Abstract
HRM professionals’ reliance on using teamwork, organisational planning and managerially- controlled appraisal measures within the framework of High Performance Organisation (HPO) and High Performance Work Systems (HPWS) has outlived its useful applicability and sustainability in today’s SME crisis-ridden environment. This chapter highlights the gap between the HRM discipline, whose measures to resolve the organisational performance problem have instead resulted in a deepening of the performance crisis in resource-constrained SMEs and an urgent need to address such a fundamental problem through the creation, development and sustenance of more innovative measures. A critique of HPO and HPWS’s structural and systemic approach to solve the effective organisational performance implementation gap led to an additional discovery, which is how to solve the performance problem competently and sustainably such that SMEs have a more strategically viable future. The study’s interpretivism paradigm backed up by a survey of 85 management and staff respondents in a longitudinal study spanning 7 years in the UK highlighted 6 important themes. These were combined to develop a new ‘Strategic Workforce Resilience Management Model’ as a way to solve the SME performance quagmire. This fills the performance implementation and strategic sustainability gaps and introduces resilience characteristics into the way HRM professionals should be managing the performance problem. The limitations, the implications and future research areas are discussed.
Highlights
Managing organisational performance has been a problematic area for Human Resource Management (HRM) professionals
At the start of the performance difficulty, it was clear from customers’ complaints and apparent delays in meeting production targets especially in Bakkavor and Longhurst that management and staff realised that they were both dealing with a severe set of performance blockages
In each of the four firms, the overall performance problem highlighted reactions of two main types, which included, firstly those in management positions initiated the redesigning of the old work structures, whose implementation they think will enhance staff ’s competences
Summary
Managing organisational performance has been a problematic area for Human Resource Management (HRM) professionals. This is partly because the discipline has depended on traditional measurement methods as part of managerial control [1]. This chapter defines organisational performance as the sum total of the tasks that managers and staff complete in order to help an organisation achieve its operational and/or strategic goals/objectives. Despite such significance, greater emphasis of performance management appears to have been focused on larger firms [5].
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