Changing Role of HR : A Comparative study of different organization structures in relation to HR & the motivation behind them

Sammanfattning: Since its big breakthrough in 1980 starting in America (Bredin, 2008), we see yet another shift from traditional to Strategic Human Resources which were basically about two normative model “best fit” vs. “best practice” and their implication in business organizations (Boxall & Purcell, 2000). Scholars like Ulrich (1997), suggested ways about how Human Resource (HR) could contribute in the search for competitive advantage by advocating new organizational structures and roles such as HRSSC (Human Resource Shared Service Center) or the new role of HRBP (Human Resource Business Partner). These new roles and structures can be seen as an extension of “best fit” vs. “best practice” thinking and provide with a tool to cope with challenges faced by today’s organizations. The first and foremost objective of this paper is to come up with a reasonable understanding about these different changes in roles and structures of HR. To do this, it puts the whole change process under “organizational evolution theory” lens and analyzes the whole phenomena to figure out “where do these changes come from” and “what is the implication of these changes for practitioner managers”. To be more precise, this paper applies ecological perspective at organizational and population level suggested by Lovas & Ghoshal (2000) and provides a starting point for future research to apply what Lovas & Ghoshal (2000) called “Guided Evolution” perspective. The next objective of this paper is to check if it is possible to come up with a Key Success Factors (KSF) which would work across different business environments and come up with implications for today’s organizations accordingly. In addition to an extensive literature review, the thesis conducted four semi-structured interviews with three large companies in Sweden applying “qualitative research interview” technique and then analyzed the data with adding more data from other secondary sources. The findings of this work suggest that, the whole change process corresponds to a “variation” cycle of the evolutionary process which should eventually move to a “selection” cycle. The choice and success of these new structures and roles are dependent on factors such as corporate strategies, adequate knowledge of HR or presence/absence of competition and finally suggest that success factors vary from environment to environment and thus it is not possible to come up with a set of Key Success Factors (KSF) which would work across cultures and business environments.