Question 1: [45 marks]

The labour market has become one of the sectors in the country that are moving towards commercialisation in the South African economy. The paper clarifies how the labour market has progressed over the years in the country.

Required:

1.1 Discuss how the nature of work has changed over the centuries in the work environment in South Africa. (16 marks)

1.2. You are an owner of a relatively new restaurant whose service was severely affected by the COVID-19 pandemic restriction. You have decided to adopt a new strategic approach for the survival of your business. You intend to digitalise your services during and after the end of the lockdown restrictions.

Required:
Demonstrate how you will briefly apply the five-stage strategic management model to convert your strategic aim into action. (5×2=10 marks)

1.3 Use the Ulrich and Brockbank (2005) model to illustrate your organisation’s human resources functional role. (5×2=10 marks)

1.4. In your organisation, you are confronted with the situation where some of your employees misuse the organisation’s technological resources and caused confusion at work during working hours. You realise that the company is losing money unexpectedly on internet use into none work-related activities. As a manager in your unit, you are expected to manage this situation not to happen again.

Required:

Explain how you will use the three means identified by Van Gramberg et al. (2014) to address employees’ misbehaviour in order to improve efficiency in the use of the internet during working hours. (3×3=9 marks)

Question 2 [16 marks]

Discuss the four potential employment modes that you find within an organisation as part of the Human Resource Strategy.

Question 3: [26 marks]

Universalist approaches to SHRM are based on the assumption that there is ‘one best way’ of managing people to enhance organizational performance, and that it is the task of the researcher to identify what this is and the task of the HR professional to implement it.

Required:

Explain the human resource interrelated ‘best practices’ derived from discussions with the HR executives.

Question 4: [13 marks]

Describe the four criteria that can be classified as ‘resources’ from an RBV perspective that can help secure a sustained competitive advantage for the organisation. Total 100 Marks

Answers to Above Questions on Strategic Human Resource Management

Answer 1: An analysis of the labour market in South Africa indicates that it is moving towards commercialisation and has changed significantly over the years. In the Pre Colonial period in South Africa, labour was communal and their main objective was on meeting out their basic needs. The emergence of the mining and manufacturing industry in the 19th century has resulted in the labour being shifted towards wage labour in mines, factories and urban areas.