Strategic Management of Human Resources

Part A Question a

The modern business environment is characterized by a high level of competitiveness which requires profit-oriented businesses to constantly reengineer their internal operations . The fast-paced nature of the change makes competitive advantages difficult to sustain . Three competitive strategies that the management of an organization has at its disposal are related to differentiation , cost minimization and quick response . However the main weakness in implementing these strategies is that the resulting competitive advantage is not sustainable because competitors can easily copy these strategies and achieve the same competitive advantage

overnight . For this reason , any competitive edges arising from organizational culture are sustainable because building the right organizational culture is a long term process and competitors cannot transfer successful elements of the organizational culture because of possible misalignments . The misalignments occur because each company has its own unique structure of core competencies organized into a particular strategic focus and that structure determines the particular characteristics of the organizational culture . For this reason organizational cultures are not transferable from one company to another and for the same reason , competitive edges arising from cultural dimensions are sustainable . This is illustrated in the approach taken by Jon Sparkes

Sparkes embarked on a project of consolidation as a means of minimizing cost of operations . For example , he closed the shops which were making losses and then he diverted the savings generated from these closings to financing training and development expenses . As mentioned in the case the basic service center approach reduced the cost of managing human resources by 30 and it also improved services . Therefore , essentially Sparkes ' approach was targeted at downsizing the existing scale of operations in to enhance the strategic focus of the company . The effectiveness of this strategy lay in Sparkes ' emphasis on enhancing the efficiency of human resource management . However this strategy created a paradox in the form of eliminating manpower committed to the vision of the organization . This was the critical issue to resolve because commitment to vision was the critical success factor . Eliminating people who were passionate about charity work would not appear to be a performance-enhancing strategy on the surface . However Sparkes ' strategy was to downsize the breadth of the organizational scale in terms of human resource management and to enhance its depth by changing employment policies . In this regard , he targeted filling a certain number of positions with people with disabilities . The reasoning behind this employment structure was that people with personal experience in handling disabilities would offer a better quality of service in this regard . This is how the paradox of commitment and vision was resolved

Sparkes implemented the principles of implementing organizational change . As a result his focus was on all areas of the organizational structure such as organizational culture governance , finances and the diversity program . The framework of quality management is built on the interconnectedness between the different process chains of an organization . Therefore , in improving the efficiency and the effectiveness of human resource management at Scope Sparkes set out to eliminate...