 Boardroom reward continues to attract controversy, despite the structural changes in corporate governance arrangements over the past decade. This study responds to Pettigrew's (1992) call to eschew over-ambitious attempts to demonstrate causality in the area of executive management and firm performance, in favour of redressing the overwhelmingly prescriptive bias in the literature. A simple but important task is to 'begin to provide some basic descriptive findings about boards and their directors', and open up 'the black box of board behaviour' -in this case, that of board remuneration committees. Interpretations of comparative market signals play a part in deliberations between the leading actors responsible for determining executive directors' salary, bonuses and other emoluments. But the position is more deeply textured than the reified influence of (global) market forces sometimes implied in the normative literature. The study reported, based on qualitative interviews, taps in to the nuances of decision taking in respect of boardroom reward management, including remuneration committee members' reactions to corporate governance reforms. Such initiatives locate non-executive directors in the role of intermediaries in the principal-agent relationship, explicitly assigned to resolve the conflict of interest inherent in boardroom remuneration systems, while simultaneously they are expected to play a team role as board members responsible for the overall strategy and operation of the company. The study is indicative: an attempt to open up research questions around the context and process of boardroom reward management that earlier analyses may have ignored or overlooked.

Purpose -The purpose of this paper is to examine managerial opinion regarding human resource management (HRM) practices in eastern Nigeria (western Africa). Design/methodology/approach -This paper is informed by a survey administered to a small sample of Nigerian HR practitioners (n ¼ 50 usable responses, 25 per cent response rate), replicating earlier work in different regions of the same country. Findings -Nigerian HR practitioners appear open to people management practices under the HRM rubric. But rather than predicting convergence with western-inspired approaches, evidence suggests that cultural and institutional influences on how normative HRM may be interpreted and acted on may result in a blend of transplanted and indigenous managerial behaviour. Practical implications -Sensitivity to individuals' socialization as well as economic, historical, political, and social contexts may enable multinational organizations to capitalize on the potential to transplant forms of HRM from parent country cultures to developing countries such as Nigeria, at least among managerial employees. Originality/value -The paper augments and builds on limited empirically informed research to date on people management issues in African country contexts, helping to ground consideration of abstract debates in the literature around convergence and divergence in culturally and institutionally embedded managerial practice.

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to examine how female expatriates interpret the effectiveness of practical implementation of equality/diversity policies, trusting this to support their expatriate careers.Design/methodology/approachA cross-sectional, qualitative research approach draws upon in-depth semi-structured interviews with 14 human resources equality/diversity policy implementers and 26 current female expatriates in two oil and gas firms.FindingsEarly-career stage female expatriates believe that equality/diversity policy implementation will support their international careers. At the most senior levels, women expatriates highlight unequal treatment breaching their trust in delivery of equality/diversity principles to support their expatriate career progression.Research limitations/implicationsLongitudinal research is needed to assess how early-career women expatriates' willingness to trust in organisational equality/diversity principles alters as their careers progress, and the effects of any changing trust relations on their contributions to organisational strategic objectives. Larger senior female expatriate samples are needed to research links between trust relations and turnover.Practical implicationsOrganisations must weigh up benefits from using transparent expatriate selection processes versus less formal mechanisms, if informal processes are not to undermine espoused equality interventions. Unconscious bias training should form part of wide-ranging programmes to tackle discrimination. Senior managerial action with embedded accountability is needed.Originality/valueExploring the rhetoric and reality of equality/diversity policy implementation on women comprising a minority expatriate group, this research demonstrates women expatriates' early-career trust in gender equality falls away as they first recognise and then accept diminishing female expatriate senior grade representation and the implications for their expatriate careers. Should turnover result, this could detrimentally affect organisational expatriate gender diversity objectives.

T he HR profession has been concerned with establishing the contribution of HRM to organisational performance in measurable terms, at both a speci® c (HR activities) and a general (organisational) level. Furthermore, HRM uses various technologies to direct employees' behaviour towards objectives and tasks that deliver approved organisational performance. Many organisations try to frame these `levers' within an overall performance management system, and attach incentives and rewards to the achievement of objectives and targets within this.However, there are a variety of disconnections possible between organisational performance, HR performance, performance management and incentive structures. For example, detailed measures for justifying the effectiveness and ef® ciency of HR activities may not re¯ect what delivers true performance for an organisation. Such measures are, in effect, part of the performance management system applied to the HR function and may themselves not be clearly linked to business or other outcomes. Equally, there are many cases where incentive schemes operate without being closely tied into a performance management system.The purpose of this article is to deconstruct some of the problems and faults in conception and design which surround performance and rewards in HRM and to introduce a model for planning and thinking about these things more sensibly. In particular, it is an attempt to clarify what performance we should be talking about, how and whether it is measurable and how performance is best improved, before the HR specialist is called on to redesign an organisation's reward system. This is not the ® rst time, nor undoubtedly the last, that this task has been undertaken. Lawler (1990) and Kerr (1975Kerr ( , 1988, among others, have devoted many years trying to bring clear thinking to this area. However, it is still necessary to reiterate many of the basic lessons from time to time.The article is in two parts. The ® rst draws on a study for the Institute of Personnel and Development (IPD) into Investors' View of People Management (Hendry, Woodward, Harvey-Cooke and Gaved, 1997Gaved, , 1999, which reviewed the uses and abuses of performance measures in the course of `developing agreed criteria and information relating to good people management as an element in company performance'. This identi® es some of the practical problems around performance and sets the scene for the second part, which is more directly concerned with performance management. In this, we draw on the work of the Strategic Remuneration Research Centre (SRRC) in developing a tool to help companies think more systematically about performance management (Hendry, Bradley and Perkins, 1997).The common ground between these two pieces of work lies in the view that measuring people performance is vitiated by the obsession with control and therefore is liable to undermine, rather than contribute to, performance. It should only be done within a context of strict attention to corporate business objectives and a limited number of s...