The HR Functions - Assignment Example

Becker, Huselid, and Ulrich (2001) argued that even though HR functions are very important for the growth of the organization, these roles must always be appreciated as being a subset of the larger organizational goal. Based on this understanding, it can be said that the benefit of assessing how well the HR goals align with the organization’s strategy is to ensure that the HR function does not yield outcomes that are outside the scope of the actual organizational goals. Again, such alignment will ensure that the HR goals are those that the organizational strategy can best help in achieving. That is, the strategy must not be seen as being either over or below the achievability of the goals (Handler & Jasinski, 2010).

To understand the role that HR has as a partner and driver of change in meeting the organization’s strategy, it is important to ask the probing question of how the organizational strategy can be run without the employee base of the organization. With this question in mind, it will be appreciated that the role of HR helps in setting an organizational strategy that rightly meets the competencies of the human resource base of the organization. Whiles setting organizational strategies to meet employee competencies, Becker, Huselid, and Ulrich (2001) also recommend the need to ensure that the strategies can be tightened to make employees challenged to build their competencies.

Even though it is generally accepted that aligning HR goals with the organization’s strategy is an important thing to do, the approach to doing this has often been challenging for most managers. Using systems thinking or systems view helps to make the alignment process very simple. This is because, in its original terms, systems thinking is about understanding how processes influence one another within a whole organization to form a system (Handler & Jasinski, 2010). This means that when the systems view is used, the HR goals will be seen as a unit, as well as the organization’s strategy, the two of which will have a simple modality that integrates them in serving a common purpose.