ABSTRACT
The field of strategic human resource management (HRM) has garnered considerable interest from scholars from a variety of disciplines. Over the past three decades, what might be viewed as a macro view of HRM has evolved into its own research domain often entitled strategic HRM. Within this domain, several issues have received a disproportionate amount of attention from scholars. Perhaps the most prominent issue has been trying to understand how human resource (HR) practices and HR systems relate to organizational outcomes. Indeed, scholars such as Huselid (1995), Delery and Doty (1996), Arthur (1994), Batt (2002), and Guthrie (2001) have provided ample evidence that certain types of HR systems exert a significant impact on organizational outcomes. Predicting firm performance gains (and losses) based on HR initiatives has provided a considerable thrust to this area of research and has helped establish credibility of this domain among practitioner audiences.
