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132 MANAGING KNOWLEDGE WORK AND INNOVATION

Only larger, more established organizations can offer these kinds of career
track opportunities because, to be meaningful, they involve providing a high
level of job security over a sustained period. In sectors dominated by smaller firms
or where job security is threatened by market and technological change, long-
run careers with a single organization may be rare. In such contexts, knowledge
worker careers will normally involve jobs in a number of different organizations,
and even in different industries. Expectations will shift correspondingly towards
opportunities for developing portable forms of expertise that offer ‘employabil-
ity’ across a range of employers rather than employment with a single employer.
Translating these challenges into possible managerial responses, we can see that
HRM policies need to take account of a number of different factors if they are to
succeed in recruiting, retaining and motivating knowledge workers. The tangible
financial rewards of the job, which are determined through company remuneration
policies, are important because employers are often operating in competitive labour
markets for these workers, and they need to be able to offer attractive inducements.
At the same time, these financial rewards need to be complemented by the intan-
gible rewards created by work design, training and development and the social and
cultural environment of the firm. The latter are crucial if managers are to succeed
not only in recruiting this group, but also in motivating and retaining them.
This analysis explains why managers often see knowledge workers as a difficult
group to deal with. If HRM is to create an enabling context for knowledge work,
it needs to be capable of developing joined-up policies across the different areas
of reward, careers and work design. Given the limited power of HRM functions
noted earlier, this kind of integrated approach to HRM policy is often difficult
or impossible to secure, despite the advantages of doing so.

>> EXISTING HRM APPROACHES TO KNOWLEDGE WORK

Having discussed the challenges which knowledge work creates for HRM policy
and practice, in this section we turn to the existing approaches which are avail-
able to respond to these challenges. We focus on four major approaches – briefly
labeled as ‘best practice’, ‘best fit’, human capital and psychological contract
approaches – which aim to give managers better frameworks for developing
effective HRM policies in contexts where knowledge work is important.

Best-practice approach
One major strand of HRM research has focused on identifying ‘best practice’,
that is a set of HRM practices which are universally effective across a range
of settings in producing high levels of performance from employees (Wood,
1995). One of the problems with applying this approach to knowledge work,
however, is that such work involves a number of different processes, depending,
for example, on whether workers are sharing, creating or integrating knowledge
and the context in which this work is being undertaken. As a result, a range
of ‘best practices’ can be identified depending on the knowledge processes we
wish to support. For example, a recent review of the literature (Cabrera and

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