Strategically Reactive and Strategically Proactive Human Resource Management

Over time the importance of the value of human resources (HR) to its firm has increased. The management of human resources went from being operational to strategic, which are the two levels of HR, and from reactive to proactive. The HR field may organize its thinking about the past, present, and future around the framework that results from the combination of both proactive and reactive HR. Operational HR activities generally refer to the routing, day-to-day delivery of HR basics. The strategic level of HR activity is more difficult to explain and involves five criteria:

• Long term-whether the activity would add value in the distant future as opposed to the near future.
• Comprehensive-whether the activity involves the entire organization or individual departments or parts.
• Planned-whether the activity is thought out before it is done or if it is done on the spur of the moment.
• Integrated-whether it would bring other separated activities together.
• High value added-whether it focuses on business, financial and market success of not.

The two approaches to the management of HR that would be discussed are strategically reactive and strategically proactive. Reactive human resource management waits for problems to happen before something is done about it, e.g. waits for someone to quit before even thinking of a replacement or training for that replacement. Whereas proactive human resource management anticipates needs or problems and attempts prevent them. Both strategically proactive and strategically reactive HR are used to add value to an organization. In his book Strategic Human Resource Management, Mello explained the terms strategically reactive and strategically proactive as:

Strategically reactive HR focuses on implementing the business strategy; that is, given a clearly formulated business strategy (e.g., growth, new product, innovation, cycle reduction, new market entry), how can HR help support is successful implementation? Such activities... [continues]

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