Hr Achieving Competitive Advantage

ACHIEVING COMPETITIVE TALENT ADVANTAGE

An organization’s talent can create a competitive advantage by influencing quality of the organization’s stock of talent or the superiority of its work processes. Resource stock and process capabilities reflect the difference between human capital advantage and human process advantage. The organization can generate human capital advantage by hiring and retaining outstanding people, and producing a stock of exceptional talent.

A human process advantage is obtained when the firm’s work gets done in a superior way. The phenomenon can be thought of as a function of complex processes that evolve over time as a result of learning, cooperation and innovation on the part of employees. Human process advantages are very difficult to imitate. For example , a firm might have very smart and capable managers (high quality talent stock) but fail to fully utilize their talents-perhaps because the politicking and infighting between the firm’s department are excessive (poor work processes). Thus, an organization achieves a competitive talent advantage if it has a better stock of employees working with better processes.

Given that any competitive advantage erodes over time, an organization must do what it can to defend its current position by regularly undertaking new strategic initiatives. These initiatives can include broadening the company’s product line or customer support (say, offering free or low-cost training to product users), patenting alternative technologies, further reducing costs and prices, and acquiring talent ahead of the company’s present needs to keep them from being hired by potential competitors. Indeed, getting the right people on board before they are needed can defensively prevent them from being hired by the competition and offensively ensure they will be available when the organization needs them. For example Praxair a worldwide provider of industrial gasses, believed that it could not afford to wait for the...