Strategic Human Resource Management: Scale Development and Validation

Abstract

With escalating challenges of the business environment, the corporate world is fast realizing the worth of human resource for attaining sustainable competitive advantage. This has given place to the ideology that Human Resource Management (HRM) needs to be aligned to the Strategic Management (SM) process of the organization. This integration of the above two fields is termed as Strategic Human Resource Management (SHRM). Despite the increasing importance of SHRM, there is a paucity of valid instruments for measuring such integration in the Indian context. Keeping in mind the fact that India is one of the fastest growing markets today, there is a need to develop a reliable and valid instrument for measuring SHRM in the Indian context.  The volatile and changing business environment of India offers a good testing field for a study on SHRM. On the basis of an extensive literature review, four constructs of SHRM were identified and developed, collectively called as SHRM Inventory henceforth. The scales were empirically tested in the Indian context to establish unidimensionality, reliability and validity using Structural Equation Modelling capabilities of LISREL version 8.50.  The study is pioneering in the sense that it provides a reliable and valid instrument for measuring HRM-strategy integration that has been empirically tested in the Indian context.