Understanding Strategic Human Resource Management: A Playbook for Competitive Advantage

Implementing strategic human resource management (SHRM) practices have the potential to make an organization stay on top and ahead of its competitors by using people as a competitive advantage. When an organization or a company creates values for its customers through its workforce, this ultimately becomes leverage for a competitive advantage against competitors. This can be achieved through gaining excellence and significant shares in the market niche selected. Management of organizations should critically examine and use best human resource management (HRM) practices and best-fit approaches as strategies in HR practices. These strategies' applications ensure a competitive advantage to increase the performance of its workforce, productivity, and profitability. Contingent determination should not limit organizations in adopting HR best practices, but reality should prevail.
The objectives of this book are to critically appraise human resource (HR) philosophy and its application, HR theories, the nature of human resource management (HRM), and the characteristics of HRM. The book also explains hard and soft HRM, the strategies to achieve goals of HRM, the core area of HRM, and how HRM function in a system and its diversity. The book appraises the concept, meaning, and nature of SHRM, HR metrics, competitive advantage, the concept of value chains, distinctive capabilities, and core competencies. The book also examines SHRM and the lessons it draws from strategic management, the elements, aims, and importance of HRM, strategic fit, strategic flexibility, and superior performance of an organization. The book explores human resource (HR) best practices, the best-fit approach, and theoretical models of the best-fit approach and strategic choice using case studies of the most capitalized company in the world to draw key lessons from how they used SHRM for their success.