A Study on Determining the Relationship between Strategic HRM Practices and Innovation

Human resource management practices and functions have gained more strategic role in today’s competitive organizations. Traditional personnel management and human resources management activities are not enough to compete in the challenging environments. HR departments should become strategic partners of organizations’ top management level teams and be a part of the strategic planning process. All HRM functions should be designed consistent with the strategies and goals of organizations. There should be vertical and horizontal consistency among all HR functions and firm’s strategies. In order to develop the skills of employees and support their innovativeness, HRM functions and practices should be implemented according to the needs of employees. Organizations can gain competitive advantage by designing their HRM functions systematically and support their employees for being innovative. In this paper, firstly the evolution and importance of strategic HRM are investigated. The role of strategic HRM on innovativeness in organizations is analysed by a research which was conducted on 48 organizations in various sectors. A positive relationship between strategic HRM practices and innovation is found in the analysis and the results are discussed in the conclusion section.