Motorola has been creating industry-leading products since the launch of its first mobile phone,
in 1983. As a result of rapidly changing technologies and increased competition in Europe and
Asia during the 1990s, the HR function (‘HR leadership team’) in Motorola developed a new
HR strategy with goals that included linking HR practices to the requirements of key
stakeholders (i.e. customers and shareholders), developing the culture so that it was
consistent with the company’s brand identity, and gaining the commitment of all employees.
HR put culture at the heart of the strategy. The HR function identified that the company culture
needed to change if the company was going to respond effectively to increasingly competitive
global markets. By 2011 the company was better known for filing patents on an incremental
basis: ‘No one had thought of Motorola as being particularly innovative in a long time, despite
the firm’s best attempts…The company failed to pursue the innovations that led to
fundamental change in its key markets’ (Lerner, 2012: 1-2)
Activity
- To what extent does this case illustrate a contingency approach to SHRM and how
successful does this appear to have been?
