Strategic Human Resources: Frameworks for General Managers [Hardcover]

James N. Baron (Author), David M. Kreps (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0471072532 | ISBN-13: 978-0471072539 | Publication Date: March 22, 1999 | Edition: 1

Human Resources are the most important resource that a firm commands and should be regarded as capital, a factor of production in which managers invest today in order to realize future profits. This book deals with the strategic implications of Human Resource Management as an important strategic asset and emphasizes its importance within the overall strategy of the firm. The book covers issues such as job design, evaluation, recruitment, training, career concern, and outsourcing and downsizing. The linkage between the various pieces of HRM policy are stressed and how the policies are related to management issues such as TQM, just-in-time manufacturing, and others. The book is aimed at the general manager, not the HRM practitioner and it stresses conceptual frameworks, not procedural methodology.

Editorial Reviews

From the Inside Flap

How Every General Manager Should Think about Human Resources Human resources are increasingly recognized as an important—perhaps the most important—strategic weapon in the organization’s arsenal. Yet general managers and students of general management have lacked a compelling general framework for thinking about managing human resources strategically. Baron and Kreps provide such a framework:

• Emphasizing connections among different pieces of the organization’s HRM strategy, as well as links between the organization’s strategy, technology, culture, and environment and its HRM strategy.
• Tackling important and timely issues, including outsourcing, managing a diverse workforce, pay-for-performance, teams, high-commitment HR systems, and HRM both in multinationals and in emerging high-tech start-ups.
• Blending together disciplinary thinking from economics, sociology, and social psychology, the book will bring you up to speed on the latest thinking on the subject.
• Emphasizing strategic concepts and insights—and avoiding technicalities—this book is written for general managers and HR specialists interested in a general management perspective.

From the Back Cover

Advance praise for Strategic Human Resources: Frameworks for General Managers I would have asked every one of my professional HR people to read the text if it had been available to them. The HR profession has been longing for a solid foundation from which to operate and this text provides it. — Debra Engel Executive Adviser and retired Senior Vice President, Corporate Services 3Com Corporation It’s very simple. Baron and Kreps have produced a path breaking HRM text by mixing rigorous analysis and up-to-date research findings with engaging case material. They convey what all current and future managers, regardless of their functional specialty or interests, need to know to manage effectively the workforce and organizations of the future. HRM teaching will never be the same, and we will all be better off for it. — Thomas A. Kochan George M. Bunker Professor of Management Sloan School of Management, MIT This book provides general managers with a valuable framework, empirical evidence, and some thoughts to consider on how to align human resource strategy with business vision. — Richard M. Kovacevich President and CEO, Wells Fargo & Company Baron and Kreps have written an extraordinary text on human resource management that combines as perhaps no others have the cutting edge in social science theory on the employment relation with the best in real business practice. — James R. Lincoln Spieker Professor of Leadership, Haas School of Business, and Director, Institute of Industrial Relations, University of California at Berkeley This book demonstrates the benefits of interdisciplinary collaboration. Baron and Kreps have developed a practical, comprehensive framework for the design and analysis of HR strategies. — James Montgomery Interdisciplinary Institute of Management London School of Economics Management is about (1) deciding what to do and (2) making it happen. In today’s world, making it happen is all about people: having the right ones (and avoiding the wrong ones) and integrating those people into an effective work system. This text is all about making the people equation happen. Certainly, if I were to teach a class on HR management as experienced by a practitioner, I would find this text a perfect vehicle to frame the course and develop its content. — John S. Reed Chairman and Co-Chief Executive Officer, Citigroup Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 624 pages
• Publisher: Wiley; 1 edition (March 22, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0471072532
• ISBN-13: 978-0471072539
• Product Dimensions: 7.6 x 1.2 x 9.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.5 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #436,470 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

16 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A major achievement in an underserved field, June 13, 1999

By 

Jonathan Day ([e-mail]) (London, UK) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Strategic Human Resources: Frameworks for General Managers (Hardcover)

Essential reading for both general managers and human resource executives, this book breaks new ground in several ways.

First, the authors present human resources as a critical part of a SYSTEM, integrated with the company's external environment, workforce, culture, strategy and production methods, rather than as an isolated or downstream activity.

Second, they bring insights from economics, sociology and social psychology to the topic, in a powerful way. The four appendices alone (transaction cost economics, game theory, agency theory and market signaling) are worth the price of the book.

Third, they avoid the trap of "best practice", where an author looks at a few successful firms (GE? PepsiCo? 3M?) and encourages others to imitate them. In contrast, this book offers clues to creating real and inimitable competitive advantage from a company's human resource management.

The entire treatment is readable and rich in cases.

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The best book on strategic human resources I have ever read!, September 20, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Strategic Human Resources: Frameworks for General Managers (Hardcover)

Baron & Kreps write with wit & grace, pulling together a vast amount of literature to make their point that human resource management is critical to a firm's success. In every chapter, they get to the point quickly, writing for students in a way that faculty will appreciate. They retain the essence of the academic research on which their principles are based, while focusing on what it all means for managers. I highly recommend this book.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars superb text in modern micro theory applied to human resource management, December 12, 2009

By 

John Fountain "jfok" (New Zealand) - See all my reviews
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Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Strategic Human Resources: Frameworks for General Managers (Hardcover)

To get an idea what this text is about if you are an economist, or an economics student, start your reading in chapter 4 Employment and Economics. There you will realise that almost nothing you learned as an undergrad in economics - demand and supply, consumer optimization, neoclassical cost functions, monopoly oligopoly and competitive industries - will prepare you for understanding employment relationships. But the economics for which Oliver Williamson just got his Nobel prize will matter - and Kreps and Baron are wonderful expositors of this sort of economic theory....not in the abstract, but applied to employment relationships/transactions.

Employment is often an open-ended transaction, with the detail specified only as time passes (after the transaction has been entered into) and relevant contingencies arise - salaries/commissions in years ahead, future promotion prospects, future job assignments, etc. Just how these details are filled in depends on a system of interlocking factors and behaviors: decision making rights and privileges specified in law (common law or legislation or both), by explicit, but incomplete, contractual details, and most importantly by tradition and common practices that have evolved with some history. But why do these customs have any force? Why does anyone believe them? Well one problem in an employment relationship, on either or both employer and employee sides, is that as time passes and the relationship matures both parties may face large costs of switching to alternatives - alternative jobs, or alternative workers. Replacing and retraining skilled knowledgeable workers may be costly, especially if it has to be done quickly in a time of high product demand - and those workers may know that; Finding alternative jobs with comparable pay and with comparable skills in alternative locations may be costly for workers - and employers may know that. So each is very aware that the other party to the transaction might act opportunistically to extract something from them - either or both parties can get very worried about "hold-ups". So how does one protect against hold-ups when efficiency in employment depends on being able to adapt flexibly as well as to have workers and employers invest specifically in one another - ie in the joint enterprise - since this makes you even more exposed to hold-ups. The answer - ie the needed protections - lie in the phenomena of "reputations". These reputation systems rely on history, culture (internal and external), customs, traditions, and shared beliefs expectations. Kreps and Baron are masterful analysts of the conditions under which reputations can, can't, and might be relied upon to offer guarantees.
A long way from demand and supply , non? And much more interesting.
So in the res t of the book your are going to have some amazing new insights - and examples - about internal promotion ladders, recruitment , retention, incentives, performance evaluation, performance pay, job design, unions, etc...all based on this new transactions costs theory of behaviour, and all richly and amply illustrated by many fascinating examples. Enjoy