A New Perspective on Employee Benefits: Using Benefits Strategically to Create a Sustainable Competitive Advantage

Although Strategic Human Resource Management (SHRM) has advanced considerably since the late 1980s, scholarly focus has tended to cluster around talent management, performance, and compensation. Yet employee benefits―despite accounting for nearly a third of total labor costs―have remained surprisingly peripheral in strategic conversations.

A New Perspective on Employee Benefits addresses this long standing gap. Drawing on foundational SHRM and compensation strategy research, this book brings together emerging scholarship that reframes employee benefits as a powerful, underutilized driver of organizational effectiveness. Across its chapters, contributors explore new theoretical perspectives, present empirical insights, and examine practical implications that position benefits as a central component of strategic HR decision making.

This collection offers essential reading for scholars, doctoral students, and HR practitioners seeking to deepen their understanding of how benefits can be leveraged to create sustainable competitive advantage. Rather than viewing benefits as static or purely administrative costs, the book invites readers to reconsider their strategic potential within the broader HRM landscape.

Steve Werner is the JPMorgan Professor of International Business at the C. T. Bauer College of Business, University of Houston.