Section Two SUMMARY
More organizations are recognizing that their human resources
provide a source of competitive advantage. This recognition,
along with increased environmental uncertainty, greater
pressure to control costs, and increased governmental
regulation, have elevated the strategic role of human resource
management. As a result, there is growing involvement of
human resource management in strategy formulation. Where
human resources are an organization’s source of competitive
advantage, human resource management has a critical role of
providing “up-front” input in the corporate level strategic
planning process. Human resource planning provides another
important linkage with organizational strategy by providing
input on the availability of critical labor and by adding lead time
to deal with shortages and surpluses of employees. Other
strategic inputs of the human resource function include
environmental scanning and competitive intelligence.
At the next level of strategy formulation, human resource
strategies help align personnel practices, policies, and programs
with strategy so that desired employee roles and behaviors will
sup-port different strategies (e.g., innovation, quality
enhancement, cost reduction). A typology of activities indicates
how human resource activities vary in their contributions to