Employee relationship management — Realizing competitive advantage through information technology?

Employee relationship management (ERM) constitutes an emerging trend of managing human resources by building and maintaining individualized and mutually valuable relationships with employees based on information technology. However, given the early and still emerging state, there is little knowledge and agreement regarding ERM. Hence, the current paper attempts to clarify the concept and derive research implications. The formation and the strategic, processual and technological components of ERM are derived and discussed based on the Customer Relationship Management (CRM) concept that preceded it. As a result, a first general outline of an interesting and ambitious concept is presented. Based on the outline, major implications for further conceptual elaboration, theoretical foundation and empirical evaluation of ERM are derived to propose directions for future research.