People Strategies

Chapter 11 of Human Resource Management in a Business Context (2nd Edition) by Alan Price - published by Thomson 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.

Further reading

Mintzberg, et al (1998), Strategy Safari: A guided tour through the wilds of strategic management, published by The Free Press provides an interesting excursion through the different types or 'schools of strategic management. Good reviews of strategic human resource management are found in the articles by Purcell and by Schuler et al in J. Storey (ed.) Human Resource Management: A Critical Text, 2nd edition, published by Thomson Learning (2001). Rothwell et al. (1998), The Strategic Human Resource Leader: How to Prepare Your Organization for the Six Key Trends Shaping the Future, published by Davies-Black Publications is a practitioner-oriented primer on strategic human resource management.

Review questions

Problem for discussion and analysis - Supreme Sportscars

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