Achieving Competitive Advantage through Human Resource Strategy Essay

Achieving Competitive Advantage through Human Resource Strategy - Essay Example According to the research conducted by the Bureau of National Affairs for 2012-2013, seven out of ten (that is 69%) HR offices outsourced one activity, at a minimum, in 2012. The same 69% of the companies reported that an activity, once outsourced, was never returned to the in-house HR team. Therefore, the presented above trends raise a number of questions related to the reasons and results of HR function outsourcing in the organizational context. In today’s very competitive economy the reasons for taking some component of managing a business out of the organization should be very serious because a successful organization is the one that is effective and efficient in all of its business processes. For that reason, the goal of this paper is to research and analyse the concept of outsourcing an HR function and its benefits and barriers. This work will try to give a clear definition of what HR outsourcing is, what types of HR outsourcing there exist, and what particular component s of the HR function should or should not be outsourced. It will review how companies manage HR outsourcing and how beneficial it is for organizations to outsource HR activities in general. In order to fulfil all these tasks, it is important too, first of all, determine the concept of outsourcing itself. According to Norman (2009, p.2), â€Å"outsourcing is an important management practice† that means transferring implementation of some aspect of the business to a third party organization. A company may outsource, for instance, a business function, such as payroll, a manufacturing process or a part of business-supporting tasks, such as cleaning, mailing and so on. A very clear and precise definition of outsourcing is provided by Brown and Wilson (2005), who states that outsourcing is obtaining services from outside of the company.