Making Sense of Small Business Growth: A Right WorkForce Template for Growing Firms.

Executive Summary. Although small businesses employ about half the American workforce and represent 99 percent of all U.S. firms, small firm human resource management is under-studied and therefore commonly misunderstood. Further, HR textbooks pay little attention to the distinctiveness and ubiquity of this topic. This paper develops a repeated-uses template for entrepreneurs, practitioners and scholars, out of a conceptual model of strategic HR management. The template serves to identify and organize tactical stages of HR responsibilities that are tied to firms' workforce expansion and strategic considerations that recur in phases as new businesses develop and mature. The Right WorkForce model and its related template are employable periodically as small firms grow into larger ones. Respectively, they offer a framework for strategic HR theory development and a process for forward-looking identification of HR issues in support of operations and strategy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]