The scientific debate on questions of personnel management has received new impulse through research dealing with the competence-based theory of the firm. This paper shall show that the distinction between various organisational regimes of personnel management enables far-reaching insights into the organisation of personnel management. We can thereby draw conclusions regarding the development of competencies of the individual participants and the company. An empirical study was undertaken in which around 240 heads of HR departments or those in company management responsible for matters of HR throughout the industrial region of North Rhine-Westphalia were approached. Eighty questionnaires were evaluated: 40 per cent of the companies had 1000 or more employees, 25 per cent had 500 to1000 employees, and 35 per cent had 20 to 500 employees.Company management are increasingly asking the question as to what contribution personnel activities make with respect to value creation in the business. In this context it is of interest whether indications of best practice in personnel management can be gained from firms which are considered particularly innovative. A central question of the empirical study was which tasks HR managers regarded as particularly important in the personnel work of their company. The tasks included personnel advertising, recruitment, planning, selection, deployment, appraisal, remuneration, development and redundancy. Significant results were obtained from the performance of statistical tests such as cluster analysis, ANOVA and chi-square. The answers may be categorised into three organisational regimes - appraisal, planning strategy, and selection - which differ in respect of certain points of emphasis, goals and types of behaviour in interaction with members of the organisation. The first category comprises companies for which personnel work was characterised by the appraisal and development of their staff members (appraisal regime). In the second category were those companies for which the optimum utilisation of their human resources was priority (planning strategy regime); the third consists of companies whose main personnel concern was recruitment of the most ideally suited candidates (selection regime). Companies deploy instruments with varying intentions according to the organisational regime of their personnel work. New instruments are transformed and "absorbed" by the particular organisational regime, so that high-order learning processes, such as double-loop learning, do not occur in the organisation. Surprisingly, companies under the planning strategy regime struggled with excessively high staff numbers and personnel costs, despite this being a target on which they focused their work. The greatest problem facing the companies under the selection regime was the shortage of specialists and executive staff. The companies under the appraisal regime documented a relatively high number of staff away on sick leave.This study clarifies that those responsible for personnel are caught in the organisational regime of their company and run the risk of falling into an evaluation trap. They must therefore take care not to choose goals to legitimise their work which in some way depend upon the company's organisational regime. An alternative would be to accentuate the service character of personnel management and to focus current quality management approaches on external or internal clients. Conclusions or expected outcomes or findingsReferences (including own publications):)