Practices of human resources and strategic orientation in the medium industry: the experience of the industries of Manizales, Colombia

Abstract

This article revises the practices of human resource and strategic orientation in the medium industry, taking the industries from Manizales, Colombia as the object of this study. After evaluating the relations between the practices of human management and strategic orientation of the business, in the studied population there were no evidences of the existence of relations between these two aspects, even though empirical evidences in other environments show the oposit. This leads to the lack of coherence among the corporate strategies and human resources and the disagreement of the strategic orientations between the diverse practices.

This study was posed as an explaining hypothesis of the low development of the strategic systems for human management, so the management of human resources in the companies studied, is done according to functional reasons instead of strategic postures of the company. In most of the companies, there was found, at a descriptive level, a dominance of corporate strategic orientations towards the customer, the product, and practices of operative excellence, which generates the aforementioned incoherencies.