The Mirages of Strategic Workforce Planning: A Critical Inquiry Into an Elusive HR Process

ABSTRACT Strategic Workforce Planning (SWP) has become a widely adopted HR process that aims to forecast workforce and skills changes in alignment with organizational strategy. Both academic and professional literature often assumes that SWP mechanically enhances HR efficiency and legitimacy, leading to increased organizational performance. However, this view overlooks the practical challenges that organizations face when implementing SWP. On these grounds, this paper investigates the mechanisms that constrain the implementation of SWP in organizations. Drawing on critical realism, we develop a stratified explanatory model that emphasizes SWP's structural contingency, procedural fragility, and political nature. We identified six interconnected mechanisms that explain why SWP projects fail to be realized in practice, providing a critical and pragmatic perspective on how SWP unfolds within organizations.