People Strategies

Chapter 11 of Human Resource Management in a Business Context (3rd Edition) by Alan Price - published by Cengage Learning

Contents

Objectives

The purpose of this chapter is to:

• Determine the nature and prevalence of strategic HRM.
• Evaluate the influence and involvement of people managers in high-level decision-making?
• Identify different approaches to strategic HRM, and outline their strengths and weaknesses.
• Consider how people strategies and practices can be adapted to meet perceived threats and opportunities in a changing business environment.

Topics

Strategy and HRM

Strategic management

Strategic HRM: theory and practice

Forming HR strategies

Business goals

Strategy formation

Strategy, thinking and decision-making

Translating strategy into action

The reality of HR strategy

HR strategy in the real world

Summary

Strategic thinking has its basis in rational thinking. In practice, strategists have accepted that there must be a place for the unexpected. Strategy and planning provide a framework for human resource requirements over a defined period but traditional personnel managers have experienced difficulty in understanding and implementing strategy. Human resource strategies tend to focus on numbers and also attitudes, behaviour and commitment in line with harder 'matching' models of HRM but their implementation is problematic. Recent thinking has accommodated the notion that HR strategy is not as simple as some rationalist accounts imply and that strategy itself has the same emotional, irrational and intuitive components as any other form of thinking or decision-making.

Organizational competences are the sum product of the competences of the workforce. This suggests that people management should drive rather than follow business strategy, by building employee competences through selection, assessment, reward and development. In the next chapter, we elaborate further on the building of organizational competence with an examination of a fundamental aspect of people management: resourcing.

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