Strategic Human Resource Development in Small Businesses in the United States
Bibliographic record
Abstract
ABSTRACTOver 99% of the businesses in the United States are classified as small businesses. These businesses are responsible for at least half of: private sector employees, highly skilled and trained employees, new jobs created, and the private gross domestic product (nonfarm). Evidence is presented in this review to support that both strategic business planning and strategic human resource development work in combination to provide businesses with a competitive advantage. As we build on this research and strive to learn the best approaches for adopting adopt strategic human resource development in small businesses, we need to ensure the foundations for this research are strong. This review summarizes what we know about strategic human resource development in small businesses, the theoretical foundations for this work, and the role of critical definitions in this work. Suggestions are made for increasing the impact of research in this field and building support for the utilization of strategic business plans and strategic human resource development plans in businesses of all sizes.INTRODUCTIONThe aim of this review is to highlight the important research on the prevalence and impact of strategic human resource development (SHRD) in small businesses in the United States, and to find ways to improve the impact made by this work. This review explores foundational questions about this research. First, what theories are researchers relying on in support of strategic planning? Secondly, what does the term and construct 'small businesses' refer to? What defines a small business and why are small businesses important to the United States economy and subsequently its citizens? To what extent do small businesses create and utilize strategic business plans? And finally, do SHRD processes benefit small businesses? Existing research will be examined to provide insight on these questions. Following which is the discussion of the implications of this research for researchers, theorists, educators, and practitioners.Research articles included in this paper were located through a series of online title searches through a University of Illinois electronic library access and included searches of the following databases/tools: Business Source Complete, ABI Inform Complete, Scopus, Academic Search Premier Plus (Ebsco), PsychlNFO and Engineering Village. Additional articles were identified through a targeted title search of leading human resource development and human resource management journals. Search terms included combinations of the following: strategic plan, strategic planning, strategic business plan(s), strategic human resource development, SHRD, small business, small firms, Strategic planning theory, Resource Based Theory, and Human Capital Theory. Over 90 articles from peer reviewed journals were reviewed as a result of this process. A few additional articles were discovered via citations and references included in the aforementioned articles.Three articles were retained for which the sample of businesses were outside of the United States, which included businesses in Canada (Fabi & Lacoursiere, 2009) and the United Kingdom (Keogh, Mulvie, & Cooper, 2005; Richbell, Watts, & Wardle, 2001). These articles focus and methods were unique (i.e. there were not comparable studies published utilizing businesses in the United States), provided specific research findings relevant to the topic, were timely (published in the last 10 years), and because the countries included share a number of economic and cultural traits with the United States. Generalization of the findings from these studies to small businesses in the United States is inherently limited. Each of these studies represents research that has the potential to be replicated, to test for relevance in a United States setting, by utilizing a similar sample of small businesses in the United States.Studies that examined strategic planning that were published before 1980 were excluded due to the rapidly changing business environment and the growth of the human resource development profession in the 1980's (Kuchinki, 2007). …
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".