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Center for Effective Organizations

Working Paper

Sustainability and the Talentship Paradigm: Strategic Human Resource Management Beyond the Bottom Line

J. Boudreau. December, 2003

"Strategic" human resource management (HRM) typically means making investments in HRM policies and practices that enhance financial outcomes. This paradigm, focused on "bottom line HR" is being challenged by "Sustainability," an alternative definition of organizational success. It is often defined as "meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs." This shift in the prize from exclusively financial returns to sustainability, includes ecological, social, and ethical considerations. Sustainability language is in the mission statements of many global organizations, particularly those with European roots, and whose products and services carry highly visible ecological and social consequences, and it is rapidly becoming common among organizations beyond Europe and in a wide variety of industries. Sustainability will undoubtedly figure prominently in the future paradigm for organizations, and thus must become a part of HRM. Yet, making sustainability actionable and tangible is much harder than adding words to the mission statement. Simply attaching the word "strategic" to HRM failed to accomplish real change, and simply attaching the word "sustainability" to HRM may similarly raise expectations without results.

Today, Sustainability is typically connected to HRM through the traditional HR paradigm - service delivery, client satisfaction, and HR policies and practices, such as child labour, worker representation, health and safety. This is very important, but just as the traditional HR "service delivery" paradigm overlooks important HRM contributions to financial success, it also risks overlooking important HRM contributions to sustainability. To make sustainability truly actionable requires a framework that connects decisions about the organizations talents with Sustainability in a clear, deep and logical way, just as the decision sciences of Finance and Marketing tangibly connect decisions about money or customers to financial outcomes.

This paper proposes such a framework that simultaneously shifts the prize to reflect Sustainability and shifts the paradigm of HRM toward a decision science called "Talentship" (Boudreau & Ramstad, 2002). It defines Sustainability and its measures, defines the typical connection between HRM and sustainability using the traditional HRM paradigm. Then, the HC BRidge® talent decision framework that connects HRM, talent, and competitive/financial strategic success, is used to logically make similar connections between HRM, talent and sustainability. Examples from Shell and DuPont show how the combination of shifting the prize and the paradigm reveals pivotal roles for talent that are not apparent with traditional definitions of strategic success and the traditional HRM paradigm.

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