Human Resource Case Study

1 Harrison L Cooper 1116382 Assignment 2 - SHRM Strategic Human Resource Management and its role on organisational performance. Employee sick leave, absenteeism and work related accidents cost the New Zealand economy and business close to 5 billion dollars annually (Department of Labour, 2012) and is a major source of focus for a human resources departments. Strategic human resource policies and practices aim to minimise such costs to improve an organisation’s profitability and therefore organisational performance. Bundling of human resource practices is one method of increasing organisational performance through the implementation of sets or mixes of human resource practices that create a synergising

Flexible working arrangements like working from home and a compressed working week both considered products of high performance work systems have been shown to have a detrimental effect on organisational performance and employee wellbeing (Mariappanadar & Kramar, 2009). These findings based on data sourced from 240 firms in the Asia Pacific region including New Zealand, Australia, Japan, Philippinesand Taiwan have been consistent from a more international perspective by compilation of similar studies in peer reviewed journal articles. Organisational performance including organisations that had in place high performance work systems have been shown to have a favourable link with such human resource management employee well-being practices (Van De Voorde, Paauwe, & Veldhoven, 2012) but work intensification had an opposing effect which in turn decreased organisational profitability and employee well-being (Boxall & Mackay,

The performance of an organisation’s employees whether it be measured by sales, employee turnover, absenteeism, employee motivation and productivity to name of a few can have a neutral, positive or negative effect on organisational performance. High performance work systems again aims to increase performance of an organisational through certain human resource management practices. One practice can include high rewarding employee remuneration (Mariappanadar & Kramar, 2009). Remuneration systems like pay for performance or incentive pay assists in the management of employee performance as this practice leads to “motivating employees to develop the knowledge, skills, and abilities (KSAs), and/or competencies that they feel they might need to reach their performance goals” (Mackay, 2008). Motivation of an organisation’s employees is crucialto the performance of an organisation as it is understood to provide increases to overall job satisfaction (Wood, et al., 2013) which in turn can decrease turnover leading to decreased costs to an organisationand increases in organisational performance due to the increased productivity in its workers. In addition, the need for human resource management involvement and its relevance to businesses are highlighted further as