An Attention-Based View of Strategic Human Resource Management

In spite of the designation, research in strategic human resource management (SHRM) has largely focused on tactical rather than strategic issues. These studies have attempted to explain whether firm performance is associated with “best-practice” or “best-fit” human resource management (HRM) practices. The focus on internally consistent (horizontal fit) HRM practices is better characterized as tactical implementation than as strategic formulation. In the latter, HRM leads rather than follows the firm’s long-term responses to shifts in the firm’s competitive and market environment. In this paper, I propose an attention-based view of the firm to reframe SHRM research and policy to support a strategy formulation based on environment conditions (vertical fit). From an organizational policy perspective, this approach elevates the role of the HR executive from that of a functional specialist to that of a strategic generalist

Corporate Governance and Management Succession in Family Businesses

Family businesses carry the weight of economic wealth creation in most economies. In the U.S. alone, family businesses account for 80 to 90 percent of the 18-million business enterprises in the United States, and 50 percent of the employment and GNP. In many ways, the family business is synonymous with the entrepreneurial organization as many were started as a means to provide for the financial well being of the founder's family. Founders who went on to build family empires started many of today's large corporations (e.g., Anheuser-Busch, Dupont, and Seagrams). Still, we know relatively little about the issues peculiar to a family business, such as the process and impact of succession planning. Yet, no recurring event in the life of the family firm is more critical to survival than the transfer of power from the incumbent to the successor. Organizations are especially susceptible to loss of vision and purpose during periods of CEO transition, as the leaders who helped shape the vision are replaced by others who may not share the same values and abilities. This study addresses the importance of understanding business succession planning by proposing and empirically verifying a model of succession planning and firm effectiveness in the family business. It links aspects of succession planning and successor preparation to the effectiveness of transition and from performance. The model depicts multiple interactive relationships, with emphasis placed not only on the planning and process-specific but also on successor-specific factors that lead to effectiveness.corporate governance, family businesses, management succession, firm performance, successor characteristics