Rethinking the Application of HRM’s Configuration Perspective in Organisational Failure Contexts: Contributing Resilience Innovation Model and Resilience Innovation Capacity for SMEs’ Sustainability
The pressure for firms to utilise their human and non-human resources innovatively when challenged with organisational failure has led to a gap in HRM literature, which is how to do so effectively as well as resiliently. The problem is that the HRM literature’s assertions of how beneficial the traditional configuration and emerging resilience perspectives may help in alleviating impending organisational failure has been neglected in SME research. This paper’s research results are based on an empirical, qualitative survey of 85 staff and managers from four UK-based SMEs. The results contributed to the development of a ‘resilience innovation model’ as contribution to the emerging scholarship on resilience as well as to add resilience capacity to HRM’s configuration perspective. This led to my second contribution, which refers to the concept of ‘resilience innovation capacity’. The model and theory will firstly facilitate the development of human capacity in four ways and its innovativeness is found in how it provides an alternative to management’s reactive utilisation of the configuration perspective in the four SMEs that were challenged to fail. Secondly, it will also help identify and prioritise aspects of human capacity that could benefit from resilience development and thirdly it shows how SMEs can innovate-in-practice when their capacity development is threatened by systemic failure. I therefore address a capacity development gap for SMEs, a configuration-resilience theorisation deficit in HRM literature, HRM research’s oversight of a much needed resilience model and theory and the enhancement of SMEs’ sustainability. The limited number of firms, predominantly SMEs, and the regional-centric focus of the survey are the study’s limitations. Implications of my propositions and a future HRM research agenda are identified
