Competitive advantage through strategic human resources - a field study of ICICI bank

Abstract

Organizations today not only face the challenge of reorganizing themselves, but to do this realignment continuously. The question is how can an organization develop the capabilities required for this form of strategic management? This becomes especially more important in the context of diverse service sector organizations in a dynamic industry because aligning employees to the changing strategy of the organization gains ultimate importance and also becomes equally difficult. ICIC Bank is one such example and was the subject of study for this project. It was seen that for a large and growing organization, it becomes important that the HR department is free from the routine tasks and concentrates on people development. Also, each HR process and system should contribute to the overall business model and output. At many points choice needs to be made between options. It is important to question why a particular option was chosen and why the other was discarded and how it adds value to the overall process. HR should take the role of the backbone of the entire organization and nurture each functions by recruiting, training and retaining the right people. However, it was also felt that in a rapidly evolving industry there should be some space for contingency planning and this should be incorporated while coming up a strategy.