At its core the COVID-19 pandemic is a human crisis. Thus, human resource (HR) leaders have been central to the response in organisations globally. This contrasts with previous crises such as the global recession of 2008–09 or the Y2K crisis at the turn of the millennium that accentuated the roles of finance and IT leaders, respectively. By amplifying the role of HR leaders, COVID-19 has become an inflection point with substantive implications for HR globally. In this commentary, we reflect on the implications of COVID-19 for HR research, including identifying some key research questions for strategic human resource management (HRM).

Early in the evolution of the field, Wright and McMahan defined strategic HRM as ‘the pattern of planned human resource deployments and activities intended to enable the firm to achieve its goals’ (1992, p. 298). They argued that the domain of strategic HRM encompassed ‘the determinants of decisions about HR practices, the composition of human capital resource pools, the specification of the required human resource behaviours, and the effectiveness of these decisions given various business strategies and/or competitive situations’ (Wright and McMahon, 1992, p. 298). Since then, strategic HRM research has overwhelmingly focused on the relationship between HR practices and firm performance (Huselid, 1995) or the impact of those practices on mediators between these two variables (Boxall et al., 2016). However, the global pandemic revealed how myopic such research has been for addressing how firms strategically manage people.

This narrow focus limits our understanding of key questions exposed during COVID-19. For example, the pandemic requires a shift in understanding of how work context, such as working onsite versus working from home (WFH), influences employee behaviours and actions. The pandemic has also exposed tensions among stakeholders and challenges the primacy of the shareholder view which has dominated thinking in strategic HRM (Crane and Matten, 2020; Hitt et al., 2020). Finally, while HR has taken a strategic turn, tensions around its role have been exposed during the pandemic, highlighting the requirement for both strategic and tactical contributions. We consider each of these in turn.

COVID-19 大流行的核心是一场人类危机。因此，人力资源 (HR) 领导者一直是全球组织响应的核心。这与之前的危机形成鲜明对比，例如 2008-09 年的全球经济衰退或千禧年之交的千年危机，这些危机分别突出了财务和 IT 领导者的角色。通过扩大人力资源领导者的作用，COVID-19 已成为对全球人力资源产生重大影响的转折点。在本评论中，我们反思了 COVID-19 对人力资源研究的影响，包括确定战略人力资源管理 (HRM) 的一些关键研究问题。

在该领域发展的早期，赖特和麦克马汉将战略人力资源管理定义为“旨在使公司实现其目标的计划人力资源部署和活动的模式”（1992 年，第 298 页）。他们认为，战略人力资源管理的领域包括“人力资源实践决策的决定因素、人力资本资源库的构成、所需人力资源行为的规范，以及这些决策在给定各种业务战略和/或竞争情况下的有效性”。 '（赖特和麦克马洪，1992 年，第 298 页）。从那时起，战略人力资源管理研究压倒性地集中在人力资源实践和公司绩效之间的关系上（Huselid，1995) 或这些做法对这两个变量之间的中介的影响（Boxall 等人，2016 年）。然而，全球大流行揭示了此类研究在解决公司如何战略性管理人员方面的短视。

这种狭隘的关注限制了我们对 COVID-19 期间暴露的关键问题的理解。例如，大流行需要转变对工作环境（例如现场工作与在家工作 (WFH)）如何影响员工行为和行动的理解。大流行还暴露了利益相关者之间的紧张关系，并挑战了在战略人力资源管理中占主导地位的股东观点（Crane 和 Matten，2020 年；Hitt 等人，2020 年）。最后，虽然人力资源已经采取了战略转向，但在大流行期间围绕其角色的紧张关系已经暴露出来，突出了对战略和战术贡献的要求。我们依次考虑这些。