Question: In what ways should HRM strategy and/or practices respond to specific and relevant aspects of any employers’ context[s]?

Expert answer

Human resource management (HRM) operates within organizational contexts that affect the decisions and implementation of strategies. Accordingly, responding to the contexts is a critical action that HRM must tactically and intentionally approach with care. The employer, or organizational contexts, including the organizational structure, organizational culture, size, economic environment, political and legal influences, and labor, affect the types of strategies that the HRM personnel adopt (Urbancová and Depoo, 2021). Therefore, there is a need for the HRM to find a neutral and effective approach to the various contexts to ensure that the organizations and employees benefit from the employment relationship and minimize the negative effects that can arise on the employees. The best approach to HRM strategies and practices that respond to specific and relevant aspects of any employer's contexts is to examine the contexts independently of each other. Examining the organizational structure, culture, size, and external environment and creating an organization-wide effective communication system are some of the best ways for HRM strategies and practices to respond to specific and relevant aspects of internal and external organizational contexts that affect employees.

Understanding HRM is key in examining the HRM strategies and practices that respond to concerns arising from organizations and beyond. HRM refers to the activities, choices, decisions, and relationships that affect the human aspect as a resource of the organization (Etukudo, 2019). The definition of HRM is thus the practice of attracting, recruiting, hiring, training, managing, developing, supervising, and dealing with arising from employees. The employee's welfare as individuals and as a resource that organizations have are concerns that the HRM departments deal with (de Azevedo, Schlosser, and McPhee, 2020). Accordingly, issues affecting employees, such as interpersonal conflicts, pay, communication of their activities or concerns, harassment, motivation, performance, legal concerns, or discrimination, are within the docket of the HRM, whose role is to respond to them and prevent their effects on the organizational image, profit-making, and existence. Therefore, the strategies and practices that an HRM department chooses must be suitable for each case.

According to Lopez-Cabrales and Valle-Cabrera (2020), the organizational environment, which includes organizational structure, organizational culture, size, and external environment, are key areas of HRM activities that must have the right kind of attention through examination to find the best methods of responding to the issues they present. Examining the internal and external organizational environment is key because the processes expose the HRM personnel to the actual nature of the contexts and their influence on employees. For example, HRM strategies and practices can analyze the size of the organization and its resources before embarking on creating demands for resources. A small organization could have limited resources, affecting the costs of retaining employees or recruiting others (Azizi et al., 2021). In such cases, the HRM strategies must accept and accommodate the organization's limited resources and make plans and implementation processes that align with the available resources. The HRM's response toward the limited resource must be considerate of the organization's abilities because if the HRM places a higher demand on the resources, the HRM functions may fail. For instance, the organization cannot support the strategy if the organization has a budget of $100 for training and the HRM strategy demands a budget of $150. Accordingly, the right response is to assess the organization’s capabilities to finance the strategies before deciding on the budget.

On the other hand, organizations with more resources support HRM strategies and practices that can easily be diversified and accommodate HRM needs. In such cases, the HRM responds to the availability of resources by creating intensive and effective strategies (Darvishmotevali, 2019). For example, the availability of resources, such as funds, can lead to the adoption of communication technologies, employee training, or educational support that build their morale or eliminate the causes and effects of precarious work, such as “financialisation” and price competition to increase employee commitment practices,  support the physical and psychological well-being of workers and decrease social inequalities and welfare states. However, it must be noted that the identification of whether the resources can support the HRM strategies depends on the HRM's ability to assess the organization's resource availability and accessibility for the intended strategies (Stone, Cox, and Gavin, 2020). In addition, the organizational structure, which also affects the resources, must also be in the assessment matrix to develop the right strategies.

The HRM strategies and practices can also respond to the organizational structure by understanding and respecting the authorities and controls over the employees. Andersson, Cäker, Tengblad, and Wickelgren (2019) record that the centralized and decentralized organizational structures have different effects on the HRM strategies on consistency in management and development of employees. The author suggests that HRM strategies must work with the type of organizational control over employees to ensure that the strategies and the management systems are working in harmony for the success of human resources (p. 37). The type of organizational structure is thus a key consideration that determines how the HRM strategies respond to issues. For instance, a centralized organizational structure gives the organization more control and power over the employees. Therefore, the HRM strategies must allow the organization to direct its decisions and practices Abuga and Deya, 2019. A centralized organizational structure refers to an organization whose top management makes decisions affecting the employees and other resources and distributes the decision downward. It gives the employees and other departments minimal or no participation in decision-making (Adobor, 2020). Accordingly, the centralized organizational structure expects almost absolute respect and adherence to the decisions made. Therefore, the HRM departments must consider the demands in creating HRM strategies or practices.

Respecting central control's powers is a key way of avoiding conflicts in resources and practices and allowing the organization to achieve its goals. However, excessive control of employees by organizations can sustain precarious work issues, discrimination, and misuse of human resources (Djurkovic, 2021). Accordingly, while examining the organizational structure to create HRM strategies, there must be an intentional decision to find and prevent loopholes that can lead to employee misuse by the centralized organizational structures. The HRM in decentralized organizations enjoys more freedom in responding to internal organizational issues, such as organizational powers' effects on employee activities, rights, and privileges.

The assessment of decentralized organizational structures for developing HRM strategies needs to focus on the opportunities they have for HRM to create strategies that give solutions to the teams' or departments' needs. The rationale behind the statement here is that decentralized organizational structures allow employees to input their voices into management decisions (Dundon, 2004). Through communication systems or work unions, the employees can create and channel their concerns to the management or collaborate in decision-making to solve the problems that affect their work. Each team or department in an organization needs a specific HRM strategy (Crawshaw, Davis, and Budhwar, 2020). Accordingly, the creation of specific strategies must consider how the organization's structure, especially the freedom of communication and decision-making in decentralized structures, affects the nature, type, needs, and implantation of HRM strategies. The organizational culture also affects the HRM strategies and must be a point of concern in responding to the employers’ contexts.

Organizational cultures affect the HRM strategies and approach the HRM leadership takes because the strategies must consider employees' individual and collective cultures to avoid causing conflicts. Organizational culture refers to the collective values, practices, traditions, and expectations that organizations expressly create or impliedly practice and is known to every stakeholder who must abide by them (Lubis and Hanum, 2020). Organizational cultures conflict with individual cultures, especially where the organizations have employees from different religious, national, cultural, or social backgrounds. Consequently, an HRM strategy that balances individual and organizational cultures can best respond to conflicts arising from disagreements between cultures. Thus, the HRM strategy and practices approach to responding to organizational culture issues includes respecting the individual and organizational cultures. Zanoni and Janssens (2004) advise that the best practice for organizations that emphasize collaboration and teamwork is to be inclusive of every person’s culture (p. 64). It aids in aligning the organizational culture with them.

Apart from the issues of organizational culture, organizational structure, and the sizes that affect resources, external environments, including economic, political, and legal environments that affect human resource management activities, also contextualize the HRM strategies and practices and require HRM responses. For example, where the economy supports low employment rates, the rates and incidences of precarious work can be high (Kalleberg, 2009). Accordingly, the HRM strategies need to find a balance between protecting employees from issues, such as low wages or discrimination targeting vulnerable groups such as women or immigrants. The focus here is understanding the labor market dynamics that can make it hard to protect the employees and their rights. A perfect example of an HRM strategy in such cases is to assess the resources and set aside some portions to reward good performance, recognize employees with improved performance, or train them to acquire more or better skills. Duggan, Sherman, Carbery, and McDonnell (2020) state that the best way to reduce the effects of precarious work issues is to create relations with employees that understand their needs and relate the same with their work demands. The authors are right because the relationship ensures respect for the worker and pay that gives them dignity as humans.

According to the HRM theory, human resource management practices and structures, including HRM policies, strategies, and communication, influence employee behavior that positively or negatively affects their performance and well-being and requires proper communication. The HRM strategies and practices can respond to issues of weak communication of the strategies or communication within the organization by creating an organization-wide effective communication system (Alfes et al., 2019). A communication system refers to sharing information, decisions, and directions. The communication system can combine up-down, horizontal, and down-up systems where the management, employees, and departmental heads have an inclusive system of reaching out to any party with information for actions and prevent discrimination based on identity factors in the diversified workplace. For example, HRM strategies and practices can include implementing surveys to deduce employee opinions and concerns on issues affecting their work (Leidner, Baden, and Ashleigh, 2019). The importance of the surveys is that the employees can make their opinions anonymously, hence stating issues as they are. Besides, focusing on the company culture can make communication easy because the employees know the limits of their thoughts and actions to prevent communication mishaps.

            Communication strategies and practices within the HRM strategies and practices can also encompass the creation of long-term internal communication plans, encouraging employee-management communication, sharing engaging content, and creating an "all-in-one communication system" to ensure that the information from employees to management, and vice versa, are properly geared toward achieving organizational goals and protect human resource interests and goals. The importance of communication in HRM strategies and practices is the inclusivity and motivation it gives employees. Mani and Mishra (2020) examined the role of communication and its impacts on human resources and found that it makes employees feel they are part of the organization. As a result, they work hard and smartly to achieve the set goals in tandem with the organizational goals. Consequently, performance increases. The area of communication context thus has a myriad of approaches. The HRM strategies and practices can respond to communication issues by assessing the type of communication strategy needed while ensuring that the employees' work has the support of information, resources, and channels of reaching out to the management.

Answering the question of how HRM strategy and practices should respond to specific and relevant aspects of employers' contexts requires an assessment of the organizations' environments. Internal and external environments affect human resource activities and are the primary assessment areas to determine how they affect human resource management strategies. Accordingly, understanding the organizational structure and the effects on human resource activities, the organizational size, political issues, legal forces, the organizational culture, and communication strategies form the first steps of responding to the challenges or opportunities they create. 

Reference List

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