 Black Box Debate Central to Strategic Human Resource Management is the idea that the adoption by organizations of a more sophisticated set of HR practices, covering key aspects of the management of people in the workplace, has a positive impact on organizational performance. The policies and practices involved cover a wide range of human resource functions in the areas such as recruitment and selection, training and development, performance management, pay and benefits, participation and communication. According to Strategic Human Resource Management Theory, the more these HR practices are implemented in an organization, the better the organization's performance. However, our understanding of the processes by which HR practices affect organizational performance has been quite limited. Indeed, it is unclear both how many steps there are in the link between HRM and performance and what the content of each step is. This has been referred to as the Black Box Debate in Strategic Human Resource Management. In response, there have been a number of efforts to model the impact of HRM on organizational performance. Central to these models is the idea that employees place a key role in explaining the impact of HR practices on organizational performance. Let us take a closer look at the question by discussing three theories that dominate the field of Strategic Human Resource Management. The first is the resource-based view of the firm, developed by Barney. The main assumption of this theory is that organizations can build a competitive advantage based on resources that are valuable, capable of delivering superior competitive results, rare, not easily obtained by competitors, imperfectly imitable, hard to replace. Organizations have different type of resources, including organizational resources, structure, planning, physical resources, plans, equipment and human resources. Looking upon this resource-based paradigm, Buxal proposes that a human resource advantage can consist of the following, a human capital advantage, a situation where there is a stock of exceptional human talent working within the organization whose knowledge, abilities and skills match the strategic needs of the firm and human process advantage. The presence of difficulty imitate historical evolved processes within the organization such as an intense forms of cooperation between people. As such, the resource-based view logic provides a rationale for how HR practices positively affect organizational performance by building a better human capital pool and by stimulating better processes within the organization. The second model is the AMO framework by Applebaum and colleagues. This refers to the idea that people perform well if they have the ability, motivation and opportunity to do so. Let's take a look at the three components. Motivation means the employee can perform well on the job because he or she possesses the necessary knowledge and skills. This is linked to human capital theory. These in turn can be influenced by HR practices, for example by providing training opportunities. Motivation means employees perform well on the job because they want to perform well. HR practices such as internal career opportunities and extensive rewards motivate employees to perform well. This is linked to social exchange theory. The third component is having the opportunity to perform well. HR practices such as enabling employee participation in decision-making can empower employees to show good performance. In sum, the AMO model provides a rationale for how HR practices impact performance by increasing employee's ability, motivation and opportunity to produce high performance. Finally, we have the SHRM process model by Wright and Nishi. This model highlights the distinction between HR practices that senior managers intend to implement in the organization, the practices that are actually implemented by line managers and employees' perceptions of these implemented practices. The model also explains why there is sometimes a disconnect between the three. For example, line managers may fail to implement an intended HR practice because they lack the time or skills to do so and employees, for their part, may interpret the same practices in different ways because of factors like their previous work experience. This model thus addresses the question of how HR practices impact organizational performance by looking at how these practices are implemented in the workplace and how employees experience and respond to them. We have discussed how HRM is related to organizational performance and explored the underlying processes according to the resource-based view, the AMO framework and the SHRM process model. In these theories, we can conclude that employees or human resources play a key role in explaining the impact of HR practices on organizational performance.