Asia Pacific Journal of Human Resources

L ast year, when the writer was invited to address the Inaugural State Conference of the IPMA Queensland Division on trends affecting human resource management in the United Kingdom, he had some doubts about the extent to which it would be possible to present a general description of these developments. Experience as a management researcher in Britain, which had brought him into close contact with a wide range of organisations, had led him to conclude that personnel practices in Britain varied enormously. Some concerns (albeit only a few) appeared as impressive, effective, and innovative in their management of human resources as organisations anywhere in the world; others were strong in a particular facet of the personnel function (e.g. industrial relations) but weak in others (e.g. manpower planning); many had rudimentary and not particularly well-managed personnel functions, and in some enterprises this field of management activity left a great deal to be desired. His involvement at national level in the activities of the Institute of Personnel Management for some five years confirmed the view that there existed a wide range of personnel practices in British organisations.

Japanese management is currently highlighted in terms of its effectiveness and efficiency in advanced countries. However, transferability of Japanese management into foreign managerial climates has been discussed among academics, both at home in Japan and in other countries. Is Japanese management transfer feasible? This paper deals with to what extent Japanese management systems and practices can be transferred into Australian companies, comparing management systems and practices in Australian companies, Japanese subsidiaries in Australia, and their parent companies. The results indicate that it is possible for some parts of Japanese management systems and practices to be applied to Australian companies.

Due to the increasing complexity of both national and international business environments, and the rapid growth in technology, there is a growing number of experienced, talented and highly motivated senior executives moving from one part of the globe to another either on a temporary or permanent basis. This is due to the constant world wide demand for effective senior management personnel in most fields of management. Also the multinational companies often move their senior executives from one country to another on similar or more challenging jobs either through necessity or because of formal experience training policies.

Since the mid-1970s there has been a growing recognition that Australia's economic base has been, undergoing a fundamental change — a decline in employment in manufacturing and a growth in employment in services (many increasingly marginal and peripheral), altered patterns in consumer demand generally (from hardware to software'), the development of technologies which are far less dependent on cheap raw materials and abundant energy and far more on access to high and rising levels of skill.

The human consequences of economic and technological change have long been the subject of both popular and scholarly debate. It is frequently asserted by politicians, trade union leaders and business executives that the nation's most valuable and important resource is people. Yet the need to develop human resources continues to rank well below concerns about investment in other resources such as minerals, energy or manufacturing. The current economic recession and the growth of widespread unemployment, especially among the young, will test the 'lip service' which has been hitherto paid to the importance of sustaining and developing the nation's human resources.

T his article describes a new method for analysing organisational design and for evaluating managerial positions based on power profiles and power scores. The power profile is measured with respect to vertical and horizontal dimensions of organisational structure, whilst a power score is computed as a product of those dimensions.

A range of power scores indicates the distribution of managerial power in an organisation. Power profiles are plotted on a common matrix. From the viewpoint of the chief executive officer his dependency will be greatest when power scores of departments are high, and particularly when the power profile shows that they are less subject to total organisational control. Three methods are devised to reduce the power base of departments.

Although conceptually and methodologically different to that used in the Hay evaluation scheme, a very high correlation is found to exist between power and Hay scores found in a leading mining company.