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Notes The notion of best practice—sometimes called ‘high commitment’ HRM—proposes that the
adoption of certain best practices in HRM will result in better organizational performance.
Perhaps the most popular work in this area is that of Pfeiffer who argued that there were
seven best practices for achieving competitive advantage through people and ‘building profits
by putting people first’. These practices included: providing employment security, selective
hiring, extensive training, sharing information, self-managed teams, and high pay based on
company performance and the reduction of status differentials. However, there is a huge
number of studies which provide evidence of best practices, usually implemented in coherent
bundles, and therefore it is difficult to draw generalized conclusions about which is the ‘best’
way (For a comparison of different sets of best practices see Becker and Gerhart, 1996).
Best fit, or the contingency approach to HRM, argues that HRM improves performance where
there is a close vertical fit between the HRM practices and the company’s strategy. This link
ensures close coherence between the HR people processes and policies and the external market
or business strategy. There are a range of theories about the nature of this vertical integration.
For example, a set of ‘life cycle’ models argue that HR policies and practices can be mapped
onto the stage of an organization’s development or life cycle. Competitive advantage models
take Porter’s (1985) ideas about strategic choice and map a range of HR practices onto the
organization’s choice of competitive strategy. Finally ‘configuration models’ provide a more
sophisticated approach which advocates a close examination of the organisation’s strategy in
order to determine the appropriate HR policies and practices. However, this approach assumes
that the strategy of the organisation can be identified - many organisations exist in a state of
flux and development.

The Resource Based View (RBV), argued by some to be at the foundation of modern HRM,
focuses on the internal resources of the organisation and how they contribute to competitive
advantage. The uniqueness of these resources is preferred to homogeneity and HRM has a
central role in developing human resources that are valuable, rare, and difficult to copy or
substitute and that are effectively organized. Overall, the theory of HRM argues that the goal
of human resource management is to help an organization to meet strategic goals by attracting,
and maintaining employees and also to manage them effectively. The key word here perhaps
is “fit”, i.e., a HRM approach seeks to ensure a fit between the management of an organization’s
employees, and the overall strategic direction of the company (Miller, 1989).
The basic premise of the academic theory of HRM is that humans are not machines; therefore
we need to have an interdisciplinary examination of people in the workplace. Fields such as
psychology, industrial relations, industrial engineering, sociology, economics, and critical theories:
postmodernism, post-structuralism play a major role.

Did u know? Many colleges and universities offer bachelor and master degrees in Human
Resources Management or in Human Resources and Industrial Relations.

One widely used scheme to describe the role of HRM, developed by Dave Ulrich, defines
4 fields for the HRM function:
• Strategic business partner

• Change agent
• Employee champion
• Administration expert.

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