Davidson (cited in Stone 2011, p.36) argues that Strategic Human Resource Management (SHRM) demands HR professionals who are willing to accept responsibility for organisational performance outside HRM should ‘. . .bring their specialist HR functions more closely into alignment with corporate objectives and strategies’. Discuss.
Strategic Human Resource Management
Introduction
Strategic Human Resource Management is a way to synchronize human resource functions with the corporate objectives and strategies of the organization. For an organization to achieve success, different functions need to align their strategies with the common corporate objective of the company. An organization’s HR functions, policies etc. must be in accordance with the company’s strategy to deal with the business competition.
If we try to understand strategic management, it is essentially an adjustment between three poles in context of an organization, which are the senior management, human resources and environment (Bratton, 2005, p.37). Strategy is nothing but actions and plans decided by the company to attain top notch performance. He also defines a hierarchy of strategic decision making corporate level, business level and function level. Corporate level strategy relates to the business the organization is in, and plans revolving around the same. Here, the strategy would deal with investment planning, which business units to invest in etc. Business level strategy is for each type of business the organization is in, and various ways to tackle the competition. Functional level strategy is the backbone in strategy making since this is going to support the business level and corporate level strategy. In accordance with this, HRM policies need to align with corporate and business strategy (Bratton, 2005, p.37).