A Downside of Human Resource Management Devolution

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Published on: April 23, 2025 at 7:11 pm

Human resource management (HRM) devolution—leadership transferring HRM responsibilities from specialist executives to managers—is becoming more common worldwide. However, there’s debate over whether it helps employees and organizations or adds too much to managers’ already-full plates.

Academy of Management Scholar Carol Kulik of the University of South Australia noted that HRM devolution is controversial.

“We’ve taken all these activities that used to be the responsibility of HR managers and units and put them in the hands of line managers,” Kulik said. “There’s some research that shows that individual employees have on average two important people-management conversations every week.

“They aren’t having those conversations with HR but rather with their line managers,” she said. “You can have the best people-management practices in the world, but it really comes down to how your individual line manager enacts them on a day-to-day basis.”

Kulik emphasized that managers’ jobs have gotten so much harder. Often, they get insufficient training before being promoted. Further, many are now responsible for managing more employees with smaller budgets.

“Even when they have budgets that look large, because they’re spreading it across more employees, they don’t have as many dollars for training or for rewarding top performers,” Kulik said. “And they’re now managing people on hybrid schedules or in remote environments that they never worked in themselves, so the job itself is getting much, much harder.

“There’s evidence right now that people don’t even want to become line managers—they’re saying, ‘I just want to spend my whole career being an individual contributor,’” she said. “So here’s this incredibly important job, and we have line managers who have never received formal training in people management, because they didn’t see that as part of their the primary part of their role.

“And yet, they’re this critical linchpin in an organization.”

A sample of Kulik’s AOM research findings:

Author

Daniel Butcher

Daniel Butcher is a writer and the Managing Editor of AOM Today at the Academy of Management (AOM). Previously, he was a writer and the Finance Editor for Strategic Finance magazine and Management Accounting Quarterly, a scholarly journal, at the Institute of Management Accountants (IMA). Prior to that, he worked as a writer/editor at The Financial Times, including daily FT sister publications Ignites and FundFire, as well as Crain Communications’s InvestmentNews and Crain’s Wealth, eFinancialCareers, and Arizent’s Financial Planning, Re:Invent|Wealth, On Wall Street, Bank Investment Consultant, and Money Management Executive. He earned his bachelor’s degree from the University of Colorado Boulder and his master’s degree from New York University. You can reach him at [email protected] or via LinkedIn.

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