Effective Human Resource Management - Essay Example

113070 Human Resource Management relies on the theory that human resources are strategic and effective management of these resources can provide exceptional and competitive advantage to the organisation. In recent years, there had been a stress on human resource development, which branched out of the conventional personnel management with additional glitter and strength and gained its own splendour in the present business world. Earlier words like labour force, work force, personnel management of both the forces implied a collective mass of rigid, slightly thoughtless, immovable rather threatening in its dark intensity. Human Resource gives a much softer picture of the work force, with individual faces and diverse needs. But the main characteristic of HR is the individual and separate recognition of each worker and his varying desires, needs and ambitions, and various dimensions of his life. The realisation that people are not just employees, or a dark distant force, but are human beings too and they have to be managed in a way that is consistent both with their individual needs and organizational requirements. Actually speaking nothing much has changed, when one thinks of the measuring scales applied are the traditional requirements like quality and efficiency. But the basic difference has already come into existence where HR policies treat the employees not just as employees, but also as people with feelings and various requirements too. Organisational effectiveness could be expected only as the result of various inputs of human resource management. Without this investment, it is difficult to expect any great results in the output. This means human resources and business strategies should closely fit into one another. So the best model would be the one that could find the closest fit between the two. For Model one, I am choosing Hard HRM also called the Michigan model, (Fombrun et al), which is an US model of Human Resources Management. According to Michigan theorists the following are the most important factors: 1. Selection of the most suitable people who can answer the needs of the organisation in every way possible. 2. Performance should be single minded and the only goal is to meet the organisational requirements. 3. Appraisal should be constant, with instantaneous feedback to and fro, and continuous monitoring should prevail. 4. Development of the skills and experience with training, knowledge improvement, encouraging coercion to keep the individual motivated at all times should remain continuously intact. 5. Rewards to the employees as an inspiration and motivation for further hard work that also can create a model for other employees. They feel that experienced professionals should bank on the skills and knowledge from diverse disciplines and this collected information should be broken down to achieve solutions to various individual and group related problems. It also hope that this approach would give a new set of tools to the organisations to face the real-life situations, innovate new ways of teamwork with the maximum results, and the rich source of knowledge drawn from various disciplines would create an active field of Human Resource Management. There is no doubt that it is a very effective and strong model of HRM. But it is an autocratic model, where something is missing. It has no feelings or weaknesses. Anything that deals with humans should have a certain failings and weak points and only then, it would be effective. This model is more suitable for communist rules. "Hard HRM assumes that increasing productivity will continue to be management's principal reason for improving HRM; while this is a major factor in many private and public sector organisations, it clearly is not the only one" Fombrun et al from Pinnington and Edwards (2000, p.11). John Storey described it as Hard HRM, because of its implication on using the employees as the main means of achieving organisational effectivity in a rather cold and calculated way. Competitive success of any organisation depends exclusively on the way the employees are used as human resources and this made Storey to say that it is a hard set of rules. The main focus is on the organisation and the way it responds to its external environment. This is referred to as both the model's strength and limitation. According to this model, employees are the human resources, very much like machinery or financial investment and this makes HR region the most important area, as it is responsible for all policies and programmes connected with the employees. It develops strategies keeping the organisational goals in view and tries to strike a balance between the two. Human resources being used as the means of achieving the ultimate goals of Management did not appeal to many people. Humans and machinery are equated here, without any advantage to human beings. They have to be selected, trained, exploited as far as possible, and perhaps discarded. It gives a very hardheaded dictatorial outlook to the model. It is one sided, obviously on the side of the management. Its concern is management and the organisation and does not concern itself with the employees or their welfare. "The 'hard' approach focuses on the 'resource' side of the phrase 'human resource management'. It argues that people are organisational resources and should be managed like any other resource: obtained as cheaply and used as sparingly as is consistent with other requirements, such as those for quality and efficiency; and that they should be developed and exploited as folly and profitably as possible," Hegewisch and Brewster (1993, p.34). This model was attacked by many theorists over the years, like Hendry, Staehle, Weiss, Albert, Guest, who argued that it was imprecise, prescriptive and do not have any evidence that it could be palatable to the employees at large. "It has been attacked for being just 'personnel management' in another guise; and for being inappropriate to, for example, British industrial relations practice," Hegewisch (p.35). SECOND MODEL: PERSONNEL MANAGEMENT OF STOREY: John Storey proposed another model that is also called Personnel Management Model. He advocated different ways of making the old personnel management a part of HRM, without discarding it, but by giving it a modern outlook: 1. This can be termed as Personnel management, and that means, 'breathing new life into old ideas'. Personnel management should not be totally forgotten and with fresh policies, it can be converted into a very convenient HRM. 2. It can be used as a tougher form of personnel management, and here, if not properly executed, he said it could resemble the above Hard HRM. 3. The third one was an approach that is absolutely business oriented applied to labour management. 4. Another principle is giving a human face to the old personnel management, making it broad minded and applying it as part of HRM with improved outlook and various useful dimensions. His methods, properly applied, answered many silent questions posed by the hard model. Storey called it the Art of People Management in the new scientific way. He is of the opinion that HRM, properly applied, could be a magic contributor to the organisational atmosphere by being the buzzword for developmental strategies and policies, creating a human capital. He argued that HRM could be made into a unique area of employee commitment to the organisation, with the right motivational programmes and policies. "Storey's 'ideal description' of personnel management/IR supportive of the co-existence of management and unions. Here personnel management operates under collective bargaining arrangements in which unions have sufficient power that management has to negotiate and work with them," (Pinnington, p.16). He is of the opinion that traditional Personnel Management could be taken as the basis of comparatively new Human Resource Development for serving a much better purpose. He describes them under many points, 'the nature of relations', 'beliefs and assumptions' etc. and these points provide new dimensions to the HRM he is propagating. His twenty five points include Beliefs and assumptions (Contract, Rules, guide to management action, behaviour referent, managerial task vis--vis labour, nature of relations, conflict, standardization), Strategic aspects (key relations, initiatives, corporate plan, speed of decisions), Line Management ((management role, key managers, prized management skills), Key levers (foci of attention for interventions, selection, pay, conditions, labour management, thrust of relations with stewards, communication job design conflict handling, training and development) (based on Pinnington, p. 17). Mostly companies do not focus on all twenty-five points, but target the conventional areas like teamwork and employee involvement. There are criticisms about Storey's model that it is highly preachy, rambling and loose. Such a model will be doomed from the beginning for lack of strict application. But there is no doubt that in spite of being a 'soft' model, it is an effective one, having the potential of touching each employee. Storey talks about the earlier labour and personnel management; but argues that an improved version has to be evolved from the old framework, by breathing new life into the sound, but slightly unimaginative principles. Today's globalisation has brought another problem home. It is not easy any more to evolve models and theories of business world, without making them applicable to the international region. The business world and outlook has changed completely. What was applicable in a country cannot be applicable for the entire world. Jostling cultures, competing employees have become part of the multi national companies and human resources have to be drawn from diverse backgrounds. Similarly, policies and strategies of human resource management have to apply to all these backgrounds. "In the international setting, however, the HR department must be much more involved in order to provide the level of support required and will need to know more about the employee's personal life," Dowling et al (1994, p.8). For this revolutionary change, Storey's model is much more amenable than the Hard model. Some of the countries still persist on personnel management and evolving it to HRM might not be very difficult. "In many organizations, the human resource (HR) function is being transformed from a centralized advisory staff function to a proactive and distributed deliverer of personnel systems in support of the business strategy," Flood et al (1996, p.3). Team composition, team culture and team management are one of the important strategies of HRM. Management philosophy and company strategy should leave room for manoeuvre. There is a growing importance of human resources and its awareness in every organisation. "This importance is underscored by the shift from personnel management to strategic HRM and by the intensified involvement of regular line management in personnel activities," Flood et al (p.223). Organisations today are trying to develop a revolutionised outlook towards the employees, far removed from the previous, labour concept that had a slight communist smell in it. "It is widely believed that many such companies are using innovative human resource management strategies that maximize the productivity of their work forces," Kleingartner (1987, p.4). Environmental pressures can come in many forms like political forces, economic atmosphere, the very structure of the organisation, organisation's strategy and its mission and goals, and the prevalent cultural forces. These are important as every organisation reacts and responds to these forces, and naturally all the strategic policies are formed as reactions to these forces. Human resources, that means, employees are affected by the policies that are already responding to the environmental factors and thus, environmental factors attain supremacy. There is no doubt that common element of these models, or of all the models, is the underlying unitarism, which is the basic need of the management to adopt the best strategic policy towards developing a hub of great human resources for the organisation. The other two important factors are strategic and social. ""Finally, all predict that HRM innovations will be in the long-term social interest of employees, employers and the nation," Pinnington (p.23). In any organisation, top managers have to take an interest in human resource management and only then the strategies could be formed and executed. "Top managers are responsible for assembling and allocating physical capital resources. Top managers both are and must manage the firm's human capital resources," Flood et al (p.35). Hard model could work very well in a slightly dictatorial atmosphere, or a highly capitalistic region; but it would be a failure if applicable to all cultures and places. On the contrary, properly applied, Storey's model, which is a mixture of both the old and new business worlds, could be much more useful and tactful. It would deal with employees in a more human way with ethics on its side. BIBLIOGRAPHY: 1. Dowling, Peter J, Schuler, Randall S. and Welch, Denice E. (1994), International Dimensions of Human Resource Management, 2nd edn., Wadsworth Publishing Company, Belmond, California. 2. Flood, Patrick C., Gannon, Martin J. and Paauwe, Jaap (1996), Managing without traditional methods, International Innovations in Human Resource Management, Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, Wokingham. 3. Hegewisch, Ariane and Brewster, Chris (1993), European Developments in Human Resource Management, Cranfield University, Kogan Page Limited, London. 4. Kakabadse, Andrew and Tyson, Shaun (1994), ed. (Cases in European Human Resource Management, 2nd edn., Routledge, London. 5. Kleingartner, Archie and Anderson, Carolyn S. ((1987), Human Resource Management in High Technology Firms, Institute of Industrial Relations, Lexington. 6. Pinnington, Ashly and Edwards, Tony (2000), Introduction to Human Resource Management, Oxford University Press. 7. Wasmuth, William J. (1970), Human Resources Administration: Dilemmas of Growth, Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston. Read More