Chapter 1 - Introduction to Human Resource
Management
joi, 16 septembrie 2021 14:22
Organization - A group consisting of people with formally assigned roles who work together to achieve the organization’s goals.
Manager - Someone who is responsible for accomplishing the organization’s goals, and who does so by managing the efforts of the organization’s people.
Managing - To perform five basic functions: planning, organizing, staffing, leading, and controlling.
Management Process - The five basic functions of planning, organizing, staffing, leading, and controlling.
Most writers agree that managing involves performing five basic functions: planning, organizing, staffing, leading, and controlling. In total, these functionsrepresent the
management process. Some of the specific activities involved in each function include:
• Planning. Establishing goals and standards; developing rules and procedures; developing plans and forecasts
• Organizing. Giving each subordinate a specific task; establishing departments; delegating authority to subordinates; establishing channels of authority and
communication; coordinating the work of subordinates
• Staffing. Determining what type of people should be hired; recruiting prospective employees; selecting employees; setting performance standards; compensating
employees; evaluating performance; counseling employees; training and developing employees
• Leading. Getting others to get the job done; maintaining morale; motivating subordinates
• Controlling. Setting standards such as sales quotas, quality standards, or production levels; checking to see how actual performance compares with these standar
taking corrective action as needed.
-In this book, we will focus on one of these functions—the staffing, personnel management, or human resource management function.
Human Resource Management (HRM) - The process of acquiring, training, appraising, and compensating employees, and of attending to their labor relations, healthand
safety, and fairness concerns.
The topics we’ll discuss should therefore provide you with the concepts and techniques every manager needs to perform the “people” or personnel aspects of
management. These include:
• Conducting job analyses (determining the nature of each employee’s job).
• Planning labor needs and recruiting job candidates.
• Selecting job candidates.
• Orienting and training new employees.
• Managing wages and salaries (compensating employees).
• Providing incentives and benefits.
• Appraising performance.
• Communicating (interviewing, counseling, disciplining).
• Training employees, and developing managers.
• Building employee relations and engagement.
And what a manager should know about:
• Equal opportunity and affirmative action.
• Employee health and safety.
• Handling grievances and labor relation.
Why Is Human Resource Management Important to All Managers?
• Avoid Personnel Mistakes
• Improving Profits and Performance (through hiring the right people)
• You May Spend Some Time as an HR manager
• HR For Small Businesses
Line and Staff Aspects of Human Resource Management
Authority - The right to make decisions, direct others’ work, and give orders.
Line Authority - Traditionally gives managers the right to issue orders to other managers or employees.
Staff Authority - Gives a manager the right to advise other managers or employees.
Line Manager - A manager who is authorized to direct the work of subordinates and is responsible for accomplishing the organization’s tasks.
Staff Manager - A manager who assists and advises line managers.
-In popular usage, people tend to associate line managers with managing departments (like sales or production) that are crucial for the company’s survival.
-Staff managers generally run departments that are advisory or supportive, like purchasing and human resource management.
-Human resource managers are usually staff managers. They assist and advise line managers in areas like recruiting, hiring, and compensation.
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,-Human resource managers are usually staff managers. They assist and advise line managers in areas like recruiting, hiring, and compensation.
Line Managers' Human Resource Management Responsibilities
One major company outlines its line supervisors’ responsibilities for effective human resource management under these generalheadings:
1. Placing the right person in the right job
2. Starting new employees in the organization (orientation)
3. Training employees for jobs that are new to them
4. Improving the job performance of each person
5. Gaining creative cooperation and developing smooth working relationships
6. Interpreting the company’s policies and procedures
7. Controlling labor costs
8. Developing the abilities of each person
9. Creating and maintaining departmental morale
10. Protecting employees’ health and physical conditions
-We’ll see in this chapter that, if anything, digital tools like LinkedIn hiring and cloud computing are actually expanding many line managers’ HR responsibilities.
The Human Resource Department
-In small organizations, line managers may carry out all these personnel duties unassisted.
-But as the organization grows, line managers usually need the assistance, specialized knowledge, and advice of a separate human resource staff.
-In larger firms, the human resource department provides such specialized assistance.
-Typical positions for human resource management jobs include compensation and benefits manager, employment and recruiting supervisor, training specialist, and
employee relations executive.
Examples of job duties include:
• Recruiters: Maintain contacts within the community and perhaps travel extensively to search for qualified job applicants.
• Equal employment opportunity (EEO) representatives or affirmative action coordinators: Investigate and resolve EEO grievances, examine organizational practic
for potential violations, and compile and submit EEO reports.
• Job analysts: Collect and examine detailed information about job duties to prepare job descriptions.
• Compensation managers: Develop compensation plans and handle the employee benefits program.
• Training specialists: Plan, organize, and direct training activities.
• Labor relations specialists: Advise management on all aspects of union– management relations.
The Trends Shaping Human Resource Management
Workforce Demographics and Diversity Trends
-Many employers call “the aging workforce” a big problem. The problem is that there aren’t enough younger workers to replace the projected number of baby boom–er
older workers (born roughly 1946–1964) retiring. Many employers are bringing retirees back (or just trying to keep them from leaving).
-With overall projected workforce shortfalls (not enough younger workers to replace retirees), many employers are hiring foreign workers for U.S. jobs.
-Other firms are shifting to nontraditional workers. Nontraditional workers are those who hold multiple jobs, or who are “temporary” or part-time workers, or those
working in alternative arrangements (such as a mother–daughter team sharing one clerical job). Others serve as “independent contractors” for specific projects.
-Some employers find millennials or “generation Y” employees (those born roughly between 1982 and 2004) a challenge to deal with, and this isn’t just an American
phenomenon.
-On the other hand, millennials also bring a vast array of skills. They’ve grown up with social media and are expert at collaborating online. And, having grown up with Ap
and Google, they’re comfortable with innovation.
Trends in How People Work
-At the same time, work has shifted from manufacturing jobs to service jobs in North America and Western Europe. Today over two-thirds of the U.S. workforce is
employed in producing and delivering services, not products.
On-Demand Workers
-Today, in more and more companies like Uber, Elance, and Airbnb, employees aren’t employees at all, but are freelancers and independent contractors who work when
they can on what they want to work on, when the company needs them.
-The fact that employers increasingly rely on such Uber-like “extended work-forces” has implications for HR. For example, companies that rely on freelancers, consultan
and other such nontraditional employees will need to create personnel policies on matters like compensation for these “nonemployees,” and become more expert as
talent brokers in matching specific workers with specific tasks that need to be done.
-Some people who work for on-demand services say the sometimes menial jobs can make them feel somewhat disrespected. One critic says such work is unpredictable
and insecure.
Human Capital
-One big consequence of such demographic and workforce trends is employers’ growing emphasis on their workers’ knowledge, education, training, skills, and expertise
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,-One big consequence of such demographic and workforce trends is employers’ growing emphasis on their workers’ knowledge, education, training, skills, and expertise
in other words on their “human capital.”
-The big change is that even “traditional” manufacturing jobs like assembler are increasingly high-tech. Similarly bank tellers, retail clerks, bill collectors, mortgage
processors, and package deliverers today need a level of technological sophistication they wouldn’t have needed a few years ago. So in our increasingly knowledge-base
economy, “… the acquisition and development of superior human capital appears essential to firms’ profitability and success.”
-For managers, the challenge here is that they have to manage such workers differently. For example, empowering workers to make more decisions presumes you’ve
selected, trained, and rewarded them to make more decisions themselves.
Globalization Trends
-Globalization refers to companies extending their sales, ownership, and/or manufacturing to new markets abroad.
-At the same time, globalization vastly increased international competition. More globalization meant more competition, and more competition meant more pressure to
be “world class”—to lower costs, to make employees more productive, and to do things better and less expensively.
-As multinational companies jockey for position, many transfer operations abroad, not just to seek cheaper labor but to tap into new markets.
Economic Trends
-Although globalization supported a growing global economy, the past 10 or so years were difficult economically.
-Economic trends are pointing up today, and hopefully they will continue to do so.
-Complicating all this is the fact that the labor force in America is growing more slowly than expected (which is not good, because if employers can’t get enough workers
they can’t expand).
-Why the slower labor force growth? Mostly because with baby boomers aging, the “labor force participation rate” is declining—in other words, the percent of the
population that wants to work is declining.
Technology Trends
-However, it may be technology that most characterizes the trends shaping human resource management today. For example, the consulting firm Accenture estimates
that social media connections via tools like LinkedIn will soon produce as many as 80% of new recruits—often letting line managers bypass the human resource
management unit.
-Five main types of digital technologies are driving this transfer of functionality from HR professionals to automation: social media, mobile applications, gaming, cloud
computing, data analytics.
-Data analytics basically means using statistical techniques, algorithms, and problem-solving to identify relationships among data for the purpose of solving particular
problems (such as what are the ideal candidate’s traits, or how can I tell in advance which of my best employees is likely to quit?). When applied to human resource
management, data analytics is called talent analytics.
Today's New Human Resource Management
Distributed HR and the New Human Resource Management
-Perhaps most importantly, more and more human resource management tasks are now being redistributed from a central HR department to the company’s employees
and line managers, thanks to digital technologies like mobile phones and social media.
-Hiring managers in some companies bypass human resource management to find candidates directly via LinkedIn. At Google, when someone applies for a job, his or he
information goes into a system that matches the recruit with current Google employees based on inter ests and experiences. Ina process Google calls “crowdsourcing,”
Google employees then get a big say in who Google hires.
-Thanks to digital devices and social media, employers are shifting (distributing) more HR tasks from central human resource departments to employees and line
managers. This gives many line managers more human resource management responsibilities. And this means that many human resource managers can refocus their
efforts from day-to-day activities like interviewing candidates to broader efforts, such as formulating strategies for boosting employee performance and engagement.
HR and Strategy
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, HR and Strategy
Strategic Human Resource Management - Formulating and executing human resource policies and practices that produce the employee competencies and behaviors th
company needs to achieve its strategic aims.
-Today’s employers want their HR managers to put in place practices that will produce the employee behaviors that help the company achieve its strategic aims. We use
model opening each chapter to illustrate this idea, but in brief the model follows this three-step sequence: Set the firm’s strategic aims → Pinpoint the employee behavi
and skills we need to achieve these strategic aims → Decide what HR policies and practices will enable us to produce these necessary employee behaviors and skills.
HR and Performance
-Employers also expect their human resource manager/“people experts” to spearhead employee performance-improvement efforts.
-Here they can apply three levers.
• The first is the HR department lever. The HR manager ensures that the human resource management function is delivering services efficiently. For example, this
might include outsourcing certain activities such as benefits management, and using technology to deliver its services more cost-effectively.
• The second is the employee costs lever. For example, the human resource manager takes a prominent role in advising top management about the company’s staff
levels, and in setting and controlling the firm’s compensation, incentives, and benefits policies.
• The third is the strategic results lever. Here the HR manager puts in place the policies and practices that produce the employee competencies and skills the compa
needs to achieve its strategic goals.
-Improving performance requires measuring what you are doing. Human resource managers use performance measures (or “metrics”) to validate claims like these.
-Basing decisions on such evidence is the heart of evidence-based human resource management. This is the use of data, facts, analytics, scientific rigor, critical evaluatio
and critically evaluated research/case studies to support human resource management proposals, decisions, practices, and conclusions.
-Put simply, evidence-based human resource management means using the best-available evidence in making decisions about the human resource management practic
you are focusing on.
-The evidence may come from actual measurements (such as, how did the trainees like this program?). It may come from existing data (such as, what happened to
company profits after we installed this training program?). Or, it may come from published research studies (such as, what does the research literature conclude about t
best way to ensure that trainees remember what they learn?).
-Sometimes, companies translate their findings into what management gurus call high-performance work systems, “sets of human resource management practices that
together produce superior employee performance.”
-The bottom line is that today’s employers want their human resource managers to add value by boosting profits and performance.
-Adding value means helping the firm and its employees improve in a measurable way as a result of the human resource manager’s actions.
HR and Performance and Sustainability
-In a world where sea levels are rising, glaciers are crumbling, and people increasingly view financial inequity as offensive,more and more people say that businesses can
just measure “performance” in terms of maximizing profits. They argue that companies’ efforts should be “sustainable,” by which they mean judged not just on profits, b
on their environmental and social performance as well.
HR and Employee Engagement
Employment Engagement - The extent to which an organization’s employees are psychologically involved in, connected to, and committed to getting their jobs done.
-Engaged employees “experience a high level of connectivity with their work tasks,” and therefore work hard to accomplish their task-related goals.
-Employee engagement is important because it drives performance.
The New Human Resource Manager
-To create strategic plans, the human resource manager must understand strategic planning, marketing, production, and finance.
What does it take to be a human resource manager today? Recently, the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) introduceda new “competency model” (call
the SHRM Body of Competency and Knowledge™); it itemizes the competencies, skills, and knowledge and expertise human resource managers need. Here are the
behaviors or competencies (with definitions) SHRM says today’s HR manager should be able to exhibit:
• Leadership & Navigation The ability to direct and contribute to initiatives and processes within the organization.
• Ethical Practice The ability to integrate core values, integrity, and accountability throughout all organizational and business practices.
• Business Acumen The ability to understand and apply information with which to contribute to the Organization’s strategic plan.
• Relationship Management The ability to manage interactions to provide service and to support the organization.
• Consultation The ability to provide guidance to organizational stakeholders.
• Critical Evaluation The ability to interpret information with which to make business decisions and recommendations.
• Global & Cultural Effectiveness The ability to value and consider the perspectives and backgrounds of all parties.
• Communication The ability to effectively exchange information with stakeholders.
SHRM also says human resource managers must have command of the basic knowledge in the functional areas of HR, such as employee relations. The basic knowledge o
principles, practices, and functions they need here should cover:
• Functional Area #1: Talent Acquisition & Retention
• Functional Area #2: Employee Engagement
• Functional Area #3: Learning & Development
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