Hr Globally

Introduction

The advent of globalization has been key driver of changes occurring in the human resources function of organizations across sectors. It has led to flow of resources across the national boundaries and has led to the emergence of complementary organizational structures to accommodate the dynamic and expanding network of economic activity. Business environment has become more competitive and in order to survive organizations have to change. This change indeed comes through development of people. Beardwell and Holden (1997) support this assertion by giving an example of Japan's success despite its lacking natural resources. It is through their people development strategies that they were in the forefront of economic development. Armstrong outlines three most important factors in achieving competitive advantage as Innovative, Quality and Cost Leadership, but it is highly dependent on the quality of an organization's human resources. Thus the focal point is development of human resource. Scholars have argued that the human resource satisfies four conditions necessary to achieve sustainable competitive advantage: human resource is valuable, rare, and imperfectly imitable and has no substitutes. It is easy to duplicate technology to gain competitive advantage but difficult to duplicate competitive advantage gained through better management of people. (OSSREA, 2006) According to SHRM Workplace Forecast about 55% of HR professionals will lay emphasis on succession planning and people readiness. This paper takes into consideration that succession planning is one of the HR functions that focus on talent development for sustainable organizational growth and development.

Literature Review

Changes in demographics such as the reduction in population growth, worker retirement are leading to labor shortages for organizations (Bohara, 2007), and they face difficulty in recruitment, retaining and engaging employees (Frank and Taylor, 2004; Jamrog, 2004; Jensen,...