HR Managers’ Roles & Contributions in Merger Processes
Khalil Al Jerjawi
Faculty of Business
School of Management University of Western Sydney, Australia E.mail: mr.jerjawi@gmail.com
Accepted: August 12, 2011 DOI :10.5296/ijhrs.v1i1.896
As companies have engaged in domestic and international mergers over the last few years in order to match the macroeconomic trends operating on a worldwide and more recently to cope with the current global financial crisis, human resource managers have been encouraged to play a more strategic role in their organizations, especially in the case of extensive and radical organizational change such as merging process. This study addresses and works on the existing research gap by investigating the roles of HR managers among the different roles which were defined at the fist by Dave Ulrich. This paper demonstrates that HR managers are an essential part of merger and that HR practices should be given an extensive emphasizing throughout such organizational change “the merger process”.
Keywords: HR practices; HR manager roles; Merger process.
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1. Introduction
In recent years human resource managers have been triggered to play a more strategic role in their organizations, especially in making strategic decisions and going through radical organizational changes such as merging process (Bjorkman & Soderberg, 2003). Nowadays this requirement is even more urgent and acute due to the fact that past decade has been characterized by enormous growth in mergers. Most of the studies of HRM in merger field were focused on the theoretical framework and has a consultative nature in dealing with one phase of the merger process which is the post implementation stage of merger.
This study is directed at testing a hypothesis that there is a vital and simultaneously unreplaceable fit between Strategic Human Resource