Strategic Human Resource Management

Section Five

resource management, which maintains that the full benefit of
individual best practices or systems of practices is realized only
when these practices support the firm’s business strategy and
match well with the firm’s organizational context.

„ INDIVIDUAL HIGH-PERFORMANCE

PRACTICES

A number of researchers have identified several high-
performance practices or best practices. One of the most
prominent of these advocates of universal best practices is
Professor Jeffrey Pfeffer of Stanford University. Pfeffer has
addressed these best practices in two book-length treatments:
Competitive Advantage through People and The Human
Equation: Building Profits by Putting People First. The first book
identified 16 best practices while the second combined several
and winnowed the list down to seven. Pfeffer’s research
indicates that these seven management practices are nearly
universal in their ability to enhance firm performance:

1. Employment security.


2. Selective hiring of new personnel.


3. Self-managed teams and decentralization of decision
   making as the basic principles of organizational design.