it themselves to an organisation’s profit, goodwill and effectiveness as well as to improve their individual well-being, ultimately to create social well being to the whole society (Beaumont 1993). Normative theories of HRM are more prescriptive in their approach. They provide a basis for prescribed best practice or that a set of values that indicates best practice, and hypothesize that an integrated set of HRM practices is applied with a view to achieving the normative goals of high commitment to the organization plus high quality and flexibility, then higher worker performance will result, assuming that higher worker performance would have a positive impact on organizational performance.we can distinguish the content of performance, and try to provide some measures ofperformance by looking at firm’s output (sales and production), time (including lateness,absence, lost working time, failure to meet deadlines), financial indicators which couldinclude a large array of possibilities (i.e. profit, expansion plan etc.), and lastly staffattitude on work and their professionalism. By these exercises, the performance theoryconcludes that there may be some linkages within a broad view of performance whichcould explore causal links between HRM and performance. In addition to Guest’s review on HRM and performance, there is a growing body of literatures that support the correlation between high performance as a result of HRM practice and various measures of firm performance. Poole & Jenkins (1996) examined the development of comprehensive human resource management policies by surveying 909 firms in Britain, and found that HRM is one of the major keys for firms to gain a competitive edge or a lasting and sustained advantage over their competitors in the modern world. Results from Purchell (1995)’s quantitative analysis on 176 companies show that there is no direct link between human resource management strategy and corporat...
