Section OneAccording to Lawler, these investments will become
increasingly important due to forecasts of shifts in skill needs
from manual to cerebral.
Contemporary management practices indicate that many
leading companies have recognized the strategic importance of
human resources and have adopted an investment perspective
toward these resources. Further, there is greater awareness of
the costs of treating employees as variable costs, which is
beginning to change views of human resource practices.^5 There
is also a growing recognition of the relationship between
companies’ overall strategies and their human resource
practices. For example, companies pursuing strategies of
innovation have the potential to be severely damaged by
turnover because of reliance on individual expertise and
unrecorded knowledge that has been quickly acquired.
Accordingly, such companies tend to provide greater job
security for some employees.^6 A final reason for beginning this
text with an investment perspective is to reinforce the idea that
for human resource management to play a meaningful role in
the strategic management of organizations, it must be viewed
as contributing to the bottom line. An investment perspective
provides a valuable guide for strategic management.