The Best Fit Approach

The best fit approach emphasizes the importance of ensuring that HR strategies are appropriate to the circumstances of the organization, including its culture, operational processes and external environment. HR strategies have to take account of the particular needs of both the organization and its people. For the reasons given above, it is accepted by most commentators that ‘best fit’ is more important than ‘best practice’. There can be no universal prescriptions for HRM policies and practices. It all depends. This is not to say that ‘good practice’, or ‘leading edge practice’ ie practice that does well in one successful environment, should be ignored. ‘Benchmarking’ (comparing what the organization does with what is done elsewhere) is a valuable way of identifying areas for innovation or development that are practised to good effect elsewhere by leading companies. But having learnt about what works and, ideally, what does not work in comparable organizations, it is up to the firm to decide what may be relevant in general terms and what lessons can be learnt that can be adapted to fit its particular strategic and operational requirements. The starting point should be an analysis of the business needs of the firm within its context (culture, structure, technology and processes). This may indicate clearly what has to be done. Thereafter, it may be useful to pick and mix various ‘best practice’ ingredients, and develop an approach that applies those that are appropriate in a way that is aligned to the identified business needs.

But there are problems with the best fit approach, as stated by Purcell (1999):

Meanwhile, the search for a contingency or matching model of HRM is also limited by the impossibility of modelling all the contingent variables, the difficulty of showing their interconnection, and the way in which changes in one variable have an impact on others.

In Purcell’s view, organizations should be less concerned with best fit and best practice and much more sensitive to processes of organizational change so that they can ‘avoid being trapped in the logic of rational choice’.