An overview of HR-line relationship and its future directions

This paper reviews strategic HRM literature that directly or indirectly discusses HR-line relationship. It documents what have so for been done to understand and manage this relationship. Literature has been identified through the relevant keyword search and secondly from going through citations of the most relevant academic papers. HR-line relationship is likely to maintain its importance in future. Various dimensions of the concept have been identified and elements within each dimension have been proposed. The paper also identifies that HRM importance, supports and barriers for line managers to take on HR responsibilities, level of line involvement in an organization, role understanding of line managers, HR role type, and competencies of HR department may influence this relationship. All the scattered literature on this issue has been made available in this paper. Future research may use the identified dimensions to empirically develop measurement construct for HR-line relationship quality. Empirical confirmation of the predictors from the identified influencing variables is also needed.