HUMAN RESOURCE MANAGEMENT IN CONSULTING FIRMS

Human Resource Management in Consulting Firms

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the human resource management (HRM) policies and practices in consulting firms. The paper specifically investigates whether or not the HRM approaches in these firms mirror the two organizational archetypes of professional partnerships (P2) and manage professional businesses (MPB) found in the professional services sector. The clues sketch on a sequence of semi-structured interviews with senior advisors from 28 conferring companies with a presence in the German-speaking market. We conclude that the HRM practices and policies in P2- and MPB-type consulting firms are rooted in and reflective of fundamentally different concepts of the relationship between the organization and its members in the two types of firms.

Human Resource Management in Consulting Firms

Introduction

The consulting industry is a particularly attractive field for researchers with an interest in human resource management (HRM). Consulting, like any expert service, is a persons business. The success of conferring companies hinges on how well human assets are managed. Consulting firms serve as an increasingly important gateway into employment relationships for high-caliber candidates from a variety of academic disciplines and experience backgrounds. They form the perspectives, expectations and abilities of juvenile professionals at a critical phase in their lives. In numerous situations these persons move on to constitute the managerial elites in enterprise and public life. Therefore, the HR practices common in the conferring commerce may use an influence expanding even beyond the scope of consulting companies themselves.

Despite the growing importance of the conferring part, amazingly little is renowned about the HRM principles and practices of the companies in this industry. Most of what has become public data about consulting firms are founded on anecdotal evidence. Both theoretical advances that would interpret variations in HRM advances and reliable empirical evidence on this topic are mostly lacking.

Chapter 1

Problem definition

In this paper we contribute to loading this gap. Our target is twofold: First, we provide an overview of two (arche-) types of expert service companies as developed. They distinguish between professional service firms organized along the professional partnership (P2) model, and those characterized as managed professional businesses (MPBs). We request this investigation to the exact case of consulting firms. Second, we supply empirical clues showing that the two systems of companies furthermore employ basically distinct HRM practices.

Chapter 2

Literature Review

In this paper, we have applied the notion of organizational archetypes to the consulting sector and investigated the implications of these archetypes for the HRM systems, policies and practices in consulting firms. We have drawn on the distinction between expert partnerships and organized expert businesses suggested in institutional theory. These organizational archetypes involve fundamentally different governance and management systems, organization structures, and underlying interpretive schemes (beliefs, ideas and values that allow interpreting individual design aspects as elements of a coherent whole).

The aim of the empirical part of the paper was on if consulting firms that adhere to either of these two archetypes furthermore display different HRM schemes, principles and ...