Strategic Human Resource Management and COVID‐19: Emerging Challenges and Research Opportunities

Abstract

At its core the COVID-19 pandemic is a human crisis. Thus, human resource (HR) leaders have been central to the response in organisations globally. This contrasts with previous crises such as the global recession of 2008–09 or the Y2K crisis at the turn of the millennium that accentuated the roles of finance and IT leaders, respectively. By amplifying the role of HR leaders, COVID-19 has become an inflection point with substantive implications for HR globally. In this commentary, we reflect on the implications of COVID-19 for HR research, including identifying some key research questions for strategic human resource management (HRM). Early in the evolution of the field, Wright and McMahan defined strategic HRM as 'the pattern of planned human resource deployments and activities intended to enable the firm to achieve its goals' (1992, p. 298). They argued that the domain of strategic HRM encompassed 'the determinants of decisions about HR practices, the composition of human capital resource pools, the specification of the required human resource behaviours, and the effectiveness of these decisions given various business strategies and/or competitive situations' (Wright and McMahon, 1992, p. 298). Since then, strategic HRM research has overwhelmingly focused on the relationship between HR practices and firm performance (Huselid, 1995) or the impact of those practices on mediators between these two variables (Boxall et al., 2016). However, the global pandemic revealed how myopic such research has been for addressing how firms strategically manage people. This narrow focus limits our understanding of key questions exposed during COVID-19. For example, the pandemic requires a shift in understanding of how work context, such as working onsite versus working from home (WFH), influences employee behaviours and actions. The pandemic has also exposed tensions among stakeholders and challenges the primacy of the shareholder view which has dominated thinking in strategic HRM (Crane and Matten, 2020; Hitt et al., 2020). Finally, while HR has taken a strategic turn, tensions around its role have been exposed during the pandemic, highlighting the requirement for both strategic and tactical contributions. We consider each of these in turn. COVID-19 has changed the experience of work for the vast majority of employees. It forced organisations across the globe to adapt how work is organised and how jobs are designed. The potential for fractures between employee groups has also increased. For example between those who can WFH and those who cannot, those who remained on payroll versus those furloughed, and even those in different business units impacted differently by the pandemic. Strategic HRM research has been critiqued for its failure, or conceptual inability, to include novel, contemporary HR practices (Harney and Collings, 2021). Thus, traditional conceptualisations of HR practices or high-performance work systems require modification in the context of COVID-19. Strategic HRM research needs to move toward the more nuanced conceptualisation and measurement of HR practices such as flexibility, job design etc. rather than capturing these under the category of 'other' which has been far too common in extant research (Boon et al., 2019). Indeed, academic research in strategic HRM is often premised on a homogenous view of the employee relationship and an assumption that HR practices used within firms are relatively homogenous (c.f. Huselid, 1995). However, employees differ in their experience and interpretation of HR practices depending on their role (Kehoe and Wright, 2013). Lepak and Snell (1999) were among the first to differentiate strategic HRM practices for different employee groups. While such a differentiated approach has been core to discussions on talent management (Collings et al., 2019) we argue that COVID-19 highlights the importance of considering the differential impact of strategic HRM across different employee groups in terms of how and where they work. These changes also challenge many assumptions underpinning, and conclusions drawn from, traditional strategic HRM research. For example, this research generally assumes workers are located in a physical workplace, with limited consideration of managing a virtual workforce. Where HR flexibility has been considered, this has largely focused on HR practices, with culture/values overlooked. Understanding how culture and organisational values influence how place of work impacts on outcomes such as individual or unit performance remain key research questions. Likewise, on the rare occasions that strategic HRM research considers communications, this is generally limited to communicating financial information at the firm level. How communication differentiated those organisations that responded most effectively to the pandemic versus those that did not could provide insight into how and why some organizations and leaders respond better to crises than others. Strategic