Alternatives to Generic Typologies in SHRM 1 ALTERNATIVES TO GENERIC STRATEGY TYPOLOGIES IN STRATEGIC HUMAN RESOURCE MANAGEMENT

The common use of generic strategy typologies in strategic human resource management (SHRM), such as the typology proposed by Michael Porter (1980), is inaccurate and probably obsolete. SHRM research that examines the performance effects of human resource (HR) systems does not need to invoke the strategy construct in order to fulfill its goals. SHRM research that uses organizations' strategies to predict their HR practices or which explore the effects of fit between HR systems and strategies should use measures of strategic content which are well grounded in issues pertinent to their specific empirical contexts. Alternatively, SHRM research can embrace dynamic perspectives of strategy, which will shed light on how human resource systems become strategically valuable organizational capabilities. Alternatives to Generic Typologies in SHRM 4 It is fashionable to raise questions about the viability of Strategic Human Resource Management (SHRM) as a research field because, while the topic is provocative, the research stream has had mixed results. One of the most common complaints is that empirical studies lag far behind SHRM's theoretic underpinnings (e.g., Dyer and Reeves 1995). Such situations are common for complex topics, of course, where it can be easier to craft models than to test them. However, the extent to which SHRM's problems lie simply with designing better empirical tests may be overstated. There are important problems with the theoretic underpinnings of SHRM research that have contributed to significant shortcomings in empirical research, particularly in how the strategy construct has been used to achieve SHRM's goals. SHRM research usually attempts to 1) include human resource practices in performance models predicting organizational outcomes, often incorporating concepts of internal synergies across practices, 2) include organizational strategies in models predicting organizations' sets of human resource practices, and 3) to use the degree of fit between human resource practices and organizational strategy to predict organizational outcomes. In our view, a major conceptual problem within the SHRM field lies in its view of strategy as a summary of either the competitive environment or of organizations' strategic positioning within it. This has led SHRM researchers to use excessively simplistic generic typologies to operationalize strategy. Essentially, SHRM researchers have been looking Alternatives to Generic Typologies in SHRM 5 for simple independent variables which will neatly encapsulate the insights of the strategy field for inclusion in SHRM models. As we argue below, this approach is misleading both in general and in the particular typologies which are commonly used. To assume that a generic typology summarizes the range of insights from strategy is akin to researchers in the strategy field believing that they had captured the collective effects of a set of human resource practices with a single typology, such as the extent to which practices are "participative" or "inclusive. " Human resource scholars would rightly object that such an approach could be inaccurate in its details and, more importantly, would ignore important viewpoints from the rest of what constitutes HR. Moreover, excessive use of a static, content-oriented typology could blind researchers to dynamic processes which could generate understanding of the causal mechanisms linking key constructs. THE GOALS OF DIFFERENT TYPES OF SHRM RESEARCH Part of this difficulty in SHRM is that researchers are using the term "strategic" to mean very different things. Some research under this label explores how human resource practices, such as selection mechanisms, training programs, and autonomous work teams, affect organization level performance outcomes. Research in this tradition is loosely synonymous with concerns about organizational performance, and the term strategic is presumably used because it relates to the strategic level of thinking within Alternatives to Generic Typologies in SHRM 6 organizations, i.e., the top executives and their concern with the bottom line. Recognition of the goals of capital-providing stakeholders, primarily through increased emphasis on bottom-line, financial performance, has been a major conceptual departure for researchers interested in employment relationships. This shift in emphasis is appropriate because management's power to shape the arena in which tactical maneuvering between management and labor occurs is impressive (Kochan, McKersie, and Cappelli 1984), and this power is usually aligned with the interests of capitalproviders. Pressures for HR and other corporate staffing functions to demonstrate the value of their contributions to the bottom-line became increasingly insistent in the era of intensified international competition that began in the 1980s (Dyer and Reeves 1995) and accelerated with the rise of strategic renewal movements such as total quality management (TQM) and reengineering, which took a systemic approach toward evaluating the worth of organizational activities. Similarly, all types of SHRM research focus on interlinked sets of HR policies and practices and their relationships with their broader organizational and competitive contexts, rather than on individual HR policies or practices. In contrast, the traditional approach toward measuring the performance impact of Human Resource Management (HRM), utility analysis, which only measures costs Alternatives to Generic Typologies in SHRM 7 and benefits within a single functional area within HRM, may be too narrow to address organizational performance questions (Hackman 1985). While adopting a systemic point of view, some performance-oriented SHRM research simply aims to demonstrate that HRM influences organizational performance (e.g., Koch and McGrath 1996) and does not require the strategy construct at all. Likewise, when practitioners use the SHRM label, they often mean approaches that reveal the bottom line impact of sets of human resource practices. A second use of the term "strategic" in SHRM applies to examining how organizations' strategic choices affect the evolution of their human resource practices. In the past, "strategic" thinking about choices in individual human resource practices usually meant little more than long-range planning, such as succession planning in a human resource development program. In contrast, SHRM researchers examine how the evolution of interlinked sets of human resource practices is influenced by organizational strategies and environmental contingencies. Strategy represents fundamental choices about organizational intentions and implies the capabilities and resources, including employees and human resource practices, needed to realize those intentions. Thus, it is often assumed that organizations' human resource practices should reflect their strategies. What SHRM scholars mean by an organization's strategy is a summary of its approach to managing its competitive environment. Also, by extension, SHRM scholars Alternatives to Generic Typologies in SHRM 8 tend to treat strategy as a summary of the selection pressures in an organization's competitive environment. In other words, SHRM scholars sometimes use strategy as a lens through which they can view the effects of organizations' competitive contexts on the contents of their sets of human resource practices. A third distinct use of the strategic label ties human resource practices to performance by examining the degree to which organizations' sets of human resource practices are matched to the requirements of their general strategies, a type of external fit argument. External fit is expected to amplify the effects of organizational strategies, whether these effects are positive or negative, though the positive interactions have received the most attention in SHRM literature. These arguments include configurational approaches, where similarity to a small set of theoretically predetermined optimal configurations of human resource policies and organizational strategies, such as those in Miles and Snow's generic strategy typology (Miles and Snow 1978), are expected to be associated with higher levels of performance. Both of these latter versions of SHRM explicitly use strategy in their models in the sense that researchers in other areas of management use it: to describe an organization level approach to competitive markets. SHRM theorists also argue that synergies (or internal fit) between human resource practices will positively enhance organizational outcomes, and supporting Alternatives to Generic Typologies in SHRM 9 evidence for this is beginning to emerge. Indeed, one of the most provocative emerging findings in current SHRM empirical research is that the impact of sets or "bundles" of interrelated HR practices can be distinctly greater than the additive impacts of the individual practices comprising the bundle (Arthur 1992; Huselid 1995; Ichniowski, Shaw, and Prennushi 1997; MacDuffie 1995)--i.e., that synergies among HR practices can exist. Synergy concepts have wide application in SHRM research. Along with systemic perspectives, a complementary interest in internal and external fit issues is a second defining characteristic of all kinds of SHRM research. Strategy is a complex construct, and SHRM researchers create unnecessary confusion when they do not clearly specify the type of strategy they are using. Moreover, confounding more than one type of strategy in a study's empirical and theoretic pieces is a hazard which can undermine the ability to make inferences, leading to theoretic conclusions which are not supported by the analysis. SHRM scholars need to be clear what they mean when they discuss strategy, beyond simply acknowledging the importance of human resource practices for organizational performance. Here, we can learn a lot from the strategy field's struggles with different conceptualizations of the strategy construct, especially in it