HRM Practice Clusters in Relation to Size and Performance: An Empirical Investigation in Canadian Manufacturing Smes‪.‬

Introduction It is increasingly accepted that certain organizational factors, such as the nature of the human resource management (HRM) system, can explain in part business performance. As Hansen and Wernerfelt (1989: 409) have suggested, the building of an effective, directed, human organization can be a critical issue in firm success and development. This was a weighty argument in favor of the resource-based theory to which Wernerfelt (1984) largely contributed; Prahalad and Hamel (1990), Barney (1991), Peteraf (1993), Teece, Pisano and Shuen (1997), among others, subsequently enhanced this theory by their own contributions.