The Impact Of Human Resources Management On Marks And Spencer's ( M & S )

M&S gained customer loyalty from high quality products that were priced competitively. One of M&S´ current problems is that people demand either brand names or discounted products. M&S is therefore stuck in the middle. M&S´ product-orientated strategy in the late 1990s has become ineffective. The bargaining power from buyers is increasing and therefore, a more consumer-orientated strategy is needed.

Purpose – This article aims to explore how understanding the challenges faced by companies’ attempts to create competitive advantage through their human resources and HRM practices can be enhanced by insights

In this assignment I have looked at strategic human resource management perspective in Marks and Spencer. Before move on the strategic human resource management, let us have a brief introduction about Marks and Spencer. According to the corporate website Marks and Spencer, started its business as a single market stall and grown to become one of the UK’s leading retailers of clothing, food, home products and financial services. Marks and Spencer employs 78,000 in the UK and abroad, have more than 700 stores and serve over 21 million customers every week. Marks and Spencer strongly committed to provide high quality products as premium prices. The company has an established brand name and exceptional financial turnover of £8 billion in 2012 (About Us, 2014).

Marks and Spencer (M&S) p.l.c. is one of the largest retailers in the United Kingdom with a selling space of 12.5 million square feet, was established in 1884 as ‘Penny bazaar’. M&S sells clothing, food, footwear, gifts and home furnishings in its 760 stores around the world. The company’s wholly own and franchise stores operates in Europe, Hong Kong, Far East, Australia, Middle East, the Bahamas and Bermuda making a total of 34 countries.

This essay discusses the role and function of Human Resource Management (HRM) within an organisation. The Harvard and Michigan models have been explained within the essay as they support the analysis of “soft” and “hard” HR approach that managers adapt when applying the HR policies to achieve different organisational strategies like diversification, acquisition and cost reductions. Subsequent section of the essay will examine the link between HRM and its strategies with examples taken from organisations like Harrods’ and Disney and institutes like NHS on how they use HR policies and strategies to achieve their organisational goals.

Schuler and Jackson (1987) propose the model of Human Resource Management as the business strategic policies and practices of the organization. This framework is to achieving competitive advantage in different industry condition. They argue for fit in different industry condition and business strategic. It includes innovation, quality enhancement and cost reduction. This business strategic associated with particular employee role behaviors and HRM policies and practices.

In the case study of Tesco, it is stated that they will appoint more staff to win their customers back. This step is related to Human Resource Management. HRM is activity, which include recruitment and defining the organization’s demand for skilled staff. “HRM includes the training and

In an era of increasing competitiveness, globalization, economic rationalization, deregulation, technological revolution and changing workforce there is an ever-increasing need for human resource management to be able to capitalize on the special challenges that this changing environment brings. For a company to be able to successfully keep ahead of the competition, human resource management is seen to be a significant contributor.

The internal labour market refers to that which exists within a single organisation and represents its internal supply or stock of labour. In its broadest sense,

This paper has been submitted at the University of Gloucestershire in partial fulfillment of the Masters in Business Administration course module ‘Strategic Human Resource Management,’ under the able guidance of Dr. Xiaoni Ren and Jocelyne Fleming. Today’s competitive environment demands companies to pay serious attention to its human resource management because of the important role it plays in realizing a company’s mission,

Marks and Spencer is one the UK’s Leading retailers with over 21 million customers visiting marks and Spencer stores each week. The company has over 6 hundred UK stores and over 75 thousand people working in the UK and Abroad. 49 % of company’s sales come from clothing and home ware and other 51% sales come from food. First Marks and Spencer store was opened in 1893 in Manchester by Michael Marks and Tom Spencer. In 1903 Marks and Spencer became a limited company. M&S was enlisted as Public limited

McGuire et al. (2003) in their article titled “Examining the Matching Process – Human Resource Management and Competitive Strategies: A Study of the Irish Retail Sector” focused on how human resource management is linked to the competitive strategy of the firm. Further the paper focused on the competitive advantage in the retail sector. The authors concluded that the issue of competitive strategy and positioning is an extremely important issue within the service/retail sector. And also, the choice of competitive strategy has significant implications for the range of human resource practices available to the retail organizations. The study clearly identified that the cost bounded of competitive strategies such as financial considerations would appear a significant factor in determining the overall approach taken towards human resource management in the retail sector.

The rapid growth of internationalisation and global competition in recent years has created a significant increase in the number of Multi-National Corporations (MNC’s), which in turn created the need for International Human Resource Management (IHRM) roles (Scullion, 2001). Human resource management is progressively becoming a major factor that can determine the success or failure of MNC’s. Scullion (2001) concluded that HR strategies play a vital role in implementation and control in MNC’s, and alignment between HR strategies and the organisational structure of MNC’s often results in superior outcomes. In order to strive, human resources must be managed effectively to gain a competitive edge in the global market place, and to overcome the seemingly inexorable challenges that globalization precipitates. This essay presents an overview of the challenges faced by HR managers in a global setting, and evidences that the current permutation of HRM is not adequate to meet the critical challenges of tomorrow. BRIEFLY OUTLINE BODIES OF TEXT

In the late decade of 1980, the organisations realized the significance of their employees as a capital asset or human resources; and by adopting and implementing a set of HRM practices (such as recruiting, training and developing people etc.) aimed to succeed a sustainable competitive advantage based on a business strategic view by making the employees’ involvement the main key point of the new human resource management into the business process; and by establishing the organizational culture that they are part of the organization (Kaufman 2001: 506). During this period, the HRM is transformed into a Strategic HRM approach in order to sustain in these modern business challenges.

Modern Management considers human being as resource and it is important for the success of any organization. Every organization attempts to survive and grow and it is difficult in a global economy characterized by cut throat competition, increasing cost, expanding power of labour, rapid technological changes, growing customer expectations etc.