Excerpt from Essay :

Human Resource Management Practice

Certain combinations of human resource management practices lead to superior outcomes for organizations. The HR combination department is at the heart of organizational performance, productivity, turnover, profits, and market value outcomes. Employees are considered a source of non-duplicable and sustainable competitive advantage. By using the combinations in capabilities, resources, relationships and decisions presented by employees, organizations strategically position themselves thus avoiding threats and maximizing opportunities. Organizations and HR combinations managers aim to generate strategic capacity by ensuring that an organization acquires a skilled, committed and motivated workforce. Integration of HR combinations issues, organization performance and HR management systems in organizational strategic processes serve as a solution to business problems. The need to create and manage capabilities and skills and align such capabilities to organizational performance and future needs drives Human Resource Management. As such, the HR department plays a greater role in planning and implementing a coherent approach in designing and managing personnel systems and matching HR activities and policies to the overall business goals.

The HR department is responsible for the proper management of employees in order to ensure business success. Among the HR combinations, related issues, which contribute to business failure, include employee attitudes and perceptions towards tasks, motivation levels, work environment, organizational structures, level of feedback and employee skills and capabilities. The HR department at Many organizations can assist the company achieve its vision by recruiting individuals whose attitudes and values align with the company values. On the same note, the department should implement training initiatives or programs aimed at fostering teamwork and creativity. In order to foster innovation, the department should implement flatter organization structure and create an environment that enhances freethinking and creative solutions towards challenges therefore driving innovations and operational efficiency.

Strategic Human Resource Management results

Employees are considered a source of non-duplicable and sustainable competitive advantage for organizations. Employees directly linked to organizational performance and productivity result in enhanced turnover, profits, and market value outcomes. Organizations and managers aim to generate strategic capacity by ensuring that an organization has skilled, committed and motivated workforce necessary for achieving and sustaining a competitive advantage. Organizations achieve competitive advantage by using capabilities, resources, relationships and decisions that enable the organization to position them strategically by avoiding threats and maximizing on opportunities. Strategic human resource management emphasizes a coherent approach in managing employees in accordance with organizational intentions and future directions.

The main focus is the integration of human resource combinations, organizational performance and HR combinations management systems in organizational strategic processes as solutions to business problems. Strategically managing human resources is driven by the need to create and manage capabilities, skills and creativity and align these capabilities with organizational performance and future needs. The rationale behind this is based on the perceived advantage of developing an agreed and understood basis for developing approaches to managing people in the long-term. Strategic HRM combinations rely heavily on planning, coherent approach in designing and managing personnel systems, matching HR activities and policies on business strategy and view of employees as a strategic resource.

Empirical evidence shows that employee efforts are instrumental in contributing towards organizational performance. Employees, if poorly managed can contribute to organizational failure. Among the human factors that contribute to failure or success of an organization are employee attitude and perceptions towards assigned tasks, work environment, organizational structures, level of feedback, employee motivation levels and the skills and abilities possessed by employees. A study by Harris, MCMahan and Wright (2012), scrutinized the correlation between organizational performance and human capital combinations. Human capital is described as the skills, knowledge and capabilities needed by organizations to successfully accomplish tasks, set goals and objectives. Their employees provide these capabilities to organizations. The study established that human capital positively correlates to organizational performance, implying that employees are resources that should be managed and utilized to benefit organizations.

Employees drive competitive advantage as organizations utilize the various skills, abilities, knowledge, insights, presented by employees to drive innovations, operational efficiency, and competitive edge over competitors. This signifies that employees are a crucial resource and as such, the organization should develop HR management mechanisms to attract, develop, and retain employees. Strategic human resource management assists organizations to develop and synchronize human resource strategies to overall organizational strategies. Under the strategic human...

This therefore calls for human resource combinations that enable employees to achieve their personal and career goals so that they can in turn drive organizational effectiveness and performance.

Theories Underpinning strategic HRM

Strategic HR management draws from four dominant theoretical perspectives, the Universalist perspective, the configuration perspective, contingency perspective and the contextual perspective (Lepak & Shaw, 2008). Under the universal perspective, Delery and Doty (1996) argue that strategic HR practices must be identified and related to organizational performance. The configurational perspective focuses on aligning clustered bundled of HR practices that interact with each other to enhance organizational performance and synergy. The classical contingency theory argues that adopted HR practices depend on both internal and external environmental factors (Marler, 2012). The contextualist perspective incorporates factors in the institutional environment, industrial context and macroeconomic and social factors and how such factors affect human resource management and organizational performance (Martin-Alcazar et al., 2005).

Strategic Human Resource Approaches

Depending on the adopted theoretical framework, organizations adopt different approaches towards strategically managing human resources. The approaches include the high performance approach based on the configurational perspective. The basic assumption under this approach is on synergetic HR practices that result in superior organizational performance. The high involvement approach champion HR practices that encourage employee participation and decision making (Boxall & Macky, 2009). The high commitment approach advocates for HR practices that nurture positive employee attitudes and skills such as training, fair pay, rewards, involvement among others. The best-fit approach is based on the contingency perspective emphasizes need to fit HR strategy and practices with business strategy and environmental demands. Four dimensions of recruitment, selection and placement; HR planning, training and development; performance appraisal and compensation are identified under the approach (Martin-Alcazar et, al., 2005).

The applicability of the different approaches could however be criticized as business and human resource strategies are affected by both internal and external factors and as such there may be no best single way of managing employees. However, the approaches cannot be dismissed as the HR combination practices they advocate for such as fair compensation, proper working environments; training and developing employees have been empirically proved to improve organizational performance. A study by Rack, Elwart, Hertel and Konradt (2011), empirically proved that proper / fair compensation and monetary rewards motivated employees that resulted in improved organizational performance. Another study by Alipour, Salehi and Shahnavaz (2009) positively correlated employee training, productivity and organizational performance. Organizations should therefore invest in people, develop, and maintain the appropriate skills as part of the future organizational strategy.

Effectiveness of High Performance Model

High performance practices enhance the achievement and sustenance of high performance levels by leveraging employees' knowledge and ability to create value. The practices especially have an impact on worker productivity, equipment reliability, quality outcomes and customer service. The practices have proved to provide significant performance differences in auto assembly and parts plants among other industries. High performance work practices foster the development of human capital, generating performance advantages through employee skills development. The practices further foster employee motivation and commitment by creating organizational and labor management climate that supports and prompts employee engagement in problem solving initiatives further facilitating performance enhancement. Through enhancement of training, organizational learning and effective communication systems, high performance practices builds organizational social capital thus facilitating knowledge sharing, work coordination and improved performance (Boxall & Macky, 2009).

High performance further provides benefits to individual employees. Employee involvement in decision-making and encouragement of creativity enables employees to expand their capacity to create results by nurturing new and expansive patterns of thinking and setting free collective aspiration (Alipour et, al., 2009). Employee motivation through effective reward systems informs employees with the organization management seek to create and maintain and behaviors and attitudes required. Employee motivation further creates positive attitudes in employees towards the organization by communicating care for employees thus transforming the "I work for" attitude to "I work with" attitude. The creation of effective promotion and succession plans motivates employees while at the same time providing an organization with future leaders. Proper hiring should complement succession planning and training programs to ensure that promoted individual possess the right skills and attitudes to driving organizational performance. Further communication platforms, grievance procedures, and supportive management create a common platform for employees and leaders to engage in finding solutions to individual and organizational problems, collectively (Racket al, 2011).

Conclusion

Certain combinations of human resource management practices lead to superior outcomes for organizations. Many organizations HRM combinations are one of the leading global car manufacturers and sales company. The HRM combinations enable many organizations to enjoy a global outlook facilitated by its global subsidiaries. The…