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The first company under the Amara Raja Group was established in 1984, i.e. Amara Raja Electronics Limited (AREL) followed by Amara Raja Batteries Limited (ARBL). Its founder leveraged the presence of his family in Renigunta, a rural village in South India, and chose to start the industry there to create employment opportunities. Preference is given to local population in all ARG enterprises. Despite its strong people orientation, the HR department/function at ARG got strengthened only after Jaikrishna strived to make it central to business. The department's evolution has been demarcated in three phases. The first and second phase saw few initiatives, and during the third phase the HR department was structured according to the Dave Ulrich Strategic HR Model. While this structure had been successful until now, certain sections in ARG still doubted its sustainability.

This paper aims to examine the future contribution of human resources (HR) in three areas: first, the evolution of four waves of HR value creation leading to an outside-in focus. Second, HR insights about individual competence (talent), leadership and organization capabilities (culture). Third, creating more effective HR departments and upgrading HR professionals.

The author, Dave Ulrich, has worked extensively on HR theory, research and practice. This paper synthesizes and extends his (and others’) thinking about HR’s evolving contributions.

HR is not about HR, but about helping an organization succeed in the marketplace through talent, leadership and organization. HR departments can be assessed and improved based on nine dimensions and HR professionals can recognize and master competencies that help them deliver value.

Reading should come away recognize where HR can continue to contribute to individual and organizational success through thinking outside in, delivering HR agenda (talent, leadership and organization), and improving the HR department and upgrading HR professionals.

The purpose of this paper is to offer an integrated framework for understanding agility. Agility has become an increasingly important capability in today’s changing business world. In this paper, the authors suggest “3, 4’s” to better define agility. Agility can be defined through four dimensions (create the future, anticipate opportunity, adapt quickly and learn always); agility occurs with four stakeholders (strategy, organization, leader and individual); and agility is sustained through four Human Resource (HR) tools (people, performance, information and work).

Using this integrated framework, executives can better define, assess and invest in creating agility as a capability.

The authors studied leading Chinese and US high-tech organizations to discover how they respond to changing market conditions.

The research for this agility framework is described in their book, Reinventing the Organization: How Companies Can Deliver Radically Greater Value in Fast-Changing Markets.

The purpose of this paper is to explore a new leadership style – “soft leadership” – which is needed in a interconnected, global, and technocratic world.

This paper is a combination of research into a new leadership style with a question and answer session during an International Leadership Association (ILA) webinar.

The paper discovers how the soft leaders adopt tools such as influence, persuasion, negotiation, appreciation, motivation, and collaboration for the collective good. It explains how soft leadership is different from other leadership styles. It describes the significance of soft leadership and differentiates between soft and hard leadership through examples. It substantiates with Dave Ulrich's Leadership Code. It provides the questions posed by participants during the webinar organized by International Leadership Association (ILA) with answers. It calls upon readers to consider how leadership insights acquired from this manuscript may be applied individually and organizationally to make a difference in the lives of others.

The 11 C's that collectively constitute soft leadership is a unique concept. Globally renowned management guru, Dave Ulrich mapped 11 C's into a leadership code on the author's request which added value to this new concept. Participation of international leadership experts and their questions during the ILA webinar with the author's spontaneous answers further enriched this concept.

Business leaders can add to their bottom line by being more attentive to “soft” organization factors, such as the commitment level of employees, the quality of leaders, and the linkage of both to obtaining results. Such “intangible” factors account for 50 percent of a company’s market value. Results‐based leadership is the key source of increasing this intangible value. The selection and development of leaders in the organization should begin with the question, “What is it we need to deliver for the company?” Next determine the behaviors the leaders need to deliver those results. Too many companies do the reverse. For example, a firm wants leaders who have a vision “so that” the company will be able to innovate products faster than competitors. Or, the business wants leaders who can build teams quickly “so that” the time from concept to commercialization of a product is 20 percent faster in two years. Four attributes of leadership are suggested: setting direction for where the organization is headed; demonstrating personal character; mobilizing individual employee commitment; engendering the organization’s capability (building systems). Linking these attributes to results, there are four steps offered that will help build results‐based leaders: believe that leadership matters; develop a leadership brand; assess leaders and find their gaps; invest in leadership. A four by four matrix tool is offered as an aid to promote the linkage between capabilities and results. Empowerment becomes easy when the four levers (information, competence, authority, and rewards) are taken across the four boundaries of every company (vertical, horizontal, external and global). A succinct example: most firms move authority vertically from top to bottom but fail when they keep information, competence and rewards at the top.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the impact that HR departments have on alternative stakeholders when they focus on improving the organization’s information capability instead of focusing their information agenda on human resource (HR) departmental activities.

The findings are based on the 2016 offering of the HR Competency study that is sponsored by the Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan and the RBL Group. The data set consists of over 36,000 respondents from around the world. Data were gathered through a 360 methodology that includes self-ratings and HR and non-HR associate ratings.

The findings show that HR’s involvement in leveraging business information has more impact than any other HR department activity on creating value for key external stakeholders. When controlling for other HR activities, the analysis shows that 77.4 per cent of HR total impact on customer value and 55.6 per cent of shareholder value occurs through HR’s involvement in information management. This impact occurs as HR departments contribute to identifying important external information (including customer and competitive information), importing important external information into the firm, analyzing information through both quantitative and qualitative algorithms, disseminating key facts and findings throughout the firm and ensuring the full utilization of information in decision making. The authors provide examples of how HR departments in leading companies are contributing to each of these phases of organization information management.

These findings have potentially important implications for how HR professionals add value to their key stakeholders. It suggests that HR departments will add greater value to their firms as they shift the focus of their information agenda from application to internal HR processes and practices to creating competitive advantage through organization-wide information management capability.

The purpose of this paper is to provide answers to four questions on building a better human resources (HR) department: why?, who?, what? and how?

The paper is based on the accumulated experience of the co-authors.

The paper finds that better HR departments create better organizations and will often do this by enabling better relationships between the people working in them. Developing the right relationships is also an increasingly important part of creating an effective HR organization.

Much attention has been spent on developing HR professionals. The authors also want to make HR departments better. This paper steers future research on HR effectiveness in this direction.

Senior HR leaders charged with improving their HR department may do so with the roadmap offered by the authors.

For businesses to receive full value from HR, it is very important to upgrade the quality of HR professionals. It is even more important to upgrade HR departments. This paper suggests how this can be done.

This paper seeks to compare Ulrich's model of HR transformation/shared service organisation (the “three‐legged stool”) with the empirical evidence from the research. The aim of the paper is to describe the journey from theory to practice of HR transformation in organisations as they adopt and adapt the model.

An institutional frame of reference is used for case studies of seven Swedish organisations. The respondents in the 192 interviews are HR professionals, line managers and other stakeholders.

All seven of the organisations adopted the HR transformation as a standard blueprint. Management consultants played a leading role in this process. HR service centres were established, the local HR staffs were reduced radically, and the remaining role, the HR business partners, took on lesser importance. During the adaptation process a variety of solutions resulted, some of which were innovations.

Because of the small sample size, the generalisability of the results is somewhat limited.

The results may useful to both researchers and practitioners, whether they are involved in the study or in the re‐organisation of HR. It is not easy to imitate a theoretical model or a “best practice” model without taking the translation process into consideration.

Previous studies have not examined how HR transformation/shared service travels in different organisations using this number of interviews in in‐depth research. These results show that achieving the desirable HR organisation depends on the translation and interpretations of the concepts in the local context.

The goal of this chapter is to explore the requirements modern companies expect of HR professionals’ competences.

Departing from the widely acknowledged HR competence studies of Ulrich and associates, we extended them with the continuous learning competence profile and HR professionals’ individual job performance. The empirical study is built on open interviews with HR leaders of ten large Dutch companies.

The study offers a new set of HRM competences. This set includes six HRM profiles: Business Focus, Learning Focus, Strategic Focus, HR Technology, HR Delivery, and Personal Credibility. Several contingency factors are thought to play a role in supporting these HRM competences: company culture, strategy, size, sector, scope, and position of HR professionals.

Based on these contributions, we recommended conducting a quantitative study to gain understanding of the relevance of the individual HRM job performance and to find associations between the HRM competences and the individual HRM job performance.

The focus of this chapter is a combination of HRM competences and the individual job performance of HR professionals.

Human resource (HR) transformation research has not studied the role of digital HR technology and HR role in the context of Indian organisations. To address the gap, the current research aims to investigate the impact of HR role and digital HR technology on successful HR transformation. Further, the research shall investigate the mediating role of various HR roles (i.e. administrative, employee champion, change agent and strategic partner role) on digital HR technology and business outcomes.

The research used a post-positivist methodology using survey method. Data has been collected from 918 executives representing several sectors of Fortune 500 Indian companies. Validated instrument has been used and the collected data are analysed using AMOS and structural equation modelling.

HR transformation using Digital human resource technology (HRT) can significantly enhance business outcome of fortune 500 companies of India if it is mediated by different HR role (strategic, employee champion, change agent and administrative expert). The result also proved that just implementation and adaption of the Digital HRT may not guarantee HR Transformation unless HR optimise the specific role as per the need of the hour.

HR transformation research has not studied the role of digital HR technology and HR role in the context of fortune 500 Indian organisations.