Strategy and Human Resource Management - Essay Example

by the U.K’s larges retailer, Marks and Spencer, with an analysis of factors impacting these approaches and the way this organisation benefited from them. Through this illustration, various HRM practices such as best-practice and best-fit models, and management models such as high-commitment, high-involvement and high-performance work management models along with resource-based model have been comprehensively analyzed. According to Jackson and Schuler (1999; p.4), Human Resource Management (HRM) is a broad spectrum of organisational elements such as ‘specific human resource practices including recruitment, selection, and appraisals; formal human resource policies meant to control and/or promote development of specific practices in order to drive the desired organisational culture; and, overarching human resource philosophies, which specify the values that attracts, develops, motivates, and retains employees who ensure the effective functioning and survival of the organisation and its members.

’ These three components of HRM are in turn impacted by internal contextual factors such as structure, size, organisational life cycle stage, and business strategy; and external factors such as legal, social, and political environments, unionization, labour market conditions, industry characteristics and national cultures (Jackson & Schuler, 1999). Strategic HRM refers to the integrative framework of HRM with strategy, encompassing several aspects of the organisation’s external and internal environments at national and international levels including multiple stakeholder perspectives.

In addition, it demonstrates a myriad of outcomes associated with strategic HRM reflecting the purposes of various stakeholders. Hendry and Pettigrew (1986) explain that this strategic integration of HRM with strategy is accomplished through use of planning; use of rational approach to the design and management of personnel systems based on an employment policy and manpower strategy