Human Resource Management as a Catalyst for Firm Innovation: A Bibliometric Review

Growing competition due to global-wide firm operations has compelled organisations to constantly force themselves to modernise and re-shape their organisational structures, systems, and techniques to reap a competitive advantage. Researchers claim that innovation is of a salient competitive strategy as it enables firms to increase their growth and competitive position, thereby achieving a sustained competitive advantage. Notwithstanding, how to foster innovation within firms remains paradoxical and past findings are obscure. Intriguingly, the literature shows that human resources and its effective management is a significant enabler of organisational capabilities, a "proxy variable" for competitive advantage. It is axiomatic that innovation is being recognised as an organisational capability. Notably, the research on the link between human resource management and innovation is plethora in developed country context. However, little is known about the evolution of this new field of research. Therefore, the present study aims to analyse and synthesis the documents published in the Scopus database on human resource management and innovation. Bibliometric analysis was performed to discover the present trend and the evolution of the research field, identify the principal authors, articles, and topics, and propose future research direction. The articles published between 2000 and 2021 were analysed quantitatively. Based on the analysis fourteen compelling research clusters were identified: "innovation", "human", "knowledge management", "resource allocation", "Technical presentation", senior entrepreneurship", "HRM practice", "evaluation", "learning", "e-government", "computer-generated holography", "continuous innovation", " evolution", " role", is the critical research domain in the knowledge field of HRM and innovation.