human resource management

Strategic human resource management: concept and process

The concept of strategic human resource management (strategic HRM) and the processes involved are considered in this chapter under the following headings:

- strategic HRM defined;

- the meaning of strategic HRM;

- the aims of strategic HRM;

-approaches to strategic HRM;

- limitations to the concept of strategic HRM.

STRATEGIC HRM DEFINED

Strategic HRM defines the organization’s intentions and plans on how its business goals should be achieved through people. It is based on three propositions: first, that human capital is a major source of competitive advantage; second, that it is people who implement the strategic plan; and, third, that a systematic approach should be adopted to defining where the organization wants to go and how it should get there.

Strategic HRM is a process that involves the use of overarching approaches to the development of HR strategies, which are integrated vertically with the business strategy and horizontally with one another.

These strategies define intentions and plans related to overall organizational considerations, such as organizational effectiveness, and to more specific aspects of people management, such as resourcing, learning and development, reward and employee relations.

THE MEANING OF STRATEGIC HRM

Strategic HRM focuses on actions that differentiate the firm from its competitors (Purcell, 1999). It is suggested by Hendry and Pettigrew (1986) that it has four meanings:

- the use of planning;

- a coherent approach to the design and management of personnel

- systems based on an employment policy and workforce strategy and

- often underpinned by a ‘philosophy’;

- matching HRM activities and policies to some explicit business strategy;

- seeing the people of the organization as a ‘strategic resource’ for the

- achievement of ‘competitive advantage’.

Strategic HRM addresses broad organizational issues relating to changes in structure and culture, organizational effectiveness and performance, matching resources to future requirements, the development of distinctive capabilities, knowledge management, and the management of change. It is concerned with both human capital requirements and the development of process capabilities, that is, the ability to get things done effectively. Overall, it deals with any major people issues that affect or are affected by the strategic plans of the organization. As Boxall (1996) remarks: ‘The critical concerns of HRM, such as choice of executive leadership and formation of positive patterns of labour relations, are strategic in any firm.’

AIMS OF STRATEGIC HRM

The rationale for strategic HRM is the perceived advantage of having an agreed and understood basis for developing approaches to people management in the longer term. It has been suggested by Lengnick-Hall and Lengnick-Hall (1990) that underlying this rationale in a business is the concept of achieving competitive advantage through HRM.

Strategic HRM supplies a perspective on the way in which critical issues or success factors related to people can be addressed, and strategic decisions are made that have a major and long-term impact on the behaviour and success of the organization. The fundamental aim of strategic HRM is to generate strategic capability by ensuring that the organization has the skilled, committed and well-motivated employees it needs to achieve sustained competitive advantage. Its objective is to provide a sense of direction in an often turbulent environment so that the business needs of the organization, and the individual and collective needs of its employees can be met by the development and implementation of coherent and practical HR policies and programmes. As Dyer and Holder (1988) remark, strategic HRM should provide ‘unifying frameworks which are at once broad, contingency based and integrative’.

When considering the aims of strategic HRM it is necessary to consider how HR strategies will take into account the interests of all the stakeholders in the organization: employees in general as well as owners and management. In Storey’s (1989) terms, ‘soft strategic HRM’ will place greater emphasis on the human relations aspect of people management, stressing continuous development, communication, involvement, security of employment, the quality of working life and work–life balance. Ethical considerations will be important. ‘Hard strategic HRM’ on the other hand will emphasize the yield to be obtained by investing in human resources in the interests of the business.

Strategic HRM should attempt to achieve a proper balance between the hard and soft elements. All organizations exist to achieve a purpose and they must ensure that they have the resources required to do so and that they use them effectively. But they should also take into account the human considerations contained in the concept of soft strategic HRM. In the words of Quinn Mills (1983), they should plan with people in mind, taking into account the needs and aspirations of all the members of the organization. The problem is that hard considerations in many businesses will come first, leaving soft ones some way behind.

APPROACHES TO STRATEGIC HRM

There are five approaches to strategic HRM. These consist of resource-based strategy, achieving strategic fit, high-performance management, high- commitment management and high-involvement management, as described below.

The resource-based approach

A fundamental aim of resource-based HR strategy, as Barney (1991) indicates, is to develop strategic capability – achieving strategic fit between resources and opportunities and obtaining added value from the effective deployment of resources. A resource-based approach will address methods of increasing the firm’s strategic capability by the development of managers and other staff who can think and plan strategically and who understand the key strategic issues.

The resource-based approach is founded on the belief that competitive advantage is obtained if a firm can obtain and develop human resources that enable it to learn faster and apply its learning more effectively than its rivals (Hamel and Prahalad, 1989). Human resources are defined by Barney (1995) as follows: ‘Human resources include all the experience, knowledge, judgement, risk-taking propensity and wisdom of individuals associated with the firm.’ Kamoche (1996) suggests that: ‘In the resource-based view, the firm is seen as a bundle of tangible and intangible resources and capabilities required for product/market competition.’

In line with human capital theory, resource-based theory emphasizes that investment in people adds to their value in the firm. The strategic goal will be to ‘create firms which are more intelligent and flexible than their competitors’ (Boxall, 1996) by hiring and developing more talented staff and by extending their skills base. Resource-based strategy is therefore concerned with the enhancement of the human or intellectual capital of the firm. As Ulrich (1998) comments: ‘Knowledge has become a direct competitive advantage for companies selling ideas and relationships. The challenge to organizations is to ensure that they have the capability to find, assimilate, compensate and retain the talented individuals they need.’ 

Aconvincing rationale for resource-based strategy has been produced by Grant (1991): 

When the external environment is in a state of flux, the firm’s own resources and capabilities may be a much more stable basis on which to define its identity. Hence, a definition of a business in terms of what it is capable of doing may offer a more durable basis for strategy than a definition based upon the needs (eg markets) which the business seeks to satisfy. 

Unique talents among employees, including superior performance, productivity, flexibility, innovation, and the ability to deliver high levels of personal customer service, are ways in which people provide a critical ingredient in developing an organization’s competitive position. People also provide the key to managing the pivotal interdependencies across functional activities and the important external relationships. It can be argued that one of the clear benefits arising from competitive advantage based on the effective management of people is that such an advantage is hard to imitate. An organization’s HR strategies, policies and practices are a unique blend of processes, procedures, personalities, styles, capabilities and organizational culture. One of the keys to competitive advantage is the ability to differentiate what the business supplies to its customers from what is supplied by its competitors. Such differentiation can be achieved by having HR strategies that ensure that the firm has higher-quality people than its competitors, by developing and nurturing the intellectual capital possessed by the business and by functioning as a ‘learning organization’.

Strategic fit

The HR strategy should be aligned to the business strategy (vertical fit). Better still, HR strategy should be an integral part of the business strategy, contributing to the business planning process as it happens. Vertical integration is necessary to provide congruence between business and human resource strategy so that the latter supports the accomplishment of the former and, indeed, helps to define it. Horizontal integration with other aspects of the HR strategy is required so that its different elements fit together. The aim is to achieve a coherent approach to managing people in which the various practices are mutually supportive.

High-performance management

High-performance management (called in the United States highperformance work systems or practices) aims to make an impact on the performance of the firm through its people in such areas as productivity, quality, levels of customer service, growth, profits and, ultimately, the delivery of increased shareholder value. High-performance management practices include rigorous recruitment and selection procedures, extensive and relevant training and management development activities, incentive pay systems and performance management processes.

A well-known definition of a high-performance work system was produced by the US Department of Labor (1993). The characteristics listed were:

- careful and extensive systems for recruitment, selection and training;

- formal systems for sharing information with the individuals who work in the organization;

- clear job design;

- high-level participation processes;

- monitoring of attitudes;

- performance appraisals;

- properly functioning grievance procedures;

- promotion and compensation schemes that provide for the recognition and financial rewarding of the high-performing members of the workforce.

High-commitment management

One of the defining characteristics of HRM is its emphasis on the importance of enhancing mutual commitment (Walton, 1985). High-commitment management has been described by Wood (1996) as: ‘A form of management which is aimed at eliciting a commitment so that behaviour is primarily self-regulated rather than controlled by sanctions and pressures external to the individual, and relations within the organization are based on high levels of trust.’

The approaches to achieving high commitment as described by Beer et al (1984) and Walton (1985) are:

- the development of career ladders and emphasis on trainability and commitment as highly valued characteristics of employees at all levels in the organization;

- a high level of functional flexibility with the abandonment of potentially rigid job descriptions;

- the reduction of hierarchies and the ending of status differentials;

- a heavy reliance on team structure for disseminating information (team briefing), structuring work (team working) and problem solving (improvement groups or quality circles).

Wood and Albanese (1995) added to this list:

- job design as something management consciously does in order to provide jobs that have a considerable level of intrinsic satisfaction;

- a policy of no compulsory lay-offs or redundancies and permanent employment guarantees with the possible use of temporary workers to cushion fluctuations in the demand for labour;

- new forms of assessment and payment systems and, more specifically, merit pay and profit sharing;

- a high involvement of employees in the management of quality.

High-involvement management

This approach involves treating employees as partners in the enterprise whose interests are respected and who have a voice on matters that concern them. It is concerned with communication and involvement. The aim is to create a climate in which a continuing dialogue between managers and the members of their teams takes place in order to define expectations and share information on the organization’s mission, values and objectives. This establishes mutual understanding of what is to be achieved and a framework for managing and developing people to ensure that it will be achieved.

LIMITATIONS TO THE CONCEPT OF STRATEGIC HRM

The concept of strategic HRM appears to be based on the belief that the formulation of strategy is a rational and linear process, as modelled in Figure 3.1. This indicates that the overall HR strategy flows from the business strategy and generates specific HR strategies in key areas. The process takes place by reference to systematic reviews of the internal and external environment of the organization, which identify the business, organizational and HR issues that need to be dealt with.

But strategic HRM in real life does not usually take the form of a formal, wellarticulated and linear process that flows logically from the business strategy, as Mintzberg (1987) and others have emphasized. The research conducted by Gratton et al (1999) in eight British organizations established that ‘In no case was there a clearly developed and articulated strategy that was translated into a mutually supportive set of human resource initiatives or practices.’ Strategic fit is a good idea but one that is difficult to attain, as is explained in Chapter 5.

CONCLUSION  

Strategic HRM is in some ways an attitude of mind that expresses a way of doing things. It is realized in the form of HR strategies, as described in the next chapter.