Human Resource Management or HRM is the process of hiring and developing employees designed to maximize their performance in service of their employer’s strategic objectives. Human Resource Management includes conducting job analyses, planning personnel needs, recruiting the right people for the job, orienting and training, managing wages and salaries, providing benefits and incentives, evaluating performance, resolving disputes, and communicating with all employees at all levels. Examples of core qualities of human resource management are extensive knowledge of the industry, leadership, and effective negotiation skills.
Human resource management plays a major role in staffing, training and helping to manage people so that both the people and the organization are performing at maximum capability in a highly fulfilling manner. HRM is increasingly considered a contemporary development to reshape employment relationships as a tool that may have effectively replaced other management traditions like personnel management and industrial relations.
As HRM has tools of a system which attracts, develops, motivates, and retains the effective functioning related with the people managing, the scope of HRM is very wide. New trends in managing workers and advances in the field of training have expanded the scope of human resources function to include: the personnel aspect, concerned with manpower planning, recruitment, selection, placement, transfer, promotion, training and development, lay off and retrenchment, remuneration, incentives, productivity, etc.; the welfare aspect which deals with working conditions and amenities such as canteens, restrooms, lunch rooms, housing, transport, medical assistance, education, health and safety, recreational facilities, etc.; and the industrial relations aspect which covers union-management relations, joint consultation, collective bargaining, grievance and disciplinary procedures, settlement of disputes, etc.
Human resources management aims to enhance the contribution of employees in organizations.
Those contributions are new ideas, productively working and success. The HRM role is the provision of assistance to line employees, or those directly involved in producing the organization’s goods and services. Acquiring people’s services, developing their skills, motivating them to high levels of performance, and ensuring their continuing maintenance and commitment to the organization are essential to achieving organizational goals. HRM consists of four functions: staffing, training and development, motivation, and maintenance.
HRM is also a strategic approach to managing employment relations, and emphasizes that leveraging people’s capabilities is critical to achieving sustainable competitive advantage. This is achieved through a distinctive set of integrated employment policies, programs and practices such as: planning, recruitment and selection, appraisal and performance management, reward management, development, employee relations, health and safety, and union-management relations. It includes assisting the organization in attracting the quality and quantity of candidates required with respect to the organization’s strategy and operational goals, staffing needs, and desired culture.
By helping to maintain performance, HRM standards and increases productivity through orientation, training, development, job design, effective communication, and performance appraisal. It also helps to create a climate in which employees are encouraged to develop and utilize their skills to the fullest, by establishing and maintaining a cordial working relationship with employees; and creating and maintaining a safe and healthy work environment. HRM also helps the organization to retain productive employees and ensure that the organization complies with the labor laws affecting the work place such as human rights, employment equity, occupational health and safety among others.
HRM upholds the importance of matching personnel strategies with organizational strategies, balancing the relationship between ‘individual personalities’ and ‘company personalities’. Human resource management practices enhance organizational effectiveness and performance by attracting, identifying, and retaining employees with knowledge, skills, and abilities, and getting them to behave in a manner that will support the mission and objectives of the organization. Thus, the effectiveness of HRM practices depends on how it engenders the appropriate attitudes and behaviors in employees, in addition to its implementation.
However, despite the importance of HRM in promoting organizational efficiency and effectiveness, many organizations still remain reluctant to fully adopt it. This is contrary to any organizational success strategy, given the many advantages that HRM has on organizational effectiveness. Some of the factors that limit the adoption of HRM in organizations include among others the following:
Weak/poor labor laws; Some components of HRM such as employee health and safety, working conditions are regulatory given that they are a statutory requirement. In such a case, the adoption of such provisions is hugely dependent on the willingness and capacity of the government to legislate effective laws and vigorously enforce them. In cases where there is no political will or where the legal system is weak, these laws are exposed to enforcement loopholes, which affects the adoption of HRM.
Employee personality; The adoption of sophisticated HRM practices may also depend on the personalities of individual employees. The personality of some employees however, may be detrimental to the adoption of stringent HRM practices. For example, however effective an employee may be at his/her job, if he/she has a an attitude that is divisive or confrontational in the workplace, keeping such an employee may be counterproductive as it may affect the other employees he/she works with.
Origin of organization; The company origin determines its adoption of HRM practices. In multinational companies for example, the HRM policies in their country of origin have a huge bearing on the HRM practices they adopt in the overseas subsidiaries. A Chinese MNC may not be as enthusiastic in implementing HRM practices like say, a UK or Norwegian company, which have more sophisticated HRM regulations. The notion of the ‘competitive advantage of nations’ implies that the success of international companies springs from the characteristics of their national resource bases. On several dimensions MNCs exhibit national characteristics, even when the home base does not account for the bulk of sales, operations and employment, the home nation is almost always the primary locus of ownership and control, in other words, strategic decisions and innovative activities are still disproportionately located in the home country.
Firm age; As firms move through various stages of development, differing problems must be addressed, resulting in the need for different management skills, priorities and structural configurations. Whereas commitment HR systems may be more important in the early stages of business development, but as the business grows, more employees need to be recruited and control or traditional HR systems becomes more important. Since younger firms tend to be in an earlier stage of development than older firms, firm age may be of an influence on the orientation and implementation of commitment HR systems. Firms go through a sequence of growth and change, with the process driven by organizational learning and increases in size which is related to a firm aging, which also applies to HRM practices. New firms must work with the resources available and to succeed they must be able to react and mobilize whatever resources available depending on the various personal, organizational and environmental conditions. Older firms were more inclined to nurture and retain managers whose organizational knowledge accounts for growth.
Firm size; Larger organizations adopt more sophisticated and socially responsive HR practices because they are more visible and are under more pressure to gain legitimacy. However, economic considerations suggest that because of the costs associated with many aspects of HRM, acceptable economies of scale must be reached before sophisticated HRM systems can be implemented. Firm size is a major determinant of the extent of adopting a number of formal appraisal systems and the presence of an HR Industrial Relations department for example. Larger firms are more likely to have the resources to employ human resources professionals, who are more aware of the latest trend in managing human resources. Firm size is related to the type of HRM strategy implemented because larger firms have more complete and sophisticated human resource systems as they have more workers to control, therefore the firms are able to spread the costs over more employees and have to be more image conscious due to their higher visibility. Due to the small number of employees, the average cost of adopting sophisticated HRM practices is higher for small firms, which may slow their adoption.
References
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