**6. Strategic workforce resilience management model**

In the second stage of the presentation of the results, the previous section's themes are used to develop a Strategic Workforce Resilience Management Model. This is designed to help in answering this chapter's research question and be useful in addressing SMEs' human and financial resource performance difficulties. Two main aspects are worthy of note here. Firstly, the models' characteristics are embedded in a performance management process that is designed to deal with how people's behaviours could be modified such that SMEs' performance challenge is mitigated. This has not been attempted previously by proponents of HPO and HPWS [11, 13]. The model's four characteristics-set is expounded below to show what it could contribute to SMEs' performance.

The first aspect of the Strategic Workforce Resilience Management Model is rebuilding management-employee relations so as to repair the network relationship that Lin

and Lin [19] anticipated earlier. The 'them-and-us culture' and the need for management to 'push' staff highlighted a traditional management control approach [20], which damages employees' affective engagement with performance [14]. It was found that the ensuing blame culture only served to exacerbate the overall organisational performance challenge and its unsustainability [21]. As management were busy introducing additional work, they were also implementing communication and disciplinary structures in their attempts to minimise additional risks to performance [17]. However, such management practices did not promote knowledge generation and sharing capability as envisaged by Saunila [15] and Cerchione et al. [29]. Rather, employees started to turn to their sub-groups to develop more informal knowledge of how to resolve their knowledge development and innovation capability. It became advantageous when it was realised by both parties how performance depended on respecting each other's contributions at the micro-level if the macro-level performance problem is to be addressed. Likewise, it did not help when those in power tried to resolve matters from an HPO and HPWS's management interventionist perspective through structural imposition rather than providing collegial support to and adding to the resilience qualities of those whose performance may have been identified as wanting.

The second aspect of the Strategic Workforce Resilience Management Model highlights the need for both staff and management to agree on employment processes that clarify what each role category should be responsible to perform. Such clarification was lacking in each of the four SMEs, whose managers seemed to have adopted the HPO model. Despite the shortage of the requisite resources in line with Sardi et al. [11] and Shibin et al. [16], facilitating the implementation of teamwork, organisational planning and systems-wide change as recommended by HPO and HPWS enthusiasts became problematic. Staff's willingness to experiment with new ideas outside of the structural impositions and management control jeopardised the network relational aspect that Lin and Lin [19] consider crucial for organisational performance boost. Employees' shift towards greater clarification of and participation in each other's role boundaries also showed the need to go beyond mechanised communication practices and rigid workplace structures. The need to clarify expectations of what level of performance is needed for organisational performance viability as earlier anticipated by Thanki and Thakkar [27]. The urgency for both management and staff to agree on task redefinition and clarification helps in enabling the types of contributions that could foster Asamany and Shaorong [14] employee commitment to performance management measures.

The third aspect of the Strategic Workforce Resilience Management Model focuses on resetting an employment relationship which had been threatened by the performance crisis that the 4 SMEs found themselves in. This aspect of the model shows the central role that HRM professionals can play in revitalising performance and in mitigating against the financial and human resource risks [17]. Given that the four SMEs highlighted performance implementation measures based on the principle and belief of 'who is boss?' [24], such an approach stifles innovation capability [15, 61] and increases the wasteful use of already constrained resources [16]. Such additional damage to performance warrants an alternative to the HPO and HPWS models. The answer to this has been provided by employees who, in their desire to improve overall organisational performance started by establishing effective workplace relationships among colleagues at the micro-level in order to effect the critically important macro-level performance transformation that was missed by their management. They did so by diffusing their local knowledge and understanding of what works (or in other words, their ability to bounce back) in an effort to counter management's abuse of power and performance measurement controls through moribund team and workplace structural procedures with limited input from HR.

#### *Beyond HRM's Performance Management: Towards Strategic Workforce Resilience DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.96703*

The fourth aspect of the Strategic Workforce Resilience Management Model highlights the need for HR professionals to go beyond the current focus on using organisational structures to review and repair damaged employment relationships as a result of a control, blame-based and ineffective organisational culture [20, 25]. Given the fact that management had underestimated the resilient capability of staff when they were trying to adapt their wider organisational performance to the volatility in their respective merger and post-merger acquisition situations, there is now an urgent need for HRM to include such an aspect in people management processes. It suffices to note that people's contributions are important but equally, if not more importantly, is the need to encourage and develop resilience building in all organisational members such that management and staff and their working relationships will become resilient to the performance challenge. Part of such resilience development involves an accommodation of innate personal preferences that people bring to work and performance settings. This can be done by both parties holding performance dialogues on how to tap into and make use of people's inner qualities to help HR to create a new workplace environment for higher performance individually and organisationally. This enables the development and sustenance of being able to 'bounce back' [30] such that performance is enhanced.
