In addition, the emergence of
‘HRM’ as a panacea for integrating business strategy and people management has
exposed personnel practitioners to a new set of role demands, professional chal-
lenges and managerial expectations that have underscored the gaps between HR
rhetoric and reality. How have personnel professionals coped with these new pres-
sures and what implications does this have for their role and future professional
status?
Historically, a number of intrinsic factors that have influenced the way in which
personnel professionals as an occupational status group have sought to cope with the
exigencies of ‘role change’, defined as ‘a change in the shared conceptions and
execution of typical role performance and role boundaries’ (Turner, 1990, p. 88).
Some of these factors are generic to all professions in their attempts to maintain
their autonomy or power through ‘jurisdictional claims’ over the provision of spe-
cialist expertise (Abbott, 1988, p. 59). However, personnel professionals as a rela-
tively weak occupational group, face some very specific challenges that relate to
the inherent role ambiguities that have characterized their functional position
(Friedson, 1993). These include: (1) issues of ‘powerlessness’ or marginality in man-
agement decision-making processes, especially at a strategic level; (2) an inability
to maintain or defend the boundaries of their specialist expertise from encroach-
ment or control by managerial intervention; (3) lack of clarity or accountability in
specifying the goals, business outcomes, or the contribution of the personnel func-
tion; and (4) tensions in sustaining an ethos of mutuality in the face of the oppos-
ing interests between management and employees (Legge, 1978; Tyson and Fell,
1986; Watson, 1977).
Partly as a consequence of these role ambiguities personnel managers have been
past masters at reinventing or reinterpreting their role in their efforts to maintain
their credibility and status within a changing world of work. This has often resulted
in their ‘willingness to adopt different roles and rhetorics to suit the contingencies
of the times and to exploit possible bases of power’ (Legge, 1995, p. 53). The con-
stant search for occupational legitimacy has certainly underpinned the professional
self-images of the personnel function in the past, as does the recent ascendancy of
HRM as a reinvigorated agenda of ‘professionalization’.
There is growing evidence, however, that other pressures towards role change
or reinvention may be increasing in response to the centrifugal forces of increas-
984 R. Caldwell
© Blackwell Publishing Ltd 2003
ing organizational complexity and the competitive pressures of devolvement and
outsourcing that have accompanied the rise of HRM. Over the past decade the
personnel function has become increasingly fragmented or ‘balkanized’ as it has
been devolved to divisional and business unit levels, where the associated pressures
on cost, value and service delivery have forced discrete personnel functions to be
sub-divided into specialist tasks, subsumed by line management or outsourced to
other experts (Adams, 1991; Purcell and Ahlstrand, 1994; Tyson, 1995; Ulrich,
1997). Here the main threat is in fact a form of ‘deprofessionalization’, or the
erosion of expert knowledge, credibility and role-based status. Paradoxically, the
push towards professional specialization can itself undermine the group identity
or solidarity essential to the pursuit of professional status (Turner, 1990, p. 95).
The threat to professional status and identity can also be driven by the cen-
tripetal forces of strategic control. For even when HR activities are centrally coor-
dinated at a corporate headquarters level the influence of the HR contribution
may increasingly derive more from a shifting array of expertise, ‘rather than from
a clearly defined role or function’ (Purcell and Ahlstrand, 1994, p. 113). This
issue is compounded of course by the marginality of the HR function and its
inward-looking tendency to identity professional expertise mainly with concerns
over who controls HR activities, rather than questions of effectiveness (Ulrich,
1997, p. 95).
Taken together, these pressures from without and within appear to be intensi-
fying role ambiguity and conflict in an overall context where comfortable and
secure managerial and functional roles have declined in many organizations. It is
no surprise then, that HR professionals are now being encouraged to adopt non-
linear or ‘mosaic’ models of ‘career opportunism’ in which ‘one’s position in the
hierarchy becomes less relevant than what one knows’ (Ulrich, 1997, p. 249). This
represents a pragmatic reformulation of the classical tensions between expert
knowledge and hierarchical power in a new organizational context where con-
ventional models of managerial control have lost much of their legitimacy.
With such a disparate array of new factors at work and a long history of intrin-
sic role ambiguity, the task of capturing role change among personnel managers
presents considerable difficulties (Truss et al., 2002). Of the various early attempts
to explore the emerging impact of workplace change and HRM on the changing
roles of personnel managers, one of the most useful approaches was outlined by
Storey (Clark, 1993; Guest, 1987; Mackay and Torrington, 1986; Sisson, 1994;
Storey, 1992; Torrington, 1989). Drawing on case-based research into 15 main-
stream UK companies and public sector organizations conducted during 1986–88,
he proposed a new typology that differentiated four personnel roles on the basis
of two bi-polar dimensions: intervention versus non-intervention and strategy versus
tactics (Figure 1). The four roles were: (1) ‘Advisors’; (2) ‘Handmaidens’; (3) ‘Regu-
lators’; and (4) ‘Changemakers’. Advisors assumed a facilitating role, acting as
internal consultants offering expertise and advice to line management, while
Changing Roles of Personnel Managers 985
© Blackwell Publishing Ltd 2003
operating in an essentially non-interventionist manner (Storey, 1992, p. 171).
Handmaidens provided specific services at the behest of line management, their
‘attendant’ role was essentially reactive and non-interventionist (Abigail et al.,
1997). Regulators were interventionists involved in the traditional and essentially
tactical role of formulating, promulgating and monitoring the observance of
employment rules and industrial relations policy: ‘These were “managers of dis-
content”, seeking order through temporary, tactical truces with organized labour’
(Storey, 1992, p. 169). Changemakers were interventionists with a strategic agenda
focused on both the hard realities of business performance and the softer HR inter-
ventions designed to enhance employee commitment and motivation. It was this
new role that perhaps most clearly differentiated HRM from traditional person-
nel management (Guest, 1987, pp. 505–9; Storey, 1992, p. 180).
More than a decade later, can we expect to find significant changes in the nature
of the four personnel roles proposed by Storey? Is the ‘Advisor’ role more closely
associated with devolvement, business unit autonomy and the broader strategic
agenda of HRM? Has the ‘Regulator’ role declined? How has the ‘Handmaiden’
role coped with the challenges of outsourcing? Has the ‘Changemaker’ role grown
in significance as HRM has increasingly become part of the rhetoric and reality
of business performance (Storey, 1992, p. 187)? Or, has HRM perhaps further
undermined the credibility, professional status and legitimacy of a function that
has in the past often been marginalized by senior management?
Many of the questions and issues concerning the future role of HR professionals
have been addressed from a US perspective in Ulrich’s work, Human Resource Cham-
pions (1997). Although his work is primarily prescriptive and didactic, rather than
empirical, it provides one of the most systematic frameworks for capturing the
986 R. Caldwell
© Blackwell Publishing Ltd 2003
Changemakers
Regulators
Advisors
Handmaidens
INTERVENTIONARY
NON-INTERVENTIONARY
STRATEGIC
TACTICAL
Figure 1. Storey: four roles of personnel managers
