CONTROL OVER EMPLOYEES

Control Over Employees

Control over Employees

Introduction

In its broadest sense, Employee management is a widely used term coined to encapsulate management policies and practices concerned with the supply and utilization of the labor resource required for the firm to meet its commercial objectives. To do so, the employer has to be able to compete within the labor market and meet basic requirements of social legitimacy relevant to the society in which the firm is located. The employer needs to be able to attract and keep labor and ensure that labor power is utilized for productive purposes relevant to its business objectives. It is by no means certain how best to proceed in this endeavor. This uncertainty in the context of inevitable resource constraints—whether financial, cognitive, or the capacity for control—make both the meaning and practice of Employee management difficult and ambiguous. (Rose, 2004, 15-99)

Employee management as a new label for the personnel function and as a descriptive term for labor policies was developed in the United States in the early 1980s. The work of Harvard academics was especially influential, as seen in the book by Michael Beer, Bert Spector, Paul Lawrence, D. Quinn Mills, and Richard Walton. The rapid spread of the nomenclature Employee management for professional labor managers and their departments can be seen as an attempt to gain legitimacy and respect from senior executives by downplaying the welfare image of personnel management and giving emphasis to the contribution to business strategy. By the early years of the 21st century the term business partner was widely adopted although not universally accepted. . (Rose, 2004, 15-99)

This link between Employee management as a set of labor policies and the description of the function is one source of confusion whenever the term Employee management is used. Often the meaning of the term is bound by the policies and practices that are designed by the function itself and found within the Employee manual, or Web site. There are three major limitations to this way of defining Employee management. First, many of the Employee policies designed by the Employee function rely on other managers, especially line managers, to implement them. There is frequently a gap between the espoused and the enacted. To define Employee management as only those formal policies found in the manual is to severely limit understanding of how the Employee of the firm is managed. Second, not all firms have a dedicated Employee department or manager, yet they too, of course, need means of managing their Employees. Third, if we ask how the Employee in the firm is managed in the sense of how it is recruited and selected, trained, motivated, and deployed and how the aspirations and expectations of employees are dealt with, a much wider array of managerial behaviors have to be included. Increasingly the very broad term people management is used to cover this wider area of interest. People in this context includes managers themselves considered as employees, as well as others whose labor power is utilized by ...