Exploring the Boundaries of Human Resource Managers’ Responsibilities David E. Guest • Christopher Woodrow Received: 30 June 2011 / Accepted: 28 July 2012 / Published online: 29 August 2012 Ó Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2012 Abstract This article addresses two longstanding chal- lenges for human resource (HR) managers; how far they can and should represent the interests of both management and workers and how they can gain the power to do so. Adopting a Kantian perspective, it is argued that to pursue an ethical human resource management (HRM), HR managers need to go some way to resolving both. Three possible avenues are considered. Contemporary approaches to organisation of the HR role associated with the work of Ulrich are explored as a means of enhancing power, but rejected on the basis of research evidence as unlikely to succeed. Promotion of worker outcomes in the context of developing the link between HRM and performance offers the potential for a more ethical HRM but has not been seized by most HR managers. Finally, implementation of legislative and moral requirements to promote quality of working life is explored through the case of bullying at work. This highlights the boundaries of the HR role in a context of limited power and leads to the conclusion that it is unrealistic to look to HR managers, or at least HR managers alone, to achieve an ethical HRM. Keywords HR policy and practice Á HR roles Á HR implementation Á Kantian ethics Á Worker well-being Á Organisational performance Á Bullying at work Introduction More than 30 years ago, Legge (1978) highlighted a range of challenges and ambiguities in the role of the personnel manager. One of these concerned the conflict inherent in personnel managers’ responsibilities as an integral part of management alongside their distinctive responsibility to take account of the concerns and well- being of the workforce. The latter reflects, in part, a hangover from a welfare and human relations tradition, perceived by many in personnel management to be a burden from which they have sought, over many years, to escape. A second major challenge concerned personnel managers’ lack of power to enact personnel management. An important reason for this was that while personnel managers could develop policy and practice, line man- agers had to implement them on a day-to-day basis. This meant that everyone was, in some sense, a personnel manager, resulting in ambiguity about the boundaries of the respective roles and a difficult decision for personnel managers about how far they should seek responsibility for implementation in the face of potential reluctance or even hostility from line managers. These two key challenges, one concerning the focus of the role and the other concerning its enactment, present ethical dilemmas for personnel managers, since rebadged as human resource (HR) managers, because they can have an important bearing on their ability to influence the well- being of the workforce in any organisation. In the inter- vening years, there have been a number of attempts to address them. The aim of this article is to explore some of the recent attempts and evaluate how far they have been successful. In so doing, we will consider the boundaries or limits to what HR managers, who seek to attain ethically defensible outcomes, can realistically achieve. D. E. Guest (&) Á C. Woodrow Department of Management, King’s College London, 150 Stamford Street, London SE19NH, UK e-mail: david.guest@kcl.ac.uk C. Woodrow e-mail: christopher.a.woodrow@kcl.ac.uk 123 J Bus Ethics (2012) 111:109–119 DOI 10.1007/s10551-012-1438-8