Abstract

Several studies have been conducted to establish the link between strategy, human resource management (HRM) practices and organisation performance, yet no study has explored the alignment between strategy, innovation, strategic HRM and their impacts on organisation competitiveness. Therefore, the present study sets out to align strategy, innovation, strategic human resource management (SHRM) and organisation competitiveness. The present study relies on in-depth review and synthesis of related literature in the field of strategy, innovation, strategic human resource management and organisation competitiveness to propose a model. The results show that aligning innovation and SHRM can enhance organisation competitiveness. The study found strategic HRM practices; learning, knowledge management, reward systems, recruitment, and performance management as critical to organisations’ innovativeness. The study offers both theoretical and practical implications for scholars as well as practitioners interested in the innovation. Despite all these claims, the study cautions against over-reliance on the findings, because of the qualitative nature of the study, hence future studies should consider empirically driven data (perhaps triangulations) to corroborate these results. The study offers a conceptual framework that could offer new insights into the relationship between strategy, innovation, SHRM and organisation competitiveness that has not been empirically tested before.

Key words: Knowledge management, innovation, organisation competitive, human resource management, learning organization.