STRATEGY-DRIVEN ROLE BEHAVIORS AND PRACTICES

Competitive strategies require different human resource practices

and different role behaviors. The role behaviors needed of
employees throughout an organization provide a rationale for the
linkage between competitive strategies and human resource
practices. For example, the competitive strategies of (1)
innovation, (2) quality enhancement, and (3) cost reduction can
be used to explain how different employee behaviors are needed
for successful implementation of different strategies. These
behaviors are roles that go beyond skills, knowledge, and
abilities.
Innovative strategy
Essentially, for successful implementation of an innovative
strategy, employees probably need to be cooperative—because
of the interdependencies involved, highly creative, oriented
toward the long term, risk takers, and comfortable with ambiguity.
It has been hypothesized that under innovation strategies, the
appropriate role behaviors will be more likely to obtained with
(1) group-oriented, long-term appraisal systems;
(2) generalized skill development and broad career paths;
(3) Compensation approaches accentuating internal equity; and
(4) Flexible compensation packages including stock ownership.
Quality-enhancement strategies
With quality enhancement strategies, employees need to place
emphasis on production or service processes, risk reduction, and
predictability.
For quality-enhancement strategies, it has been hypothesized that
human resource practices should include.
(1) Employment security guarantees,
(2) extensive training programs, and
(3) participative decision making.
Cost reduction strategies
In contrast, for successful implementation of cost-reduction
strategies, employees should be focused on the short term, risk
averse, predictable, results oriented, and comfortable working by
themselves.
With cost reduction, it has been hypothesized that desired role
behaviors are more likely with
(1) performance appraisal systems emphasizing results in the
short term,
(2) virtually no training programs,
(3) very specialized jobs,
(4) narrow and specialized career paths, and
(5) procedures for continual tracking of wage rates in the labor
market.

For each of the different sets of strategies and role behaviors,

different human resource practices are required. General
categories of such human resource practices include

 planning,
 staffing,
 appraisal,
 compensation, and
 training and development.