The Role of Human Resource Manager

The paper explores to what extent HR Departments in Italy are characterized – in the perspective of HRM (Boselie, et al. 2009) - by a shift from “administrative” roles to ones more focused on valuing human capital and supporting organizational change, as “business partner” and “change agent”. After framing the theoretical background analysing the different roles of HRM highlighted in the literature, referring to Ulrich (1997) a survey was conducted on 102 large companies operating in Italy. The data analysis highlights critical dynamics in the process of adopting the roles of business partner and change agent: – the ongoing economic crisis seems to have contributed to a slowdown of the adoption of roles more focused on investing on people and organizational development and to a step backwards administrative roles and a short term perspective; – in a mere quantitative perspective, the change agent role is less adopted than the business partner; nonetheless, change agent, when adopted, appears to be sounder and based on rather consistent programmes and actions, while business partner seems to correspond more to a formal label, coherent with managerial fashions, than to real role behaviours. The main limitation is due to the impact of the economic crisis during data collection and to the necessity to test the hypotheses on more representative samples. The paper identifies possible areas of intervention for HR manager in order to become change agent and business partner. Its value is mainly due to being one of the few quantitative research on the roles of HR in the Italian context.