Role of Performance Improvement and Instructional Design in Strategic Human Resource Management

The use of instructional design theory and approaches has been dramatically increased in the field of education. This profession has made tremendous improvement in solving real world authentic problems. Different types of instructional approaches are very effective in designing curriculum depending upon the skills, knowledge, and task requirements of courses. However, there is less literature available in the area of "use of instructional design and performance improvement in strategic HRM". Instructional design is a very innovative field and it can do wonders in the areas of complex problem solving, knowledge construction, and performing real authentic tasks in the business scenarios, if the principles, approaches and theories of instructional design with performance improvement models are adopted in a right context and with alignment of organisation task requirements. This paper is an attempt to strengthen the role of human resource as a strategic business partner through insinuating and integrating the fields of human performance improvement and instructional design in a business context.

We call the 21st century the era of strategic human resources. There are so many convoluted HR roles and verbiages in the field of training and development, learning at the workplace, talent management, and compensation. There are abundance of books written on the role of human resources a strategic business partner and strategic HRM (Human Resource Management) theories like universalistic perspective (Dewar&Werbel, 1979), which proposed a framework of best practices under SHRM, contingency theory (Butler, Ferris,&Napier, 1991), which described different HR policies and approaches for different organisational contexts, and the configurational approach, which defines a holistic theory of SHRM. Notwithstanding the burgeoning field of SHRM research, the field has been criticised for lacking a solid theoretical foundation that help strategic HRM to truly define the meaning of being strategic and being a strategic business partner in the firm.