Strategic Human Resource Management Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 2000 words

Strategic Human Resource Management - Essay Example Strategy has over the time replaced the use of planning to illustrate a well laid down pattern of making decisions and taking actions by the upper management in an organisation towards a specific goal. Therefore, SHRM is critical in determining the success of any business entity and in steering the entire material and human resource in the organisation towards the common goal. Strategic management is mainly determined by three factors in an organisation, which are the resources, environment and the management that has to control and allocate resources towards the success of an organisation. An organisation has to operate in an uncertain environment with external factors such as economic and socio-cultural factors affecting decisions and operations in the company. Consequently, strategic management requires that the HR manager defines measures to facilitate organisational performance through strategies address the prevailing socio-cultural and economic forces. Economic and social-cult ural factors have an active role in determining the effectiveness of a human resource strategy in an organisation. For instance, while politicians are responsible for making tax decisions and other decisions that lead to policy formulation in a country, such policies affects economic factors in the business environment. Moreover, exchange rates, income growth, unemployment, industrial classification and customer confidence in an organisation are all factors that are closely rated to political dynamics, which affects economic factors in an organisation (Thompson, 2002). In addition, these factors have an effect on social aspects, while social factors do impact on them as well. Social factors are responsible for determining the dynamics in a society and include demographics and the overall population dynamics, which comprise of factors such as education level, income distribution, age distribution, mobility, customer behavior and entrepreneurial dynamics (Thompson, 2002). Pollution, g ender roles, fashion, harmful factors, lifestyle, among others are examples of socio-cultural factors that affect operations in an organisation (Pearce & Robinson, 2005). Moreover, the human resource manager has to put in place strategies to address the health services of the workers their social security in pensions, and has to consider work force mobility and work culture dynamics. These social-cultural factors translate to increased costs to the organisation, and the HR has to come up with strategies to ensure perform while at the same time cutting down costs. There are varying changes in the business operating environment that are caused by increasing forces of globalization, changes in demographics of the company’s workforce, intellectual capital and other changes that force an organisation to have a different approach in mangling human resources(Wright, 1998). A highly performing human resource approach that fails in establishing strategic integration lacks the competit ive advantage for survival, and would gradually lose its ground in the current market (Kazmi & Ahmed, 2001). In order to have operational excellence, research has shown that human resource managers have to align with the business strategic goals. Considering that a business is affected by external environmental factors such as economic and social-cultural factors, an effective HR manager has to pu