Best Fit And Best Practice Case Study
Introduction-200
There was once a time in the Western World where people required very intelligence or experience to work in an organisation. Factory, farming and domestic work were the main sources of employment, which mainly required hard physical labour above any other skill and people had very little employment rights. However, after the First World War in 1914, radical changes in the employment market started to happen as advances in technology meant that there was a requirement for a higher-skilled labour force and worker welfare became increasingly important. By the 1960’s Personnel Departments, who looked after employee records and pay, were a distinctive feature of organisations as numerous events in the social and economic climate …show more content…
Whilst the current literature does not advocate a single best approach, many believe that the research indicates Best Fit is the most appropriate choice. However this does not explain why many organisations such are still advocates of the other perspectives. Therefore the main body of this essay will evaluate the advantages and disadvantages of each approach in terms of how they can improve performance in their own …show more content…
This is more commonly written about in the resource-based view in which will be explored later in this essay.
There are variation in theories of ‘best fit’. Shuler and Jackson (1987) outlined Porter’s strategies for competitive advantage: innovation, cost-reduction and quality enhancement, to help identify types of practices that are linked desired behaviours that mutually reinforce the overall business strategy. For example, consider a budget supermarket adopting a low-cost strategy. There is no point implementing sophisticated recruitment and extensive training programmes that are costly, as the majority of job roles are short-term and require little skill or qualification.
There is also strong support to suggest that the size of the organisation makes a difference to what HR practices should be adopted. In an alternative view by Baird and Melshoulam (1988), the product life cycle of an organisation is used to explain how human resource practices should change over time to fit the different stages. For example, a firm who is experiencing slow growth might have difficulty recruiting and retaining
There was once a time in the Western World where people required very intelligence or experience to work in an organisation. Factory, farming and domestic work were the main sources of employment, which mainly required hard physical labour above any other skill and people had very little employment rights. However, after the First World War in 1914, radical changes in the employment market started to happen as advances in technology meant that there was a requirement for a higher-skilled labour force and worker welfare became increasingly important. By the 1960’s Personnel Departments, who looked after employee records and pay, were a distinctive feature of organisations as numerous events in the social and economic climate …show more content…
Whilst the current literature does not advocate a single best approach, many believe that the research indicates Best Fit is the most appropriate choice. However this does not explain why many organisations such are still advocates of the other perspectives. Therefore the main body of this essay will evaluate the advantages and disadvantages of each approach in terms of how they can improve performance in their own …show more content…
This is more commonly written about in the resource-based view in which will be explored later in this essay.
There are variation in theories of ‘best fit’. Shuler and Jackson (1987) outlined Porter’s strategies for competitive advantage: innovation, cost-reduction and quality enhancement, to help identify types of practices that are linked desired behaviours that mutually reinforce the overall business strategy. For example, consider a budget supermarket adopting a low-cost strategy. There is no point implementing sophisticated recruitment and extensive training programmes that are costly, as the majority of job roles are short-term and require little skill or qualification.
There is also strong support to suggest that the size of the organisation makes a difference to what HR practices should be adopted. In an alternative view by Baird and Melshoulam (1988), the product life cycle of an organisation is used to explain how human resource practices should change over time to fit the different stages. For example, a firm who is experiencing slow growth might have difficulty recruiting and retaining