Strategic Role Of Human Resource Management

Marks and Spencer (M&S) p.l.c. is one of the largest retailers in the United Kingdom with a selling space of 12.5 million square feet, was established in 1884 as ‘Penny bazaar’. M&S sells clothing, food, footwear, gifts and home furnishings in its 760 stores around the world. The company’s wholly own and franchise stores operates in Europe, Hong Kong, Far East, Australia, Middle East, the Bahamas and Bermuda making a total of 34 countries.

Marks and Spencer (M & S) was started by Michael Marks and later joint by a partner Tom Spencer in 1884. It is one of the largest British retailers that sold clothes, home furnishings, food, gifts etc. and was formerly known as St. Michael. It has markets in Europe, Far East, America and Asia. The company suffered a series of losses and a dip in the market share from a few years before the stepping down of the then CEO, Sir Richard Greenbury, in 1999. In 2001 the company underwent a drastic strategic change and the

Marks and Spencer (M & S) was started by Michael Marks in Leeds in 1984 and later joint by a partner Tom Spencer. It is one of the largest retailer’s stores of U.K that sells clothes, home furnishings, food, gifts etc. and was formerly known as St. Michael. It has its markets in Europe, Far East,

Wright and McMahan (1994) define strategic HRM as “the pattern of planned Human Resource deployments and activities intended to enable the organisation to achieve its goals.” A HR function should impact the success of an organisation; a policy must remain current and suitable to both the internal and external environment. Ulrich and Lake (1990) affirm, ‘HRM systems can be the source of organisational capabilities that allow organisations to learn and capitalise on new opportunities.’

Marks and Spencer is a major British multinational retailer headquartered in the City of Westminster, London. It specializes in the selling of clothing, home products and luxury food products. M&S was founded in 1884 by Michael Marks and Thomas Spencer in Leeds. “M&S has grown from a single market stall to an international, multi-channel retailer, selling stylish, high quality, great value clothing and home products, as well as outstanding quality food, responsibly sourced from around 3,000 suppliers globally. M&S have almost 800 stores throughout the UK.” It is the biggest and strongest competitor for Next.

Schuler and Jackson (1987) propose the model of Human Resource Management as the business strategic policies and practices of the organization. This framework is to achieving competitive advantage in different industry condition. They argue for fit in different industry condition and business strategic. It includes innovation, quality enhancement and cost reduction. This business strategic associated with particular employee role behaviors and HRM policies and practices.

In today’s highly competitive world market, companies are intensely pressurized to survive any possible failures caused by their external threats and internal weakness. Coming with the intense competition in the world market are the changes in many aspects such as technologies, customer demands and customer tastes. All these dynamic factors have all combined to make the originally shrinking world market share much smaller, and make the intensive competition all the more fierce. The adaption to this changing wave of the highly competitive world market requires a willingness and real strategic actions of companies to make internal changes so as to be adapted to the world market to maintain the very survival of theirs. Generally speaking, such a desire and those actual strategies come from nowhere but within the companies internally. The following essay aims at exploring the extent to which the changes in Human Resources Management has contributed to the competitiveness on Marks and Spencer’s (M&S) after 1997, its crisis of describing by analyzing the HRM problems with which M&S was faced, by evaluating the approaches made by M&S to HRM change, which this article will argue it played a large role in enhancing the overall competitiveness of M&S in the global market.

In this assignment I have looked at strategic human resource management perspective in Marks and Spencer. Before move on the strategic human resource management, let us have a brief introduction about Marks and Spencer. According to the corporate website Marks and Spencer, started its business as a single market stall and grown to become one of the UK’s leading retailers of clothing, food, home products and financial services. Marks and Spencer employs 78,000 in the UK and abroad, have more than 700 stores and serve over 21 million customers every week. Marks and Spencer strongly committed to provide high quality products as premium prices. The company has an established brand name and exceptional financial turnover of £8 billion in 2012 (About Us, 2014).

Marks and Spencer Company is one of the biggest retailers in UK, which it has known by providing the finest qualities of goods and services including clothing, home product, foods and groceries. In currently, M&S Company operates 852 UK stores, 480 international stores and e-commerce platform includes approximately 83,069 employees, while M&S Company is one of the UK’s leading market positions in Menswear, Women-wear and Lingerie products (Mark and Spencer 2016.

Marks and Spencer (M&S) is a major British multinational retailer, headquartered at City of Westminster, London. It was founded in 1884 and now grown into a multinational retailer with their

Strategic Human Resource Management has been developed to give companies a competitive edge over other companies. Since widespread access to and the use of technology have resulted in tighter margins for maintaining a competitive edge,

The use of human resource management in organisations has certainly evolved over the past decades. It has been described as a key source of competitive advantage for an organisation and there are many reasons and examples of this. However human resource management has had many role changes thus meaning new challenges for the human resource professionals. This essay will discuss these role changes and new challenges in regards to how they have been dealt with in order to achieve competitive advantage for organisations.

In today’s rapidly changing globalised business environment, human capital has become one of the keys to competitive advantage. Consequently, any good business strategy must fully utilise the inimitable assets of people through their knowledge, skills and abilities. This highlights the need for strategic human resource management (SHRM). The key assumption of SHRM is that organisational performance is affected by employees through a set of human resource (HR) practices (Pan et al 2006).

Analysis of Human Resource Management The report starts with the introduction to Human Resource Management (HRM) and the role it has to play within an organisation followed by brief introduction of the chosen organisation for the discussion-McDonald’s Restaurants Ltd. Also, it gives the reasons why this organisation has been chosen. The report presents the key strategic issues and corporate strategy of McDonald’s.

Aim: This research will help us understand the role played by Strategic Human Resources Management in Organizational success, what role a HR manager plays in improving organizational efficiency and how it differs from traditional Human Resources Management.