Importance of Human Resource Planning in Hospitality Sector

Running head: MANAGING HUMAN RESOURCES
Managing Human Resources
Name of the Student:
Name of the University:
Author’s Note:

1MANAGING HUMAN RESOURCES
Introduction
Human resource management (HRM) practice is designed to maximize the performance
level of the employees towards meeting the strategic objectives of an organization. Human
resource planning is the core function of HRM practice, which assesses the demands and supply
of human resource and link the skills of the employees with the business needs for meeting
organizational goals. This study will choose five peer reviewed journals, which will assess the
importance of human resource planning in hospitality sector.
Article 1
Reference: Saad, S. K. (2013). Contemporary challenges of human resource planning in tourism
and hospitality organizations: A conceptual model. Journal of Human Resources in Hospitality
& Tourism, 12(4), 333-354.
Key Words: HR Planning, contemporary challenges, strategic problem formulation theory,
tourism and hospitality service
Paragraph 1
The article examines the challenges faced by the human resource (HR) managers of
hospitality and tourism industry in their HR planning. As per this article, human resource
planning is the most important factor in human resource management, which determines the
needs of the employees, avoids the oversupply of employees, predicts the manpower needs and
avoids cost error. It specifies the numbers of employees needed for an organization and aligns
the skills of those employees with business needs for achieving the strategic organizational goals.
The purpose of this article is to identify and explain the challenges, which prevent the ability of

2MANAGING HUMAN RESOURCES
HR managers to apply HR planning perfectly in hospitality and tourism sector. Moreover, the
objective of the article is to identify the challenges of HR planning and demonstrate their affects
on overall HR planning process. In order to gather authentic information regarding the research
objectives, the author has used secondary data collection process. The author has used Strategic
Problem Formulation (SPF) Theory for assessing the challenges of HR planning and their impact
of HR management (Saad, 2013). The result of the study has indicated that inaccuracy of data
analysis is the most important change faced by the HR planner during HR planning. Most of the
managers rate the effectiveness of HR information less than moderate despite of varieties of
information statistics and scorecards. It ultimately hampers the management style and employee
performance of organizations.
Paragraph 2
The study is particularly applied to the hospitality and tourism sector. The findings of the
study will be extremely helpful for me for knowing hospitality sector, as it has analyzed the
issues of human resource planning of this sector. The study has argued that HR planning is
considered as complex and ill-structured strategic problem in hospitality and tourism sector. I
came to know that the success of hospitality and tourism sector is largely dependent on the KSA
skills of the employees. Hence, the HR planners of an organization must align the KSA skills of
the employees with the business needs. However, most often, such HR managers face issues in
finding the compatibility between the employees’ KSAs and business needs. On the other hand, I
can use the findings to analyze hospitality sector, as it gives the overview of assessment
employee behavior required in hospitality sector. Most importantly, I understood that inaccurate
data analysis regarding employee KSA mostly lead to challenges in HR planning.

3MANAGING HUMAN RESOURCES
Article 2
Reference: Gannon, J. M., Doherty, L., & Roper, A. (2012). The role of strategic groups in
understanding strategic human resource management. Personnel Review, 41(4), 513-546.
Key Words: Strategic human resource, strategic group, hotel and catering industry, human
resource planning
Paragraph 1
This article examines the emerging concept of strategic group in strategic human resource
management. The purpose of the article is to explore the way which organizations have started to
create competitive advantage in human resource practice through strategic groups. The objective
of the study is to identify the importance for strategic group in readdressing the challenges of
competitive advantages. As per this article, industries are not compilation of disconnect
heterogeneous companies, but subsets of organizations separated by mobility factors that limit
the movement among groups. The ability of organizations towards pursuing distinctive HR
practices for competitive advantage is limited by the constraints like isomorphism and
organizational inertia. As per strategic human resource management, the organizations should
use best fit approach in HR planning for hiring the best employees of creating competitive
advantage (Gannon et al., 2012). The article has use qualitative method for collecting research
information, where the authors have interviewed senior human resource executives and their
team across eight international hotel companies (IHCs). The article has concluded that different
types of institutional factors lead the HR managers to adopt distinctive HR planning strategies
for leading competitive advantage. However, as per resource based view of HR practice, despite