Leersamenvatting: SHRM boek
Laura Veerman
Week 1: H1 and H2: HR foundations
Chapter one: HRM, what and why?
Human resources are the characteristics that are intrinsic to human beings, and which
people can apply. HRM engages the services of talented individuals and help them
use their talents. It is the process through which management builds the workforce and
tries to create human performance that the organization needs. There are, however,
tensions in HRM.
Economic Socio-political
Static Cost-effective labour Social legitimacy
Dynamic Organizational flexibility Managerial power
Human resource advantage
All these dimensions have tensions between them. Cost effective labour is about
staying economically viable. It must be effective, and profitable. The other things in the
economic dimension are organizational flexibility, which is both short-run
responsiveness (labour flexibility) and long-run agility (can you survive in a changing
environment). Lastly, there is a human resource advantage when an organization has
certain talented people or ideas that other organizations do not have and cannot copy.
In the socio-political dimensions, there are also tensions. There is the issue of
social legitimacy, which deals with the regulative, normative and cultural pressures and
requirement of the society the firm operates in. Next there is the issue of managerial
power. Management also has its own goals to maximize managerial power and this
can conflict with worker unions or other goals or regulations. Management should have
enough power, but not too much.
There are some key tensions managers face. First, there is the problem of labour
scarcity. Large organizations can offer more than small organizations, and when there
is a labour shortage, organizations may need to offer employees so much it endangers
their cost effectiveness. The second tensions is employee motivation. The organization
can’t control the employee, so there must be trust. There can be conflicts between
employer and employee interest. The worst forms are strikes or lots of employee
turnover.
Third, there are change tensions in labour management. You want to be flexible,
so have 0-hour contracts, but in times of labour scarcity nobody wants to work at your
place. If you play the long game and build a large and loyal workforce, you may be
unable to handle economic downturns. Fourth, there is tension between management
power and social legitimacy, which plays in on the influence of work unions. Lastly,
there is also complexity and politics in management.
HR strategy is a term describing the critical economic and socio-political choices
management makes. It is segmented at local level, and easy to see at organization
level.
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, Chapter two: Strategy and strategic management
A firm’s strategy is the set of strategic choices that is revealed in its actions, not its
plans. There are four essential elements of a business. This is marketing (product or
services that target a profitable set of customer needs), funding, production (also IT),
and human resource management. These four are interdependent and should be in
sync with each other. This is a constant struggle. If it works, you have competitive
advantage, but most of the time this is temporary.
Strategies of firms are attempts to engage with the strategic problems in their
environment. Some firms have more choice in this than others. This definition is on
business unit level. Phases of industry evolution influence firm strategies. The first
stage, the firm has an innovative product and establishes itself. Next, it matures and
becomes more stable. Here, the tension between stability and flexibility is a thing. This
gives first an establishment crisis (either viable strategy or failure), then maturity (stable
but variations in readiness to change per company), then a renewal crisis
(reconfiguration to cope with the threatening change).
Human cognition influences this with bounded rationality, success traps, and
blaming external instead of internal factors. Politics and the conflict it brings in or with
management is also important, on both personal and department level.
HRM is strategic because of:
- long term view (like HR planning)
- external fit with environment and strategy
- internal fit (of HR practices)
- show a visible worth for organizational outcomes
Strategic Human Performance (HSP) model:
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