Papers by Martin McCracken
The Human Resources Business Partner (HRBP) role is advocated as a way for Human Resource (HR) pr... more The Human Resources Business Partner (HRBP) role is advocated as a way for Human Resource (HR) professionals and the HR profession to become more strategic and less transactional, necessitating the...
Academy of Management Proceedings
Performance Management (PM), in all its guises, is a core business practice across the majority o... more Performance Management (PM), in all its guises, is a core business practice across the majority of organizations; whether this occurs formally through an official organizational process or informal...
Academy of Management Proceedings
Whilst bureaucracy has for much of the last century been the dominant structural configuration wi... more Whilst bureaucracy has for much of the last century been the dominant structural configuration within the public sector throughout the western world, the past two decades have seen increasing press...
Accounting Forum
Recently, there have been attempts at increasing human capital (HC) reporting in the United Kingd... more Recently, there have been attempts at increasing human capital (HC) reporting in the United Kingdom (UK) through the introduction of government legislation and other initiatives. This paper assesses the current state of HC reporting in the UK by analysing the annual reports of the Financial Times Stock Exchange 100 companies before and after relevant amendments to the Companies Act 2006. The findings show that most of the companies analysed have been increasing their HC reporting, going beyond their statutory duties and moving away from wider intellectual capital disclosures to focus more on HC issues. However, these changes were not universal.
Work, Employment and Society
There is growing evidence that in the UK demands for non-profit and voluntary sector organisation... more There is growing evidence that in the UK demands for non-profit and voluntary sector organisations to comply with funders’ target driven priorities are often in tension with organisations’ social goals. The implications of this for employees are not yet sufficiently understood. The present article builds on Bateson et al.’s theory of double-bind to develop a socially contextualised model to understand employees’ experiences of workplace contradictions in the sector. Drawing from data provided by 49 individuals working in three case study organisations, our conceptualisation of a ‘non-profit double-bind’ provides a new and novel way of understanding how social meta-communicative processes serve to embed or reframe contradictions within intense employment relationships.
Journal of General Management
This paper is designed to critique the goal setting literature, with particular emphasis on the e... more This paper is designed to critique the goal setting literature, with particular emphasis on the effectiveness of different types of goals for successful transfer in management development programmes. In reviewing the literature, particular focus was given to goal interventions used in education, training and skill acquisition settings over the last 20 years and how these studies have advanced the understanding of knowledge transfer from management development programmes. Overall, the evidence suggests that the traditional result (or distal outcome) based goals are ill-suited for effective transfer and instead management development scholars and practitioners should use the newer forms of goal setting (e.g. proximal plus distal, behavioural and learning) to facilitate transfer.
Academy of Management Proceedings
Shared services arrangements have been viewed as a strategy for achieving efficiencies and improv... more Shared services arrangements have been viewed as a strategy for achieving efficiencies and improved service provision in back-office functional areas such as information technology (IT), finance an...
Management Learning, 2016
mini-cases provided range across health, environmental and social issues. Moreover, the authors e... more mini-cases provided range across health, environmental and social issues. Moreover, the authors explain well different takes on social marketing and that it is not, strictly speaking. The book concludes with the 12th chapter, ‘Legislation, Regulation and Ethics’. This chapter treats several different rationales for and approaches to regulation; however, it does so in perhaps too few pages to do justice to alternative regulatory and legislative regimes. MEAS and its companion website are extremely valuable informational, educational and reflective tools. The primary authors and their colleagues who have made this volume offer important questions about marketing in today’s world with an emphasis on meaning, purpose, consequences and possibilities. I can easily imagine students and other readers taking what they learn from this book and helping to push the horizons of marketing – not in the sense of expanding markets but rather in ways that make the profession and the institution fully engaged with the enormous challenges facing contemporary societies, economies and the planet.
The Life Assurance industry has been through a period of rapid change as a consequence of increas... more The Life Assurance industry has been through a period of rapid change as a consequence of increased competition, which is resulting in the need for structural re-organisation. The mid-career manager is arguably the most affected by these changes as the flattening structures and the need for obtaining new skills are leading to a re-appraisal of their role, while also diminishing their chances of the vertical progression that was traditionally on offer. It is against this background that an analysis of the barriers to participation in learning was undertaken through in-depth interviews with 61 managers from five of the largest Scottish Life Assurance institutions. A grounded model was developed to identify the prevalence of both intrinsic and extrinsic factors affecting participation levels. The model identified five intrinsic variables (Perceptual, Emotional, Motivational, Cognitive (General) and Cognitive (Vocational)) and three extrinsic factors (Culture, Management Development Culture and Physical Resources) and the managers were categorised against these variables according to their propensity to participate in learning initiatives. While the intrinsic barriers relating to managers perceived need for learning and emotional insecurities were important, the managers appeared to primarily attribute their levels of participation to the presence or otherwise of extrinsic variables. In particular, the organisational culture was seen to be crucial in influencing participation levels, as there were high levels of negativity surrounding the support and guidance structures for learning. The ambiguity of reward strategies was also seen to be an inhibitor, as were time pressures. Organisations need to address the issue of balancing participation in learning activities with the pressures originating from both mid-career managers private and professional lives as a potential solution to these external pressures. It was suggested that barriers to learning could be alleviated through better support and guidance and the development of a learning culture, encompassing top management involvement.
Personnel Review, 2016
Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to examine employers’ use of social networking sites (SNSs... more Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to examine employers’ use of social networking sites (SNSs) within employee selection. Design/methodology/approach – In-depth interviews were conducted with 15 organisations to gain an understanding of how they accessed, observed and utilised data from SNSs in their selection procedures, as well as gaining an insight into employers’ perceptions of candidate privacy and discrimination. Findings – SNS profiles were either accessed as part of an organisation’s official selection process, through integrating internet screening as part of the formal process and obtaining candidate permission, or through covert (without consent) observation. Facebook was primarily used to identify a candidate’s organisation fit and make assessment of their soft skills, whereas LinkedIn distinguished their professional attributes and their job fit. Problems were associated with the extent to which SNSs were reflective of the person and whether a candidate’s personal l...
This paper presents the findings from an exploratory study into managerial skill requirements in ... more This paper presents the findings from an exploratory study into managerial skill requirements in the Scottish visitor attraction sector. It provides an insight into the range, diversity and perceived importance of current and future skills. The main findings highlight a focus on operation skills, with soft people skills also seen as being important in the future. However, less emphasis was given to strategic skills, either now or in the future. Given the intensely competitive environment for visitor attractions, this finding is rather concerning as strategic thinking has been presented in the literature and by tourism experts as essential to maintain commercial viability
Academy of Management Proceedings, 2014
Some 65 years ago, Thorndike (1949) highlighted four criteria for effective performance managemen... more Some 65 years ago, Thorndike (1949) highlighted four criteria for effective performance management (PM) systems: reliability, validity, freedom from bias and practicality. While the literature has a rich and deep history concerning the first three criteria, limited scholarly work has examined practicality, and even less has examined the perspective of the human resource (HR) practitioner. We believe this void is problematic as these HR practitioners often design and implement PM systems. As such, they have a unique and important perspective concerning PM. In this study, we interviewed 45 people involved in PM design and implementation from Canada, the United Kingdom and New Zealand, in order to gain insights concerning what they felt constituted effective PM. Overall, we noted that the effectiveness criteria highlighted by these practitioners did not relate to the psychometric criteria that have dominated the scholarly HR literature. Rather, across the three countries, we found that HR practitioners focus...
Managing Visitor Attractions, 2008
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Papers by Martin McCracken