64 A STUDY OF HRM PRACTICES AND ORGANIZATIONAL CULTURE IN SELECTED PRIVATE SECTOR ORGANIZATIONS IN INDIA Anil Kumar Singh * 1. Executive summary The new economic environment is primarily marked by the freeing of shackles for entre- preneurship and economic growth. The “license system” has been replaced, to a great extent, by a “market system”. The challenge of Human Resource Management (HRM) practices would be to create an environment of resilience, which can accommodate and assimilate successfully changes in systems, structures, technologies, methods, etc. People would have to ascribe the right meaning to the change process. India is well-equipped to succeed on global markets. It has a pool of highly educated people, a well-developed judicial system, democratic governance, an established banking industry, and fairly sophisticated and inter-linked financial markets. Knowledge industries will be at the vanguard of economic opportunity, and India will be poised to take advantage of this trend with its corpus of highly skilled people. The changes on the market scene have necessitated the Indian industry to look inward for the development of human resources (HR). People develop themselves in a globalized scenario with new directions along with new problems and issues arising to develop new competencies to meet the changing requirements, aspira- tions, and problems. There are, however, some universal goods towards which all human resource management efforts should be aimed at. The emergence of Japanese human resource management has led to the concept of culture in a big way. At the organizational level, the goal of HRM is normally to have competent and motivated employees to ensure managerial effectiveness and growth of the organization. Organi- zations normally direct their HRM efforts towards the development of competencies and organizational culture. Organizations use mechanisms to achieve HRM goals with competent and committed employees. Organizations can achieve very little even if they have excellent technological and other resources at their command. Such an assertion gains better credibility in the context of developing countries like India, that is, typically in early growth stages in terms of economic development, and growing more rapidly than the ‚traditional‘ developed economies of Japan, North America and * University of Delhi, Sri Aurobindo College (dranil.singh@gmail.com). This paper was presented at the Tenth International Conference on the topic of “UN Millennium Development Goals: Challenges and Perspectives” held in Gödöllő, Hungary, on 23-26 June, 2009.