The four faces of HR: analyzing the performance of Human Resource management in Brazilian companies

This paper aims to analyze Brazilian companies' Human Resource Management [HRM] performance. We used the Four Faces of the HRM model developed by Tanure, Evans and Pucik (2007) as a framework. The four faces are: executor, constructor, change partner and navigator. To achieve our goal, we discussed the result of a survey with 172 presidents of the 500 biggest companies in Brazil. We also analyzed a case study of a finance company - Brasilprev. The data was collected during 14 interviews, from three focal groups with 15 collaborators from all the hierarchical levels and 68 questionnaires. The results of the presidents' survey showed that the HRM is mainly considered as an executor in Brazilian capital companies. The constructor and the change partner faces prevail in multinational capital companies. According to the case study results, the HRM of Brasilprev is moving to the change partner face. Nevertheless, even if a company's HR practices are modern and sophisticated, they do not present internal or external consistency. Therefore, we can conclude that the executor face still prevails in Brazilian companies, although modern HRM practices are utilized.