Strategic Human Resources management is irrelevant when it comes to highly skilled professionals in the new economy

Résumé 0

The goal of this paper is to explain the commitment behaviour of highly skilled professionals in Canadian business-to-business (B2B) technology services companies that do not have a formal and explicit managerial commitment strategy and to emphasize the need to take the organizational context into consideration when developing a theory that seeks to account for differences in employee’s organisational commitment. Our contribution is to reappraise the relevance of the traditional organizational commitment definition in this organizational context, a new organizational form. We demonstrate that in the companies which are different from the traditional bureaucratic organizational forms and which employ highly qualified professionals, the employment relationship is based on a psychological contract that is not accounted for in the strategic HRM theory. Indeed, the basic principles of strategic HRM dictate that an organization’s most valuable asset is its employees; it is therefore incumbent on management to do whatever is necessary to retain its workforce, readily described as a key resource and to use human resources management (HRM) practices as tools to elicit commitment. In a study of highly skilled workers in Canadian business-to-business (B2B) technology services companies belonging to the so-called “new economy,