Strategic Human Resource Management and COVID-19: Emerging Challenges and Research Opportunities

Abstract

At its core the COVID-19 pandemic is a human crisis. Thus, human resource (HR) leaders have been central to the response in organisations globally. This contrasts with previous crises such as the global recession of 2008–09 or the Y2K crisis at the turn of the millennium that accentuated the roles of finance and IT leaders, respectively. By amplifying the role of HR leaders, COVID-19 has become an inflection point with sub stantive implications for HR globally. In this commentary, we reflect on the implications of COVID-19 for HR research, including identifying some key research questions for strategic human resource management (HRM). Early in the evolution of the field, Wright and McMahan defined strategic HRM as ‘the pattern of planned human resource deployments and activities intended to enable the firm to achieve its goals’ (1992, p. 298). They argued that the domain of strategic HRM encompassed ‘the determinants of decisions about HR practices, the composition of human capital resource pools, the specification of the required human resource be haviours, and the effectiveness of these decisions given various business strategies and/or competitive situations’ (Wright and McMahon, 1992, p. 298). Since then, strategic HRM research has overwhelmingly focused on the relationship between HR practices and firm performance (Huselid, 1995) or the impact of those practices on mediators between