What is strategic human resource management? Critical evaluation of the concept in terms of theory and practice

Résumé du document

In the 1980's, a new concept called ‘Human Resource Management' was born. This trend comes after an intense period of Taylorisation, Fordism and now, McDonaldisation. HRM came to counter balance these trends and consider the concept of Man as a man and not as a machine. For the last several decades, the interests of companies in “strategic management” have increased in a noteworthy way. This interest in strategic management has resulted in various organizational functions becoming more concerned with their role in the strategic management process. The Human Resource Management (HRM) field has sought to become integrated into the strategic management process through the development of a new discipline referred to as Strategic Human Resource Management (SHRM). In current literature, the difference between SHRM and HRM is often unclear because of the interconnections linking SHRM to HRM. However, the concepts are slightly different.

Extraits

[...] What is Strategic Human Resource Management? Critically evaluate the concept in terms of theory and practice Introduction In the 1980's, the birth of a new concept called ‘Human Resource Management' was born. This trend comes after an intense period of Taylorisation, Fordism and now, McDonaldisation. HRM came to counter balance these trends and to consider the concept of the Man as a Man and not as a machine. For the last several decades, the interests of companies in “strategic management” have increased in a noteworthy way. [...]

[...] Human resource management understands that human capital can be considered the main source of competitive advantage. By considering a human as a human, giving him satisfaction, education, motivation, training and reward, human resource strategies intend to optimize human capital and take care of the relationship between the management of the firm and this type of capital, as this relationship can be ambiguous. To add further on this ambiguous relationship, we can emphasize that the organizational strategies are implemented by human capital in a big way, creating a powerful role in the implementation process of management strategies. [...]

[...] key element of best-practice is horizontal integration and congruence between policies”. This concept of a ‘universal best practices set' is disputable as it is a non-specific and non-accurate definition of HR policies that have to be applied. Indeed, the best practice models are constituted by different policies that vary significantly from one model to another. Performances of this approach in organizations are, because of the difficulty of generalization and conceptualization, very hard to measure as they are determined by several different factors. [...]

[...] Another limit of the best-fit approach is the trend of over simplification of the organizational reality; in effect, the best-fit models try to simplify the factors that influence business strategy and business goals. The greatest limit of this approach originates from the very beginning, with the hypothesis. Organizations are influenced by internal and external complex factors which can cause the frequent changing of environmental and implementation issues. II.b) An evolution of ‘tight' fit models introducing flexibility: configurational approach In response to this limit, amongst others, Delery and Doty (1996:808) propose the ‘configurational model' where horizontal integration (the internal development of HR strategy) is introduced for aiming toward better implementation of vertical integration. [...]

[...] It is agreed that human resources do the implementation of organizational strategy, but it can only be properly done if the external environment allows the human resources and the organization to do so (Miller and Shamsie, 1996; Porter, 1991). The resource-based view tends to ignore the baseline of specific industries as it takes into account the differences of firms in the same sector as a competitive advantage. However, competitive advantages are gained by the ‘rightsizing' process (Hamel and Prahalad, 1993) which implies that an organization obtains more output from its existing resources and optimizes the way in which they are used. [...]