Human resource function strategic role and trade unions: exploring their impact on human resource management practices in Uruguayan firms Alvaro Cristiani a * and Jose ´ Marı ´a Peiro ´ b a IEEM Business School, Universidad de Montevideo, Montevideo, Uruguay; b Research Institute on Personnel Psychology, Organizational Development, and Quality of Working Life (IDOCAL), Universidad de Valencia, and IVIE, Valencia, Spain Organizations worldwide are confronted with different contextual constraints. Jackson and Schuler [1995, ‘Understanding Human Resource Management in the Context of Organizations and their Environments,’ Annual Review of Psychology, 46, 237–264], in their classical review, highlight the importance of the impact of the internal and external organizational context on human resource management (HRM) practices. This paper uses data collected through a survey of firms located in Uruguay, in a context where HR function and trade unions have gone through significant changes, to determine their impact on the adoption of different HRM practices. The authors find that organizations with an HR function strategically involved and with higher degree of union presence have more person-centred HRM practices, while performance-centred HRM practices were positively influenced by HR function strategic role. However, the findings do not support the moderating role of trade union presence on the relationship between the HR function strategic role and HRM practices. Keywords: HR function; performance-centred HRM practices; person-centred HRM practices; unionization; Uruguay Introduction During the last decades, industrial relations (IR) has been experiencing changes at its core. Trade unionism has been experiencing a continuous decline in many countries (Verma and Fang 2002). Although unionization rate still remains high in certain countries (e.g. China, South Africa), unions have been disappearing in certain organizations or trying to find a new strategy in others (Fiorito 2001; Guest and Peccei 2001; Verma and Fang 2002). Meanwhile, there is a growing interest in human resource management (HRM) practices at the workplace level as a way for reaching higher levels of cooperation and ‘win-win’ employee-employer relationships (Machin and Wood 2005). While the Uruguayan IR framework has similarly changed in these last years, it has not been exactly in the same direction of the international trend. HRM practices are not replacing traditional unionism and collective bargaining paradigm as in the USA or European countries. In recent years, the rate of unionization and the percentage of people covered by collective agreements have experienced high levels of growth. The national workers trade union confederation (PIT-CNT) grew from 102,000 members in 2003 to more than 200,000 in 2007 (Senatore and Zurbriggen 2007). q 2014 Taylor & Francis *Corresponding author. Current address: Research Institute on Personnel Psychology, Organizational Development, and Quality of Working Life (IDOCAL), Universidad de Valencia, Valencia, Spain. Email: alvaro.cristiani@uv.es The International Journal of Human Resource Management, 2015 Vol. 26, No. 3, 381–400, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09585192.2014.925946