Employers and Business-Critical Needs - Dissertation Example

Employers have to know where their key talent is if they are to meet business-critical needs. It’s about ensuring that your business is sustainable.”1. Introduction Human Resource Management (HRM) policies and initiatives have received greater attention in the current period due to highly articulate employee skills training and development strategies at the individual firm level. Thus the theoretical and empirical research of this paper is based on the available literature on the subject at a global level (Dunford, 1996). This study basically draws on the policy based convergence/divergence parameters for the continuous analysis for a proper articulation of the HRM strategy at broader level though its theoretical underpinnings are based on the need to focus attention on the evolving environment of competition. In other words an HRM policy and initiative based analysis is a near approximation of an otherwise intractable continuum which lacks definable contours and a logical conceptual framework of reference. While theoretical constructs underlying this approach have been presented as a uniform analysis there is very little attention being focused on the qualitative paradigm shift caused by the a priori and a posteriori catalytic changes. Thus the qualitative shift in this study is essentially based on these outcomes and the latest calibrations and/or benchmarks enunciated by researchers to establish a conceptual framework for analysis. This paper just focuses on the latest HRM related practices and their theoretical evolutionary process with reference to a company’s operational environment at a global level. 2. Analysis Multicultural workforces in the context of the modern business organization have been studied with specific reference to international Human Resource Management (HRM) practices. HRM according to Armstrong “is the strategic and coherent approach to the management of an organizations most valued assets - the people working there who individually and collectively contribute to the achievement of the objectives of the business” (Armstrong, 2006). HRM involves such tasks as recruitment, training & development (T&D) of skills, employee relations, retention and motivation strategies, workplace culture and delegation of power, authority and responsibility. Thus a far more strategic significance is assumed by its country-specific and organization-specific contexts than any other dimension. Business organizations operate in their respective environments as determined by organizational structure, culture, leadership style, strategic competitive environment and a host of other internal and external influences such as the regulatory framework (Handy, 1999). Given the degree of influence under these circumstances, each organization adopts its own leadership style with a view to achieving organizational goals such as profits, market share growth, higher share prices, quality improvements, brand loyalty, sustainability and benchmarks. These organizational goals can be divided into short term goals and long term goals. Theoretical and conceptual contingency model-based convergence/divergence approach to Human Resource Management (HRM) policies and initiatives has received greater attention in the current period due to highly articulate employee retention strategies at the individual firm level. Thus the model building effort in this analysis is based on the available literature on the subject at a global level along. In other words an HRM contingency model is a near approximation of an otherwise intractable continuum which lacks definable contours and a logical conceptual framework of reference. While theoretical constructs underlying this approach have been presented as a uniform analysis there is very little attention being focused on the qualitative paradigm shift caused by the a priori and a posteriori catalytic changes. Thus the qualitative shift in this study is essentially based on these outcomes and the latest calibrations and/or benchmarks enunciated by researchers to establish a conceptual framework for analysis. A perceptual mapping process to achieve corporate and organizational goals is nothing new in the individual firm’s own strategic HRM operational environment (Beardwell & Holden, 2001). Thus the current dichotomy between strategic competitive environment and strategic operational environment is based on the organizational outcomes. The individual company in the retail sector of the economy is subject to a greater amount of competitive pressure than those firms which exclusively produce in order to sell in the domestic market or export physically. The relationship between the manager and the subordinate has been brought into sharper focus here owing to the very important decisions involving HRM and above all the existence of a dichotomy between the theory and the HRM approaches shows that indisputably international HRM practices under cultural diversity have to be adopted in a variety of contexts. This is none so well borne out than by the fact that where there are international culturally diverse HRM practices in organizations there is a precise tendency to define HRM strategy in keeping with long term organizational goals (Tosi, Rizzo & Mero, 2000). This is in sharp contrast to the inefficiencies associated with less culturally diverse workforces elsewhere where organizational outcomes and goals tend to be synonymous with inward looking local practices. The leadership style plays a much more pivotal role here. The transformational leader motivates his followers by setting an example to his subordinates. However transformational leadership style isn’t always typical of such HRM environments (Bratton, & Gold, 1999). In the first place the democratic and transformational leadership qualities when combined together would ignore such overriding concerns for meeting production targets so that it would instill a sense of permanency in the minds of employees thus reducing absenteeism and redundancy. Indeed people as a resource base include all such as employees, suppliers, customers, creditors, competitors and so on. Employee relations or labor relations and HRM function have to be executed by the manager in such a manner that his management gals are compatible with organizational goals. The manager ought to have the kind of negotiating skills to deal with employees’ representatives such trade union leaders. In the performance of the HRM function the manager is not only a leader but also an executioner of strategy, i.e. the proper management of the HRM function depends on his personal skills. The ability to develop the hidden skills of his subordinates and to train them in the latest techniques matters as much as the ability to sustain the workforce at its peak level in competition against rivals matters. Organizational structure can be regarded as the best management structure comparing to other companies that democratically constituted. It has a flatter organizational structure with a shorter hierarchy which encourage for the interaction and communication between all levels of the employees. There is still a sound system of internal communication with quality circles being formed and well informed about decisions in advance. “Talent management” is a novel concept and it refers to the activities performed to attract develop skills, retain and develop employees. It is all about developing and integrating new workers, retaining the existing workers and luring highly skilled employees to a firm. Companies strive to do their best to attract and retain the most skilled workers in the current competitive environment. Currently more and more firms have understood that employees’ talents and skills are a driving factor in the success of an organization. Talent management is a vital aspect of HRM and HRP. Good talent management is an integral part of HRM and HRP. Usually talent management is utilized as a employee retention tactic. An organization that makes a lot of effort to attract the best employees but spends little time in retaining and enhancing their talent is unsuccessful. HRM and HRP play a crucial role in talent management. However talent management system should be incorporated throughout all departments of the company. For instance departments within the firm should share information with each other so that all employees would gain an idea of the overall goals of the company. Talent management has become that much more important in the midst of the credit crunch. Both Microsoft and NDS UK have successfully adopted employee retention and talent management strategies at the organizational level. Microsoft’s current strategy of retaining employees by delegating power, authority and responsibility is highly characterized by employee empowerment and innovative dynamism. Meanwhile Microsoft has successfully recreated a well known tactical competitor oriented technique in which the company moves up its employees in keeping with their skills and possible development. For instance majority of its software engineers are chosen from a core group of elite universities that include Ivy League Universities in the USA, High tech institutes in India and the top ten universities in the UK. Its previous practice of permitting employees to become owners of the company has not been successful because when the share price increased in the market many of those former employees sold their shares and became instant milliners. Subsequently most of them left the company. The current strategy of retaining employees by giving them greater responsibility is much more successful. Similarly its talent management initiatives and programs have invariably produced a degree of friction less success within the organization. However though the company has succeeded in preventing redundancy to a greater extent, still there is a degree of duplication of work at the middle level. In fact its talent management strategies basically oriented towards capability enhancement. NDS UK has similarly adopted far reaching strategic policy initiatives that border on both employee retention through democratic team work based approaches and talent management programs based on fostering innovative skills. Its talent management strategy is dictated by a desire to create next generation technology. For instance its recent employee retention programs are indented to retain employees on the basis of motivation and upward mobility. By setting production and quality targets the company has successfully retained its key cadres. In the same manner its talent management approach is based on strategic skills development through team activity such as quality circles and six sigma participation. In contrast companies such as British Petroleum and Asda have a high employee turnover as the talent management and employee retention practices that they have employed are not adequate. Due to the fact that employees are not entrusted with challenges in keeping with their skills and talents most of the skilled employees at these companies are regularly heading for the door. Ineffective leadership has also contributed towards this end. There is also less opportunity at these companies to for employees to learn new skills and broaden their skills. Figure 1: Manager’s/Leader’s Competency-based Framework Source: Writer’s own diagram The above diagram (Fig. 1) illustrates the minimum number of tasks for each functional area and thus the fully-fledged framework identifies and addresses the management tasks and issues that correlate with each other to produce an integral system of reference and analysis. For instance the vision & mission of the organization are identified with the long term corporate and business goals. Such goals or objectives are essentially strategic in nature because they necessitate a degree of dependence on the organizational culture and leadership to bring about the appropriate environmental characteristics to achieve those long term objectives. Bass (1985) holds the view that less hierarchical more democratic institutions with the ability to adapt to the unfolding environment are the best. A competency-based contingency framework or model like this requires a series of sub-level functions or competencies to be outlined as of consequence though such heterogeneous elements which lie outside the functional domain of the manager’s/leader’s tasks could be avoided with convenience. For example manager’s/leader’s common competencies are always inclusively treated in the theoretical framework for the purpose of reference. Planning, leading, organizing and controlling are four function based approach to managing the work environment in a business organization. Those are considering as main functions that a manager has to perform in this business organization. The manager’s primary function is to determine the organizational goals that set out in the mission statement and the annual reports to its stakeholders. Organizational goals have to be achieved by utilizing and organizing the available resources and combining them with employees by maximizing its output and minimizing its costs (Buchanan, & Hucynski, 2003). Therefore the manager seeks to combine supplies and provisions and then integrate suppliers and creditors into the whole process of management. Next, management need to adopt methods in order to build integrated networks or process for easy control and execution of strategy. In order to achieve those organizational goals there should be a very good leadership style in organizational environment. There are many different leadership styles in the modern business world and almost every one of them has a particular reason or reasons for its existence. According to Burns (1978) transformational leadership has a set of category constructs such as values, morals, farsightedness, long term goals, principles, acute awareness about the dividing line between causes and symptoms, mission statements, strategic perspectives and human resources. Transformational leadership is primarily and immediately concerned with winning the support of those subordinates to achieve predefined organizational goals. While many such objectives are not realized in the short run due to a variety of reasons such as inadequate planning and wrong forecasts about cash flow, sales revenue and profits, there can be some recovery in the long term. Transformational leader seeks with fervent hope to inculcate a sense of responsibility and pride in achievements among the subordinates. A critical theoretical perspective that has been developed on this particular aspect looks at the transformational leader’s attitude towards his\her subordinates as power-sharing partners whose contribution to the productive process is rewarded with acknowledgment. Leadership styles play a crucial role in HRM practices adopted by modern business organizations. Current literature on leadership developments involves communicating, supervising and inspiring and managing and making the best use of resources available at his disposal. According to the Lussier & Achua (2007) leadership is defined as “the art of motivating a group of people to act towards achieving a common goal”. A good leader should inspire and motivate his employees to follow in his direction. He should be able to foresee the future. A leader who is successful should be able to gather the support of his staff members to achieve the goals of the company. Managers’ styles keep on changing with time and circumstances. Thus it’s very rare to see organizations being run strictly in accordance with the textbook theory. Big business organizations which have successfully created global value brands such as Coca Cola, McDonald’s, IBM and Continental Airlines have all one thing in common, viz. they all strive hard to create value to the customer by focusing on service quality plus cost cutting measures. According to transformational leadership theory it is the leader who brings about valuable and positive changes in his followers. A transformational leader pays attention to “transforming” his followers to help each other, to support each other and to work towards the success of the firm as a whole. In this style of leadership the leader boosts the self-confidence, performance and enthusiasm of his co-workers in the company. According to Burns (1978) and Bass (1985) transformational leadership theory is based on some predefined categories that are in turn connected with the modern democratic leader’s approach to the mission statement based organizational goals. A de-motivated workforce might underperform and then cause conflicts in the workplace. This is apparent in some organizational settings where persistently underperforming staff come to be treated as a liability by the management. Such friction between the manger and employees in culturally diverse organizational settings would be regarded as one of the most negative factors in falling productivity in organizations where mangers tend to be autocratic and diverge from norms. In other words human potentials have to be recognized before they are rewarded. The transformational leader does recognize these positive elements in the culturally diverse workforce. Such leadership qualities have a positive cumulative impact on the long term organizational outcomes. Therefore what’s essentially noticed in culturally diversified organizations an international strategic HRM environment that functions basically with a highly regulated work environment while democratic leadership norms persist even beyond the work environment and sometimes extend up to otherwise indeterminate culturally diverse social settings (Dessler, 2000). The tendency of the staff to be de-motivated and increasing costs were considered by the Toyota System in its analysis of the workplace impact on productivity. The only difference is that it’s totally about manufacturing and not construction. Conversely Kaizen refers to the standard Japanese manufacturer’s practice of continuous improvement of the product. This practice is related to quality circles. Japanese manufacturers have a habit of forming quality circles as informal units within the organization. The main task of a quality circle is to identify quality related constraints and suggest ways and means to overcome them. Their meetings are informal gatherings, usually during lunch or tea. Liberal minded advocates of the Kaizen concept agree that in the absence of operational freedom for the manager there is very little by way of effective decision making that a manger can accomplish without consulting the whole management of the project. In fact the existence of substantial constraints in adopting the concept of Kaizen in lean management on a substantial scale, not having patience and follow through, not having constant visibility by management on the shop floor, perpetuating a blaming and judgmental culture, not having a persistent and challenging leadership, lack of involving employees at all levels in the process from an early stage, not having a clear vision of the future and what could possibly be achieved, failure of management to take a view of the system as a whole of the business and to see the relationships between all processes and failure to realize that management must employ lean methods to alter the culture. The usual notion of lean is that it is a narrow technical means to save cost. It is a highly integrative socio/technical strategy. Therefore there should be a proper balance between demanding results and improving processes, rather than concentrating only on demanding results and not concentrating on improving processes. It must be noted that the Human Resource Management of this nature has more constraints than otherwise would be possible. The limits are applied in order to make HRM practices more manageable and conveniently applicable in the organizational environment. The development of a theoretical and conceptual Human Resource Management requires a well controlled analytical framework of reference with the basis of variables as some integral parameter (Grugulis, 2007). In this instance the writer has made use of people resource, resources (material) and methods as the tripartite integral elements in the framework so that a comprehensive logical and theoretically sound framework could be developed. Such a framework of course has some limitations as the extensive controlling of the variables’ behavioral tendencies. In other words the variables are subject to some limitations that might hamper a free analysis. This is none so more apparent than in the international HRM practices being adopted to manage culturally diverse workforces. It had a very narrow outlook in managing its HRM function. I would inevitably focus attention on these modern HRM practices to align the inner organizational practices and structures with the current international trends in HRM. Next international HRM practices have an identical parallel despite the fact that organizations are in different regions. Therefore it must be noted that MNCs has been much more focused on HRM practices of a very culturally diverse nature. These differences apart further some organizations are known for its international HRM practices in a relatively few sectors only such as retailing and some services as ICT but in this cultural diversity in workforce is near universal spreading into many relatively modern sectors including ICT. In fact cultural diversity is marked by a tendency on the part of the management which is basically organizations to look for what’s known as “cultural fits”. Finally the manager has to integrate a series of methods, viz. tactical, strategic and operational into his four basic functions. Methods include sub-plans, procedural, normative and policy perspectives and technology-centric techniques such as CAD & CAM. Methods are integrated into the four basic functions through a number of strategic, tactical and operational parameters at different phases of operations. The manager’s functional level performance is basically influenced by both quantitative and qualitative aspects. In the first place strategic functions such as planning, organizing and controlling require the manager to design and develop appropriate techniques so that integration across a broader spectrum of tasks at all levels within the organization would be feasible. The principle applies o tactical and operational level integration as well. However it must be noted that a personal management framework of this nature has more constraints than otherwise would be possible. The limits are applied in order to make the framework more manageable and conveniently applicable in the organizational environment. 3. Findings There must be strategic orientation of quality control measures, so that the leadership style becomes more corporate objective centered. The modern business organization has been greatly influenced by competition related leadership styles that tend to be more autocratic in nature. Therefore it is necessary that autocratic leadership styles are less likely to promote structural changes within the organization in order to initiate more efficient HRM and HRD practices. The current level of HRM and HRD strategy adoption for job enrichment and enlargement has been inadequate, especially in the context of European and North American management practice. Employee retention and talent management strategies at Microsoft and NDS UK have made it to the Times Top 100 by being extremely innovative in these strategic initiatives while British Petroleum and Asda have been faced with high labor turnover figures though the latter has been known for some good strategic initiatives under the Wal-Mart management recently. Conclusion Organizational behavior has been defined as people-organization relationship. Thus it has been described in a variety of terms by analysts and the related learning outcomes such as organizational structure, culture, leadership style, HRM and CSR practices and policies, innovation, development and change management are part of this overall strategic orientation. However organizational behavior can be considered as a multifaceted task which is invariably connected with the corporate strategies and goals of the organization. Thus motivation, group dynamics and leadership style have one particular aim, viz. meeting the challenges of the strategic competitive and operational environments of the organization. Particularly the functional parameters associated with attitudes, behaviors, values, strategies, leadership and teamwork skills have undergone a rapid transition. Such parameters have increasingly been redefined by modern theorists to improve a variety of work environment based practices. However existing strategic management initiatives and policies have been subjected to technological advances, competitive actions and fast pace of change within the environment. In other words organizations must adopt a very long term strategy based on targeting not only employees but also re-orienting them to meet overall management challenges both in policy design and implementation. Effective HRM practices must be aligned with organizational outcomes such as internal value chain enhancement and motivation parameters. HRM is a functional strategy that needs a freer organizational environment to develop into a code-based framework or model of convergence. In the context of modern organizations HRM practices play a crucial role. This paper focus upon latest HRM related practices and their impact on the operational environment of a company at the global level. The operation of business environments are influenced by such factors as organizational structure, culture, leadership style, strategic competitive environment and a host of other internal and external influences. The leadership style such as the transformational leadership style plays a crucial role in respect of HRM practices at an organization. REFERENCES 1. Armstrong, M 2001, A Handbook of Personnel Management, Kogan Page, London. 2. Bass, BM 1985, Leadership and Performance beyond Expectations, Collier Macmillan, London. 3. Beardwell, I & Holden, L 2001, Human Resource Management, Pitman, Harlow. 4. Bratton, J & Gold, J 1999, Human Resource Management, Theory and Practice, MacMillan, London. 5. Buchanan, D & Hucynski, A 2003, Organisatioanl Behaviour, Prentice Hall, New Jersey. 6. Burns, JM 1978, Leadership, Harper & Row, New York. 7. Dessler, G 2000, Human Resource Management, Prentice Hall, New Jersey. 8. 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