Measuring competing explanations of human resource management practices through the Cranet survey: cultural versus institutional explanations

Abstract

This paper assesses the relative and joint impact of cultural and institutional factors on firms’ use of “calculative” human resource management practices to determine their separate analytic power. To what extent do institutions and culture structure managerial choice? Previous research has been constrained by not having measures for both cultural and institutional distance. Employing data from 14 European countries our findings indicate that institutional, and more specifically, labour relations factors, have more explanatory power than cultural factors.