In today's intensely competitive and global marketplace, maintaining a competitive advantage by becoming a low cost leader or a differentiator puts a heavy premium on having a highly committed or competitive advantage lies not just in differentiating a product or service or in becoming the low cost leader but in also being able to tap the company's special skills or core competencies and rapidly respond to customer's needs and competitor's moves. In other phrases, competitive benefit lies in management's ability to consolidate corporate-wide technologies and output abilities into competencies that empower one-by-one enterprises to acclimatize rapidly to altering opportunities.
In a growing number of associations human resources are now viewed as a source of competitive advantage. There is greater recognition that distinctive competencies anre obtained through highly developed employee skills, distinctive organization cultures, management processes and systems. This is in compare to the traditional focus on transferable assets such as equipment. Increasingly it is being recognized that competitive advantage can be obtained with a high quality workforce that enables organizations to complete on the basis of market responsiveness, product and service quality, differentiated products and technological innovation.
Strategic human resource management has been defined as “the pattern of planned human resource deployments and activities intended to enable an organization to achieve its goals” (Wright & McMahan, 1992). Strategic Human Resources means accepting the HR function as a strategic partner in the formulation of the company's strategies as well as in the implementation of those strategies through HR activities such as recruiting, selecting, training and rewarding personnel. Whereas strategic HR recognizes HR's partnership role in the strategizing process, the term HR Strategies refers to specific HR courses of action the company plans to pursuer to achieve its aims. HR administration can play a function in environmental scanning i.e. identifying and investigating external opportunities and risks that may be vital to the company's success. Similarly HR management is in a HR management is in a unique position to supply competitive intelligence that may be useful in the strategic planning process. HR furthermore takes part in the scheme formulation process by supplying data considering the company's internal power and weaknesses. The power and flaws of a company's human resources can have a working out effect on the viability of the firm's strategic options
By design, the perspective demands that HR managers become strategic partners in business operations playing prospective roles rather that being passive administrators reacting to the requirements of other business functions. Strategic HR managers need a change in their mindset from glimpsing themselves as connection managers to asset managers knowing how to utilize the full potential of their human resources. The new type of HR managers desires to understand and know how to assess the monetary influence of their actions, so as to be adept to demonstrate the value added assistance of their functions. HR professionals become strategic partners when they take part in the method of defining enterprise strategy when they inquire questions that ...