A Critical Review of American Strategic Human Resource Management （SHRM） and its Implications for Japan

Abstract

SHRM, which is basically management- and finance-oriented, developed in the U. S. in the 1980s. The core concept of SHRM is there must be a link between human resource management and corporate performance （the HRM-P link）. That is, if human resources are obtained and utilised strategically, they must become the source of competitive advantage and help organisations or firms improve their performance. However, some British and Japanese scholars criticise SHRM for its theoretical defects :

⑴There is a critical shortcoming regarding how to demonstrate the HRM-P link. Most research is simply quantitative and does not address the links between HRM and corporate performance. That is, researchers conduct ‘measurement without theory’.

⑵Because of its increasingly finance-driven orientation, SHRM has abandoned a great deal of information regarding human behaviour accumulated by the earlier theory of personnel management, with its strong regard for behavioural science, to become a “human-less” theory. The discarding of such important insights means that SHRM analyses lack humanity. Moreover, it may not be an overstatement to say that the finance orientation of SHRM should be reconsidered in light of the growing importance of CSR.

In this paper, I will demonstrate that these criticisms are valid, and will discuss them in detail by scrutinising the SHRM literature. In addition, from a practical viewpoint, I will suggest future directions for HRM research.