MANAGEMENT

Human Resource Management in a Business Context

Human Resource Management in a Business Context

Q. Rewards in the workplace can make or break performance levels. Use corporate examples and analysis of key theorists to determine an answer.

Introduction

Human resource management plays an important role in supervising the requirements of human resources, which are employed within an organization. There are various critical functions of human resource management such as training and development, compensation and benefits, recruitment and selection, performance management, talent management etc. It is extremely important for an organization to employ all these functions, if it wants to attain success. Managing the performance of employees is not an easy task for an organization, as it requires the management to be careful and fair in rewarding its employees. The workplace or organizational policies and procedures are designed and implemented by the human resource management department of the organization. Currently, the labour courts, collective bargaining agents and labour unions are playing an effective role in managing the requirements of the employees (Zimmerman & Darnold, 2009, p.142). Therefore, the organizations should fulfil the needs and wants of the employees, if they want to get the required performance level from them. Every employee has different level of needs that keeps on motivating him or her to put efforts in order to accomplish it accordingly. The employee at an executive position would be willing to attain senior executive position and for achieving it he or she would be working effectively on the guidelines set by an organization. There are several ways that can be used by the employer in motivating the employees, so that they would be able to give the required level of performance. There are two kinds of rewards that can motivate the employees within the workplace to given the required level of performance; those are monetary and non-monetary rewards (Wang et.al, 2010, p.660).

Discussion

Every organization have different level of requirements and needs towards having monetary or non-monetary rewards such as one employee might be eager to get monetary reward against the exceptional performance that he or she has given any particular task or any period of time, while other employee might be willing to get non-monetary reward against his or her posted performance level (Mulki et.al, 2012, p.77).

According to Maslow's Hierarchy of needs every individual has five levels of needs namely: psychological, safety, belonging, esteem and self actualization. An individual will give his or her best efforts until he or she manages to accomplish any particular level of needs and this process will keep on going until he or she reaches the last level of needs presented by Maslow i.e. “Self-Actualization”. The Maslow's hierarchy of needs can be effectively employed within the workplace in order to bring out the required level of performance from any particular employee (Kim; Tavitiyaman & Kim, 2009, p.369).

The Theory of Reinforcement was introduced by B.F. Skinner in 1953 that helps in understanding the human behaviour and he also proposed reinforcement strategies that can help in reinforcing the required ...