Beyond Seniority-Based Systems: A Paradigm Shift in Korean HRM?

This contribution delineates human resource management in Korea in the context of macro environments, recent trends, and an international and comparative framework. Traditional seniority-based HRM systems with job stability, which worked well until the mid-1980s, have been recently challenged by global competition, in turn pushing towards ability and performance based systems with more flexibility. Therefore, two major issues of the recent trends are a ‘seniority versus ability/performance’ dimension and a ‘job stability versus flexibility’ dimension. Results from case studies and field data show that foreign firms from different countries had somewhat different employment policies. Finally, some implications of the results are discussed.