Document 1 in full · Document 2 from highlighted passages only
As requested, this summary treats the first document (A Brief Overview of HRM) in its entirety, and the second document (Steffensen et al., 2019) using only its highlighted passages — 12 highlights spanning the article's framework, its level-by-level summary findings, and its future-research directions. The Steffensen section below does not draw on unhighlighted portions of that article.
Human resource management is the practice of influencing an organization's people through policies, practices, and systems. But those policies and practices do not act on their own — they are adopted, enacted, and implemented by managers at every level of the organization. Understanding HRM means understanding both the toolkit of practices and the managers who put it to work.
The first document is a foundational primer whose stated purpose is to ensure everyone in the course is "speaking the same language." It establishes the key definitions on which the rest of the course is built and then provides a structured overview of common HR practices.
Simply put, the people within an organization.
The attempts to influence the behavior, attitudes, and performance of an organization's people through various policies, practices, and systems. The defining emphasis is on influence — a leader's or decision maker's central job is to influence people to accomplish the organization's objectives in ways that make both the people and the organization successful.
"The process of influencing others to understand and agree about what needs to be done and how to do it, and the process of facilitating individual and collective efforts to accomplish shared objectives." The document favors this definition because it frames leadership as a process — not an innate trait, not a one-off act, not anything passive. Leadership takes time, ebbs and flows, and evolves.
The deliberate overlap between these definitions is the central point of the document. Both HRM and leadership are fundamentally about influencing workers to do the things that help the organization reach its goals while also helping the workers get the most out of their work. This shared foundation of influence is the conceptual thread of the module.
If HRM works through "policies, practices, and systems," the document asks the natural follow-up question: what are those practices, specifically? It answers using a taxonomy from Posthuma and colleagues (2013), published in the Journal of Management, which analyzed common HR practices and organized them into nine main categories of high-performance work practices:
Direct and indirect rewards and payments employees receive. Important because it focuses employee energy on specific productive behaviors. Examples: pay for performance, incentive compensation, profit- or gain-sharing.
The specific elements of jobs, relationships between jobs, and organizational structure. Relates to motivation, satisfaction, and skill use. Examples: job analysis, workforce planning, job rotation / cross-functional utilization.
Teaching employees the competencies needed for current and future jobs. Directly linked to the functional capacity of the organization. Examples: cross-functional and multi-skill training, firm-specific skill training, new-employee onboarding.
Locating and recruiting applicants and then choosing whom to hire. Drives profitability, labor productivity, commitment, and human capital. Examples: innovative recruiting practices, strategy-based selection criteria, employment tests and structured interviews.
Governance of the relationship between employees and employer. Shapes culture and climate; a trusting environment increases commitment and improves firm performance. Examples: complaint and grievance procedures, opinion and attitude surveys.
The channels and methods through which information is exchanged. Has shown a positive relationship with organizational performance. Examples: formal information-sharing programs, meetings.
Measuring and improving individual and team performance. Important because it aligns individual and team performance with organizational strategy. Examples: frequent goal-based feedback, managing objectives tied to strategy.
Opportunities and methods by which employees move up to higher positions. Ensures candidates for openings and serves as an extrinsic motivator linked to commitment and lower turnover. Examples: promotion to reward performance, defined career paths and job ladders, succession planning.
The ninth category, Turnover, Retention & Exit Management, covers practices that identify and address the reasons for voluntary turnover. Reducing employee withdrawal improves organizational performance — and as high-performance work systems increase the investment in employees, retaining those employees becomes even more important. Example practices include exit interviews and employee retention strategies.
The nine categories give the course a concrete, organized vocabulary for the specific practices through which leaders and managers exercise influence. Every later topic in the course maps back to one or more of these categories.
The highlighted passages of the Steffensen, Ellen, Wang, and Ferris article establish a clear thesis: as organizational decision makers, managers at all hierarchical levels influence HRM. CEOs may outline strategic principles, top management teams may set HRM policies based on those principles, and the responsibility for implementing specific practices is then delegated to HR or lower-level managers. Managers' roles across the hierarchy make them responsible for much of the observed variability in how HRM practices are adopted, implemented, and how effective they ultimately are.
Yet — per the highlights — research on managers' roles in HRM has been unsystematic. While reviews exist for elements of HRM such as strategic HRM and high-performance work practices, the field lacks holistic knowledge of managers' roles. The article therefore conducts a multilevel, systematic review across five categories of managers: lower-to-middle managers (LTMMs), HR managers, top management teams (TMTs), CEOs, and boards of directors (BODs).
The highlighted text lays out the organizing framework — HRM Content, Process, and Outcomes (HRM-CPO) — drawn from Ostroff and Bowen's three key areas of HRM research:
A highlighted passage emphasizes that for HRM practices to be more than "isolated acts," it is necessary to explain how and why they lead to their outcomes. The translation of HRM content into HRM outcomes has been called the "black box" of strategic HRM — and managers are central to understanding what happens inside it.
The highlighted summary and future-research passages give a level-by-level picture of where knowledge currently stands:
Read together, the highlighted passages show a consistent pattern: higher-level managers (boards, CEOs, TMTs) mainly influence what HRM content is adopted and set strategic direction, while lower-level managers (LTMMs, and to a degree HR managers) mainly influence how content is implemented and experienced. Across every level, the highlights point to the same conclusion — managers are the missing variable that helps explain the variability in HRM outcomes, and the field needs more systematic study of their roles.
The first document defines the toolkit. It establishes that HRM and leadership are unified by influence, and that HRM exercises that influence through concrete, categorizable practices — the nine categories of the Posthuma et al. (2013) taxonomy, from compensation and benefits through turnover and retention. This is the vocabulary of what HRM does.
The highlighted portions of the second document explain who operates the toolkit. Steffensen and colleagues' HRM-CPO framework separates HRM Content (the practices themselves), HRM Process (how they are implemented), and HRM Outcomes (the results) — and shows that managers at all five hierarchical levels shape each part. Practices do not implement themselves; the variability in HRM outcomes across organizations is, in large part, explained by the managers responsible for adoption and implementation.
The throughline: The first document's emphasis on influence and the second document's emphasis on managers are the same idea seen from two angles. HRM is the set of practices through which influence is exercised; managers — at the board, executive, and line levels — are the people who exercise it. Together, the two documents frame SHRM 600 as a course about people influencing people, with managers as the agents who connect HR practices to organizational results.