The effect of grain refinement on the plastic deformation behaviour of nanocrystalline metallic materials is investigated. A phase mixture model in which a single phase material is considered as an effectively two-phase one is discussed. A distinctive feature of the model is that grain boundaries are treated as a separate phase deforming by a diffusion mechanism. For the grain interior phase two concurrent mechanisms are considered: dislocation glide and mass transfer by diffusion. The proposed constitutive model was implemented into a finite element code (DEFORM) using a semicoupled approach. The finite element method was applied to simulating room temperature tensile deformation of Cu down to the nanoscale grain size in order to investigate the pre- and post-necking behaviour.