The complexity of managing human resources in Peru

Abstract

This article describes how the politics of human resources have changed in Peru, and how this change played an important role in the reforms that occurred throughout the 1990s. Throughout the article, we examine how the size and the type of organization influence the generation of human resource management. For example, some medium-sized businesses have successfully integrated their human resource management with its central competencies, experiencing positive economic and financial business results. Other companies chose to circumvent human resource management issues by outsourcing or using contract workers, relegating the role of human resources to a peripheral role. Transnational organizations bring many methods and selection processes, promotions, evaluations, training and salary determination. The article ends with a comparative analysis between the formal and informal sector of the national economy with respect to human resources practices.

Keywords:

• International human resource management
• Peru
• Latin America

Acknowledgements

The authors wish to thank Edgard Luque, Vishal Jadhav, Cecilia Cuadros, Allison Gordon, Renzo Gonzalez, Marcos Nishio and Heber Longhurst for their research assistance with this article.

Notes

1 Urban underemployment is classified according to hours worked and wages received.

2 A forty-five-hour working week for women.

3 This varies by firms, which we consider later in the paper.

4 Research on this subject uses labels such as ‘informal’, ‘shadow’, ‘underground’, ‘hidden’, ‘second’, ‘black market’, ‘parallel’, ‘other path’ among many others.

5 Countries included in the Latin American sample are: Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Costa Rica, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Mexico and Venezuela. Although Peru was not among the countries for which empirical data were gathered, the authors are extrapolating these findings to characteristics of Peruvian leaders. See House et al. (2004) for a thorough discussion of the statistical procedures used to conduct the cluster analysis.

6 For other dimensions of uncertainty avoidance and power distance, Peruvian managers reported higher uncertainty avoidance and power distance, but the two sub-dimensions mentioned here are most relevant to this article.