This study aimed at examining (1) how recent environmeatal changes, such as changes in work values among youths, increases in female and aged workforce, and rapid advancement of technological innovation, impact upon personnel management system, and (2) what measures firms are to take to cope with those changes. It is expected that today's rapid and drastic environment changes impose some modification in personnel practices distinctive to Japanese firms, e. g., lifetime employment, seniority systems, and promotion-from-within practices. Open-ended questionnaire date were obtained from personnel managers of 13 firms in Aichi prefecture to examine this issue.
Results indicated that while personnel managers regarded recent environmental changes as serious challenges to cope with, they were still struggling to find out the directions for changes and to develop new personnel systems adaptive to environment changes. It was also revealed there was (1) a lack of systematization among various personnel practices (e. g., performace evaluation and employee development), and (2) a need to centralize major personnel management functions concerning workers' education and training, to cope with the recent changes. These results suggested that existing personnel management systems were required to shift to include strategic human resource management aspects which were designed to integrate total personnel management systems with a corporate strategy.