Increasingly, human resource management (HRM) priorities are being treated as dependent variables. Now in addition to studying HRM priorities and practices as determinants of individual outcomes such as performance or absenteeism, researchers are studying how such conditions as competitive strategies and product life cycles shape HRM priorities. This article describes an empirical test of two major hypotheses regarding how competitive strategies and product life cycles are related to HRM priorities. Briefly, it was hypothesized that human resource management priorities would differ for firms in the growth and maturity stages of the product life cycle and they would differ across firms using the competitive strategies of differentiation and cost-efficiency. Data gatheredfrom 300firms in a variety of industries provide support for the hypotheses.
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