Three of the most important practices in the field of human resource management are recruitment and selection, training and development, and compensation. Nonetheless, despite the importance of people in the development of social and human capital in family firms, they are scarcely studied in smaller companies, as the existence of human resource management practices is not common in such firms.
In the research carried out on a sample of small Spanish companies in the wine sector (which is one of the sectors most related to small family companies, due to the structure of this industry, as well as the union that exists between culture, tradition, prestige and family name), the relationship between these three human resource practices and the results of those companies is analyzed, studying whether there exist differences between family and non-family companies, as well as the differences in the behaviours of such companies depending on their age and size.
The sample under study is made up of companies that appear in the National Classification of Economic Activities, under code 11.02, both belonging to one of the different Protected Designations of Origin and not belonging to any of them. A total of 267 Spanish wine companies make up the sample, of which 120 are family firms.
The results show that small family businesses use recruitment and selection practices to a lesser extent, a result that confirms those obtained in previous studies, and reveals that depotism frustrates the selection of the most suitable people in small family firms, favoring the family members in the recruitment and selection processes, and making it difficult to recruit outsiders, which in turn endangers the performance of these companies.
The study also shows that the human resource practices carried out by the company depend on its size, and that there exists an inverted U-shape relationship between performance and size, which indicates that as size increases, the level of use of the analyzed human resource practices increases, although the relationship decreases for larger sizes. However, it is found that there is no relationship between the performance of the analyzed companies and their age.
According to these results, we can consider a series of implications to be taken into account by the management of small wine family companies: the recruitment and selection of human resources is not being carried out correctly in this type of firms, and this is the reason why they could be losing the most suitable people for the different jobs, so the use of appropriate recruitment and selection practices would be recommended to be able to attract the best employees. On the other hand, the study shows that companies, when they grow, exceed their point of efficiency in the management of human resources, so the management should review their policies and encourage greater participation of workers in the management of the company, since, without it, an increase in the size of the company produces distancing and a feeling of helplessness.
Summary of the article published by the authors in:
Ferrer, J.R., Abella-Garcés, S. y Maza-Rubio, M.T. (2020): Human Resource practices and performance in small Spanish wineries and their evolution with age and size; Ciencia e Técnica Vitivinicola, Vol. 35, No. 2, pp. 107-119.
Authors: Silvia Abella Garcés
(The opinions expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author)
