Origins and Interpretations

Origins

Sparrow and Hiltrop (1994) picked out four main approaches from this period:

The Michigan and New York Schools: strategic matching theories
The Harvard school: a multiple stakeholders theory
The Warwick School: a political and change process theory
The Schuler School: a behavioural transformation theory

  Different interpretations of HRM. - The Harvard interpretation sees employees as resources. However, they are viewed as being fundamentally different from other resources - they cannot be managed in the same way. The stress is on people as human resources.

The Harvard Map or model outlines four HR policy areas:

Human resource flows - recruitment, selection, placement, promotion, appraisal and assessment, promtion, termination, etc.
Reward systems - pay systems, motivation, etc.
Employee influence - delegated levels of authority, responsibility, power
Work systems - definition/design of work and alignment of people.

Which in turn lead to the 'four C's' or HR policies that have to be achieved:
Commitment
Congruence
Competence
Cost effectiveness

 A harder approach - people as human resources

Sparrow and Hiltrop (1994), pointing out that this is a 'matching' model of strategic HRM originally outlined by Tichy, Fombrun and Devanna (1982), state that:

"The philosophy does not limit itself to direct employees of an organization. Therefore humans or people - as opposed to just employees - need to be managed in a way that is consistent with broad organizational requirements such as quality or efficiency. Personnel policies and organization structures have to be managed in a way that is congruent with organizational strategy and organizational effectiveness depends on there being a tight 'fit' between human resource and business strategies. HRM strategies are all about making business strategies work and so emphasis is placed on how to best match and develop 'appropriate' HRM systems."

 The Michigan theorists highlighted the following as being the most important HR issues to achieve such a match:
Selection of the most suitable people to meet business needs
Performance in the pursuit of business objectives
Appraisal, monitoring performance and providing feedback to the organization and its employees
Rewards for appropriate performance
Development of the skills and knowledge required to meet business objectives

The New York variation on the matching model, outlined by Schuler and Jackson (1987), looked at Michael Porter's generic competitive strategies (quality enhancement, innovation and cost leadership or reduction) and developed a set of 'needed role behaviours' for each strategy which, according to Sparrow and Hiltrop (1994):

"varied across a number of dimensions and then (they) stipulated a set of hypotheses about the personnel and industrial relations practices that were needed. They identified the most important HRM practices about which strategic decisions had to be made and for each practice noted the dichotomous but logical alternatives that could be applied. HRM could be seen as a menu of strategic choices to be made by HR executives intended to promote the most effective role behaviours that are consistent with the organization strategy and are aligned with each other."

Schuler and Jackson (1987) listed these choices under a number of categories, e.g.

Planning choices: Informal ... Formal; Short-term ... Long-term; Explicit ... Implicit job analysis; Job simplification ... Job enrichment; Low employee involvement ... High employee involvement

Other choices were given for staffing, appraising, compensating, and training/development.

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