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Slicing Open the Black Box: Applying Occam's Razor to Strategic Human Resource Management Research

This paper examines a key issue affecting acceptance of Human Resource (HR) practitioners’ claims for a place at strategic level within organisations by investigating another consistent lament of HR researchers; lack of theory. By drawing on theory developed in other fields, the black box existing between mooted HR practices and desired organisational outcomes is opened for inspection. It is suggested that HR researchers can gain credibility by moving the direction of research away from global issues such as how best to measure organisational performance, and whether proposed HR practices are universal, contingent, or configurational in nature, towards a concentration on the processes whereby HR practices contribute to organisational performance. The argument is based on a pragmatic view of organisational performance; that essentially it is financial performance that matters, and that if HR practices are to affect this it must be by resolving performance and presence (tardiness, absenteeism and turnover) issues. Theory which suggests that job satisfaction and organisational commitment are key variables affecting presence and performance is reviewed, and links between antecedents of these variables and mooted HR Management (HRM) best practices are suggested. Future directions for Strategic HRM (SHRM) research are proposed. These research directions are intended to promote credibility for the field in the organisations likely to see value in, and thus fund, the research.