HRMG 4201 Week 1 Strategic HR Discussion Post Example

Week 1 Discussion: What Makes HR Strategic

What Did "Aligned" Ever Mean? Testing a Sentence I Wrote About Training and Strategy at an Auto Repair Chain and Rebuilding It as Three Links Someone Could Check

In a course two years ago, writing about my job at the service counter of Three Rivers Auto Care, a composite chain of 22 repair shops in western Pennsylvania, I wrote: "The company's technician training program is aligned with its strategy of quality service." Nobody questioned it, including me. It sounded like the kind of sentence a strategic HR paper is supposed to contain. Looking back, I think it was accepted because it sounded right, not because anyone could see what it meant in the shops.

This week's reading made me test it. If I replace "aligned with" with "coexists with," the sentence says almost the same thing to a reader, and nothing in it could be checked either way. That is the problem. The sentence claims a relationship between training and strategy without describing one. Wright and McMahan (1992) treat strategic HRM as the planned set of HR activities meant to help a firm reach what it is aiming for, which means the claim has to name a pathway: which activity, producing which behavior, leading to which result.

Here is the rebuilt version, in three links. First, electrical-fault training lets technicians find the real cause of a warning light on the first inspection, rather than replacing parts until the light goes off. Second, finding the cause the first time means fewer vehicles come back within a month with the same complaint. Third, fewer repeat visits keep customers, because a driver who has to return for the same problem is the customer most likely to go elsewhere next time. Each link can be measured: training completions, first-visit diagnosis rates and repeat-visit rates by shop. If any link fails, the training may still be worthwhile, but the claim that it serves the strategy would be false. Boxall and Purcell (2016) argue that this kind of chain, from practice to employee behavior to business outcome, is what separates strategic claims from slogans.

What sentence have you written, at work or in a course, that used "aligned" or "strategic" without saying how the link actually works?

Reply to Dominic

Dominic, your hospital example, that the hiring of bilingual nurses supports the strategy of serving the community, is closer to a pathway than my original sentence was. I would push one link further: what do bilingual nurses do differently that changes a patient outcome the hospital tracks? If it is fewer missed medication instructions, that is a measurable link worth naming.

Reply to Marisol

Marisol, you cited Huselid (1995) for the claim that high-performance HR practices raise productivity, and that is a fair reading of his study of nearly a thousand firms. But his finding was about systems of practices across many companies, not about any single practice at one company. When you say your call center's new coaching program will raise productivity, which link in your own chain would you measure first to know whether it is working there?

References

Boxall, P., & Purcell, J. (2016). Strategy and human resource management (4th ed.). Palgrave Macmillan.

Huselid, M. A. (1995). The impact of human resource management practices on turnover, productivity, and corporate financial performance. Academy of Management Journal, 38(3), 635-672. https://doi.org/10.5465/256741

Wright, P. M., & McMahan, G. C. (1992). Theoretical perspectives for strategic human resource management. Journal of Management, 18(2), 295-320. https://doi.org/10.1177/014920639201800205