Postgrad students showcase their research at HR Management Conference

Salome Hughes, MA Human Resource Management student, reports on the 8^th Human Resource Management Research Methods Conference, at which Salome and other students presented their research.

The 2020 HRM conference was a fascinating insight into the variety of research methods and topics that HRM students cover. Having attended in previous years, I continue to be amazed by the quality of the research on show, so being invited to speak was not only very flattering but felt like an endorsement of the effort I’d put into the MA course.

Dr Anne Humbert’s plenary on gender and nursing as a profession really underlined how research can have practical, real-world applications and benefits. The Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development’s ethos of championing better work and working lives came across in Dr Humbert’s accounts of working with nursing bodies across the country. It reminded me of the importance of academic research in adding context and credibility to the measures that provide tangible, positive outcomes for real people.

I knew how useful others’ accounts of their research journeys were in reassuring me that, if they could do it, I too would be able complete a dissertation, so I focused on trying to provide that same reassurance in my own presentation. My research on line managers’ experiences of identity work and emotional labour explored the complexity and invisibility of what people managers have to do in order to support their employees. By taking a line managers’ perspective I hoped to uncover some of the intangible work involved in simply being a manager. The research also championed the managers themselves, adding context and credibility to my proposals for recognising and supporting the difficult and important job they do.

Giving HRM students the opportunity to showcase their expertise through this conference reinforces the Business School’s dedication to maintaining links with businesses and the CIPD and, quite rightly, the pride that it has in its academic excellence.

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Congrats to the students on presenting their varied and valuable research!

• Salome Hughes: “It’s about being flexible and magical”: Exploring identity work and emotional labour in line managers’ experiences of people management
• Sandra Benaite: Negotiating a pandemic: assessing the impact of Covid-19 on workers through critical discourse analysis of tweets produced during the height of lockdown
• Alexandra Armaou: An exploration of the lived experience of mutuality in the employment relationship in a small-medium sized family business in Greece
• Heather Daw: The impact of the psychological contract on affective organisational commitment and employee engagement
• Edwina Emery: Making sense of organisational change during a merger
• Felicity Polden: The career conundrum: developing and retaining a University’s professional services staff
• Rachel Corbett: “I get knocked down, but I get up again”: a mixed methods study into the relationship between employee resilience and HR practices at Amey.