| Strategic human resources management (SHRM) has been defined as “the pattern of planned human resource deployments and activities intended to enable an organization to achieve its goals” (Wright and McMahan, 1992, p. 298). Within SHRM, the goals being achieved should typically be dictated by the organization’s strategy as there is an inherent connection between strategy and SHRM. However, previous research has found that there is often a discrepancy between intended and realized implementation of strategy (Mintzberg and Waters, 1985), and by extension SHRM (Jackson et al., 2014), thereby making this connection at times tenuous at best. Moreover, research into strategy and SHRM has been hampered by level of analysis issues (Buller and McEvoy, 2012) as well as a lack of research examining factors that are unique to an organization which may result in competitive advantage (Jackson et al., 2014). The purpose of this article is to address these issues by examining the impact of organizational culture on the linkage between strategy and SHRM. Specifically, we propose that discrepancies between intended and realized strategies may be due, at least in part, to the culture of the organization which is an important factor to overall organizational outcomes. Therefore, this article contributes to the strategic human resource management literature by explaining how organizational culture moderates the relationship between organizational strategy and implementation of SHRM and how misalignment may lead to detrimental outcomes. Organizational culture has been described as the shared values and beliefs resulting in a behavioral component (Smircich, 1983). Although organizational culture is influenced by national culture, the general consensus is that organizational culture is a separate concept from national culture (Khilji and Wang, 2006; Sheehan et al., 2007). Within the diverse workforce that comprises organizations within the United States, for example, there are factors that bring people together toward a common goal beyond shared national values. Despite these common goals, what brings people together may, at times, detract from the overall strategy. As we demonstrate, alignment of organizational culture may influence the successful implementation of a strategy. However, an organizational culture that is misaligned with strategy may also lead to unintended SHRM outcomes and result in negative firm performance (Jackson et al., 2014). This strategy-organizational culture-SHRM linkage is a neglected area of research (Buller and McEvoy, 2012; Gratton and Truss, 2003; Jackson et al., 2014, Molineux, 2013). For this reason researchers have suggested that future research examine the relationship between strategy, culture, and SHRM (Boswell, 2006; Jackson et al., 2014, Panayotopoulouet al., 2003; Wei et al., 2008). |
