HRM

HRM

HRM

Introduction

HRM today recognises that employees are valued assets of the organisation, and values the commitment of employees to the organisation far greater than their compliance to the demands of the organisation (McKenna and Beech, 2002). Its diverse activities are subsumed under the policy areas of employee influence, human resource flow, reward systems and work systems (Beer et al., 1984).

Human Resource Management (HRM) is the development of personnel and industrial relations function. It involves all management decisions that affect the relationship between the organisation and employees - its human resources (Beer et al., 1984).The history of HRM can be traced back to the development of scientific management in the early 1900s that believed any potential conflicts of interest between workers and employers can be eliminated by effective industrial engineering techniques and incentive wage systems (Kochan and Barocci, 1985).

Discussion

The development of HRM reflected the changes in the business environment in the last century. The increasing international competition created the need for improving human productivity; the greater government involvement in human resources practices, the changes in work force demography and the growing concern with career and life satisfaction all contributed in causing corporations to re-examine HRM policies and develop new ones (Beer et al., 1984). The next two decades saw labour relation specialists rose to influential position in personnel departments (Kochan and Barocci, 1985), then in the 1960s and 1970s, the concern over equitable and fair treatment took effect in the civil rights and equal opportunity legislation (Beer et al., 1984). Personnel welfare, however, was already of concern to certain families in business, e.g. Cadbury, in the late 1800s (McKenna and Beech, 2002).

In the 1920s, many large companies installed employee representation plans to cater for employee satisfaction of social needs (Kochan and Barocci, 1985), and in the 1930s, the concern over the workers conditions found its way into labour legislation (Beer et al., 1984). Personnel management entered the entrepreneurial phase in the 1980s and adapted itself to enterprise culture and market economy (McKenna and Beech, 2002); its wider strategic role led to the change of name into HRM. Though more criticisms have been directed at HRM since the 1990s, it is still seen as the dominant agenda.

Strategic Integration

Strategic planning is the process of setting organisational objectives and deciding on the programmes of action to achieve these objectives (Kochan and Barocci, 1985). There are two different approaches to strategic planning: prescriptive and descriptive (Mintzberg et al., 1998). The prescriptive school of strategy places emphasis on the design, planning and positioning (McKenna and Beech, 2002).

Stifling Factors

To identify the factors likely to hinder strategic integration, it is necessary to look first at the basic organisational requirements, the human resource policies and employee relations.

The basic organisational requirements are management commitment to HRM, strong human resource force and integrated operations staff administration. The commitment of top management to effective HRM is an important basic organisational requirement crucial to its competitive success (Foulkes and Livernash, 1989). The formulation of business plans should take into account human resource issues ...