Professional Documents
Culture Documents
management of an organization's most valued assets - the people working there who
individually and collectively contribute to the achievement of the objectives of the business.[1]
The terms "human resource management" and "human resources" (HR) have largely replaced
the term "personnel management" as a description of the processes involved in managing
people in organizations.[1] In simple words, HRM means employing people, developing their
capacities, utilizing, maintaining and compensating their services in tune with the job and
organizational requirement.
Contents
[hide]
1 Features
2 Academic theory
3 Business practice
o 3.1 HRM strategy
4 Careers and education
5 Professional organizations
6 Functions
7 See also
8 References
[edit] Features
Its features include:
Organizational management
Personnel administration
Manpower management
Industrial management[2][3]
But these traditional expressions are becoming less common for the theoretical discipline.
Sometimes even employee and industrial relations are confusingly listed as synonyms,[4]
although these normally refer to the relationship between management and workers and the
behavior of workers in companies.
The theoretical discipline is based primarily on the assumption that employees are individuals
with varying goals and needs, and as such should not be thought of as basic business
resources, such as trucks and filing cabinets. The field takes a positive view of workers,
assuming that virtually all wish to contribute to the enterprise productively, and that the main
obstacles to their endeavors are lack of knowledge, insufficient training, and failures of
process.
Synonyms such as personnel management are often used in a more restricted sense to
describe activities that are necessary in the recruiting of a workforce, providing its members
with payroll and benefits, and administrating their work-life needs. So if we move to actual
definitions, Torrington and Hall (1987) define personnel management as being:
“a series of activities which: first enable working people and their employing organisations
to agree about the objectives and nature of their working relationship and, secondly, ensures
that the agreement is fulfilled" (p. 49).
".......those decisions and actions which concern the management of employees at all levels in
the business and which are related to the implementation of strategies directed towards
creating and sustaining competitive advantage" (p. 352).
The basic premise of the academic theory of HRM is that humans are not machines, therefore
we need to have an interdisciplinary examination of people in the workplace. Fields such as
psychology, industrial relations, industrial engineering, sociology, economics, and critical
theories: postmodernism, post-structuralism play a major role. Many colleges and universities
offer bachelor and master degrees in Human Resources Management or in Human Resources
and Industrial Relations.
One widely used scheme to describe the role of HRM, developed by Dave Ulrich, defines 4
fields for the HRM function:[6]
However, many HR functions these days struggle to get beyond the roles of administration
and employee champion, and are seen as reactive rather than strategically proactive partners
for the top management. In addition, HR organisations also have difficulty in proving how
their activities and processes add value to the company. Only in recent years have HR
scholars and professionals focused on developing models that can measure the value added
by HR.[7]
[edit] Business practice
Human resources management involves several processes. Together they are supposed to
achieve the above mentioned goal. These processes can be performed in an HR department,
but some tasks can also be outsourced or performed by line-managers or other departments.
When effectively integrated they provide significant economic benefit to the company.[8]
Workforce planning
Recruitment (sometimes separated into attraction and selection)
Induction, Orientation and Onboarding
Skills management
Training and development
Personnel administration
Compensation in wage or salary
Time management
Travel management (sometimes assigned to accounting rather than HRM)
Payroll (sometimes assigned to accounting rather than HRM)
Employee benefits administration
Personnel cost planning
Performance appraisal
Labor relations
An HRM strategy pertains to the means as to how to implement the specific functions of
HRM. An organisation's HR function may possess recruitment and selection policies,
disciplinary procedures, reward/recognition policies, an HR plan, or learning and
development policies, however all of these functional areas of HRM need to be aligned and
correlated, in order to correspond with the overall business strategy. An HRM strategy thus is
an overall plan, concerning the implementation of specific HRM functional areas.
"Best fit" and "best practice" - meaning that there is correlation between the HRM
strategy and the overall corporate strategy. As HRM as a field seeks to manage human
resources in order to achieve properly organisational goals, an organisation's HRM
strategy seeks to accomplish such management by applying a firm's personnel needs
with the goals/objectives of the organisation. As an example, a firm selling cars could
have a corporate strategy of increasing car sales by 10% over a five year period.
Accordingly, the HRM strategy would seek to facilitate how exactly to manage
personnel in order to achieve the 10% figure. Specific HRM functions, such as
recruitment and selection, reward/recognition, an HR plan, or learning and
development policies, would be tailored to achieve the corporate objectives.
Close co-operation (at least in theory) between HR and the top/senior management, in
the development of the corporate strategy. Theoretically, a senior HR representative
should be present when an organisation's corporate objectives are devised. This is so,
since it is a firm's personnel who actually construct a good, or provide a service. The
personnel's proper management is vital in the firm being successful, or even existing
as a going concern. Thus, HR can be seen as one of the critical departments within the
functional area of an organization.
The implementation of an HR strategy is not always required, and may depend on a number
of factors, namely the size of the firm, the organisational culture within the firm or the
industry that the firm operates in and also the people in the firm.
An HRM strategy can be divided, in general, into two facets - the people strategy and the HR
functional strategy. The people strategy pertains to the point listed in the first paragraph,
namely the careful correlation of HRM policies/actions to attain the goals laid down in the
corporate strategy. The HR functional strategy relates to the policies employed within the HR
functional area itself, regarding the management of persons internal to it, to ensure its own
departmental goals are met.