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138 MANAGING KNOWLEDGE WORK AND INNOVATION

The findings reinforce the importance of continuously attending to the work-design
side of the employment contract. Knowledge workers remain with employers who
provide interesting and challenging assignments which allow workers to build a por-
table portfolio of skills.
(p. 1164)
Flood and his colleagues argue that the importance of the psychological contract
is such that organizations should seek to make it more ‘transparent and tan-
gible’. Such transparency involves an open discussion of the expectations which
both employer and employee bring to the job at every stage from recruitment
through to performance review.

>> CONCLUSIONS
This chapter has highlighted the challenges which knowledge work poses for
HRM, and the different policy responses which firms have developed for dealing
with these challenges. It is clear that the autonomy enjoyed by knowledge work-
ers has prompted a range of responses from organizations. Some have developed
soft HRM policies which attempt to gain the commitment of knowledge work-
ers by creating a supportive organizational context. Such policies can be highly
effective where they succeed in gaining real affective commitment and thus help
to realize the full potential of highly skilled groups and individuals. On the other
hand, such policies are also difficult to develop and sustain. This may be because
they require consistency across the different areas of culture, rewards, careers
and work design. It may also reflect the relatively bureaucratic character of HRM
where policies are often standardized for the organization as a whole. These
factors help to explain why such HRM policies for knowledge work are often
more effective when the organization is relatively small or is composed largely of
knowledge workers itself – as in the ScienceCo case described in Chapter 2.
Meanwhile, however, other organizations have resolved the tensions between
control and commitment not through HRM policies but through major changes
in organizational form and focus. The spread of outsourcing and offshoring
underscores the vulnerability of knowledge work to wider changes in the global
division of labour – a vulnerability which is increased by the very developments in
IT and communications which have accelerated the growth in knowledge work.
The radical solution of simply outsourcing activities is not available or appro-
priate for many organizations, of course, and for managers still struggling to
develop supportive HRM policies, we outlined the wide range of approaches
currently available. Each of these approaches emphasizes different ways of
improving the links between knowledge work and business performance. But, all
depend to some degree on managers’ ability to shape the employment relation-
ship in a way that best serves the needs of the particular context within which the
knowledge work is being undertaken. This underlines the importance of manag-
ers and business leaders’ actions in shaping the context for knowledge work – a
factor which is amply underlined by the case study outlined below.

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