Chapter 6: Human Resource Management, Innovative Work Behaviour, Incremental and Radical Innovation: Inspirational Vision or Aspirational Rhetoric

The recent COVID-19 pandemic has provided us with an important lesson about human resources (HR) in organisations, and it is their ability to adapt to crisis in the form of a pandemic. Organisations have shown a very significant capacity to reconfigure their human resource base to respond to highly dynamic and volatile external environmental conditions (Collings et al., 2021). This responsiveness suggests that human resources and the ways they are managed can innovate and adapt to new ways of doing things. One suspects that Schumpeter had neither a global pandemic nor human resource management (HRM) in mind when he envisaged the cyclical process of technological innovation and diffusion that gives rise to waves of creative destruction where old is supplanted by the new in an incessant cycle that can take years to unfold (Henton and Held, 2013). Arguably, organisations did that in weeks and the role of HRM practices in this context was likely a contributing factor. HRM was able to step up to the plate because its bundling of practices allowed it to de-prioritise some core HRM practices such as recruitment, selection, learning and development and prioritise other practices such as employee health and wellbeing, motivation, engagement and workplace flexibility (Adikaram et al., 2021).