Strategy, core competence, and HR involvement as determinants of HR effectiveness and refinery...

The increasingly global nature of competition requires that firms utilize all of their available resources in order to survive and succeed. This has resulted in an emphasis on the alignment of all functional activities of the firm e.g., finance, marketing, operations, etc. toward the achievement of strategic objectives. One consequence of this trend is that many have called for a new strategic role for the HR function. This role entails two major aspects. First, the HR executive should provide input into the firm's strategy in order to ensure that the firm has the human resource capabilities to implement it. Second, the HR function needs to ensure that the HR programs and practices are in place to effectively implement the strategy. One impediment to effectively performing this role, however, has been the fact that the HR function has been neither traditionally viewed nor empirically demonstrated to contribute to firm performance, and, therefore, neither important nor effective. HR involvement in the strategic management process has been thought to be effective in all cases, Its effectiveness however, may vary with firm strategies.