Organisational Behaviour

Organisational Behaviour

The precision, with which people are managed, developed, motivated and involved truly impacts business performance maybe even more that competitive strategy, quality, research and development. The assignment makes a sincere effort on attempting to analyze the link between the two and present evidence to support the for and the against of this proposal. It is imperative for an understanding of people management as a source of competitive advantage for which one must realize employees as resources that cannot be duplicated, imitated with procurements or alternates that makes them unique. The study has recognized the limited available research employed in demonstrating the causal links between people management and organization performance. There is a lack of comparable analysis to the elements of management activity and the gauging of the contribution it makes to organization performance.

The world's leading organizations are today focused on the success of their people. Change is the only constant in the business arena and is one of the most important reasons to drive fundamental transformation in organizations. Globalization and hyper-competition is having a deep impact on the ability of organizations achieve and sustain long term objectives. Most competitive edges last for shorter periods of time as technology develops and more companies get faster at responding to change. Duplicating products, services or processes are commonalities. What then makes some businesses more successful than others?

There are many factors but the primary factor is the ability of some companies to acquire and use resources more effectively than their competitors, resulting in a competitive advantage. In other words the extent to which a company obtains resources that are not imitable or replaceable -- and utilizes those resources to derive their full value -- will result in the company having a competitive advantage. This concept is often referred to as the resource-based view of a company Barney (1991) , and one of the most important resources that any company has in its quest of competitive advantage is its people. Pringle & Kroll provide four attributes for any asset to be a key resource; (MATHIEU ZAJAC 1990)

A) It must be valuable

B) It must be rare

C) Un-substitutable (no alternative providing similar benefits to achieve similar ends)

D) Inimitable (those who do not have the resource cannot procure it)

According to Pringle & Kroll the fourth criterion is considered central to the Resource Based Theory. The fourth criterion also indirectly points to intangibility of the resource one that is also perfectly includable to possessing employees who are a resource that provide competitive advantage. A company that recruits and retains employees with better skills, are self motivated, and are more experienced than what their competitors have will eventually have an advantage over their competitors regardless of the type of business they are operating. (Richard Johnson 200)

For one to consider employees as truly a source of competitive advantage thereby being a single most important contributor to the profits of an organization one must test assumptions that lead to its existence before attempting to reach a verdict on the fact that ...