The corporate world is witnessing significant changes as cultural, gender and linguistic diversity has increased manifold in recent times. All parts of organization, i.e., organizational structure, management pattern, HR system, accounting and auditing procedures, are undergoing changes with time. HR system has transformed from personnel management to Human Resource Management (HRM) and now to people asset management. The present paper seeks to explore employees’ readiness for High Performance Work System (HPWS). Employees’ readiness is found to be in ‘Ready’ category on a five-point rating scale. The paper also explores readiness variations on the basis of individual and organizational characteristics. Age, experience and educational qualifications are found to be significant individual variables affecting employees’ readiness. In the same way, sector and companies’ origin status are reported to be significant organizational variables that have a bearing on the readiness of employees. Further, the paper tends to discuss interaction effect between individual and organizational variables to give a deep insight into readiness of employees.

The corporate world is witnessing significant and overwhelming changes. Employee turnover, absenteeism, stress level, and cultural, gender and linguistic diversity have increased drastically in recent times. Technology has become an integral and necessary part of every division of an organization. Organizational structure and the management pattern have also changed. Scientific management and principles of management given by classical theorists have outlived their utility. Even traditional Human Resource Management (HRM) and behavioral approach have failed to catch up with the rapid changes. The traditional HRM style mainly gives secondary or supportive role to personnel activities of a company. It mainly emphasized on collecting and organizing employee information, monitoring individual performance and implementing organizational policies (Appelbaum and Wohl, 2000). Although human concern comes to limelight with the advent of HRM, still it could not acquire center stage. It is a passive and submissive execution of policies drafted by a few seasoned managers without participation of employees lower down the order. Further, traditional HRM also failed to forecast the challenges of the future. Therefore, there came a new avatar of HRM that started to understand the business strategy from personnel perspective. Modern HRM tends to formulate the corresponding management strategy on human resources to improve delivered service. Also, modern HRM starts to act as a strategy partner with top management team (Beer, 1997; and Mohrman and Lawer, 1997).

Organizational Behavior Journal, Readiness of India, Modern HRM Practices.