Study on HRM Practices in Indian Apparel Industry and the Factors Impacting the Performance of Apparel Enterprises

Abstract

Indian apparel industry employs the highest number of people after agriculture and contributes nearly 4% to GDP. With economy open and increasing globalization, there is intense competition in textile market. With unilateral tariff preference scheme for developing countries, Indian textile players are slowly losing to competitive prices by neighbouring countries especially Bangladesh. This has created a pressure for Indian textile players to improve their productivity and better equip its workforce to address the increasing competition. In this background, the studies on existing human resource management (HRM) practices and the gaps in creating a high performance work system (HWPS) has gained importance. This work studies the existing HRM practices prevailing across apparel manufacturing companies across Bengaluru city of Karnataka. A descriptive and exploratory analysis is presented on the various factors of HRM practices and its impact on HPWS characteristics. Various factors are identified for three different categories of large, medium and small scale apparel manufacturers which have higher correlation to HPWS.