Riccardo Peccei (1945, Totino, Italy, D.Phil Sociology, Oxford University 1984) is Reader in Organisational Behaviour (OB) and Human Resource Management (HRM) in the Department of Management at King’s College London. His research interests include the study of the impact of HRM on organisational performance and employee well-being, the transformation of work and employment relations in the service sector, and the nature and consequences of employee empowerment, partnership and participation in contemporary organisations. He is particularly interested in multilevel analysis and in the study of macro-micro-macro relationships in OB and HRM. Within this perspective, together with colleagues from King’s, Birkbeck College and the London School of Economics he has recently completed a series of studies on the impact of gender similarity/diversity on employee satisfaction and commitment at work, on the antecedents and consequences of information disclosure in Britain, and on the evaluation of the impact of the role of nurse consultants in the UK National Health Service. He publishes widely in internationally oriented journals such as the Journal of Management Studies, the British Journal of Industrial Relations, Work, Employment and Society, and The International Journal of Human Resource Management.The analysis of the impact of human resource (HR) practices on employee well-being at work is an important yet relatively neglected area of inquiry within the field of human resource management (HRM). In this inaugural address, the main findings from ongoing research based on data from the 1998 British Workplace Employee Relations Survey (WERS98) are presented. These suggest that the HR practices that are adopted by organisations have a significant impact on the well-being of their workforces and that this impact tends, on the whole, to be more positive than negative. The effects, however, are more complex than is normally assumed in the literature. In particular, preliminary results indicate that the constellation of HR practices that help to maximise employee well-being (i.e. that make for happy workplaces), are not necessarily the same as those that make up the type of ‘High Performance Work Systems’ commonly identified in the literature. This has important theoretical, policy and ethical implications for the field of HRM. These are discussed along with important directions for future research
