HUMAN RESOURCE MANAGEMENT PRACTICE - Fichier PDF

140 ❚ HRM processesmutually reinforcing set of HR policies and practices have been developed thatjointly contribute to the attainment of the organization’s strategies for matching resourcesto organizational needs, improving performance and quality and, in commercialenterprises, achieving competitive advantage.The process of bundling HR strategies (horizontal integration or fit) is an importantaspect of the concept of strategic HRM. In a sense, strategic HRM is holistic; it isconcerned with the organization as a total entity and addresses what needs to bedone across the organization as a whole in order to enable it to achieve its corporatestrategic objectives. It is not interested in isolated programmes and techniques, or inthe ad hoc development of HR practices.In their discussion of the four policy areas of HRM (employee influence, humanresource management flow, reward systems and work systems) Beer et al (1984)suggested that this framework can stimulate managers to plan how to accomplish themajor HRM tasks ‘in a unified, coherent manner rather than in a disjointed approachbased on some combination of past practice, accident and ad hoc response to outsidepressures’.The problem with the bundling approach is that of deciding which is the bestway to relate different practices together. There is no evidence that one bundleis generally better than another, although the use of performance managementpractices and competence frameworks are two ways that are typically adopted toprovide for coherence across a range of HR activities. Pace the findings of MacDuffie,there is no conclusive proof that in the UK bundling has actually improvedperformance.METHODOLOGY FOR STRATEGY DEVELOPMENTAmethodology for formulating HR strategies was developed by Dyer and Holder(1998) as follows:1. Assess feasibility – from an HR point of view, feasibility depends on whether thenumbers and types of key people required to make the proposal succeed can beobtained on a timely basis and at a reasonable cost, and whether the behaviouralexpectations assumed by the strategy are realistic (eg retention rates and productivitylevels).2. Determine desirability – examine the implications of strategy in terms of sacrosanctHR policies (eg, a strategy of rapid retrenchment would have to be called intoquestion by a company with a full employment policy).