Managing People at Work

Julian Randall, Allan Sim

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781134680146
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

This book arises from the need of students who have little or no threshold knowledge of human resource management (HRM) but who need to link it to their studies in other subjects. Managing People at Work encourages readers to examine the underlying concepts that reach out beyond discrete disciplinary boundaries and require connection with theories from different disciplines and their common practice wherever it applies to people within a company. The book also addresses the need to understand and contribute to the strategic discussions which are expected in senior management forums.

The book describes the links between company strategy, human resource (HR) planning and implementation using cost--benefit analysis to illustrate the hard and soft approaches to HRM. It also looks at evaluating the results of HR in terms of both efficiency and effectiveness in the main management interventions that lie within the human resource development activities. Students are aided with their understanding by activities that lie at the end of each chapter. These exercises can be done individually or in tutor-led groups.

This book makes clear the links between HRM, organizational behaviour and strategy, and the theory of HRM is linked to its claimed HR outcomes sometimes referred to as:

• strategic integration
• commitment
• quality
• flexibility.

This book helps to provide MBA and Master's postgraduate students and those on management trainee programmes or accelerate promotion career paths with a more detailed understanding of these theories and how they drive the organization's strategy and decisions about its people at work.

1

INTRODUCTION TO HRM

Learning objectives

• from personnel to HRM

• human resource policies and organizational outcomes

• organizational change and human resource management

• knowledge work and the knowledge worker.

Introduction

For many younger workers the rise of human resource management (HRM) is something that they will not have lived through. We are referring to events that took place nearly 30 years ago. So, they may not have been around when personnel departments changed their name to human resources. Nor will they have been privy to discussions on hard or soft HRM as different approaches that HR departments might adopt. But that debate remains alive and there are researchers who have sought to test whether the claims made for HRM as a theory are supported by the evidence over those ensuing years or not. Organizational commitment, one of the outcomes by which the theory placed great store, has been influenced by many factors, not all of them positive. In this chapter we will look at some of the influences that may have made it difficult for HRM theory and practice to realize its promises.

It would be unfair to suggest that HRM is without precedent in its interest in gaining the commitment of workers. The early proponents of looking after all aspects of workers’ lives can be found in the nineteenth century with examples such as the Rowntree Foundation, which built a dedicated town for its workers, Bourneville. Its founders believed that looking after workers was not only a religious duty, but also a benefit in that workers arrived at work well motivated, and therefore prepared to work for a company that took the trouble to look after them. For workers who were not in receipt of such benefits, the rights had to be more closely fought for through political action, and the rise of trade unions galvanised action into political initiatives to enshrine their employment rights into law.

After the First World War what would become the Institute of Personnel Management was set up specifically to address welfare at work for all workers. Looking after people seemed a more sensible personnel strategy than treating them as ‘the hands’ whose only purpose was to fulfil their working functions efficiently, as had been the philosophy at Ford through the work of F.W. Taylor. This movement to pay more attention to workers’ motivation was reinforced by the findings of the Hawthorne experiments in which researchers found that when changes were made to the working conditions of factory workers, such as changes in heating and lighting, productivity went up as people responded to the concern shown for their welfare by members of the management (Mayo, 1933; Roethlisberger and Dickson, 1939; Gillespie, 1991).

Involving workers more proactively in changes to their working conditions was pioneered in the USA by Lewin (1947) after the Second World War. He advocated working with small groups of workers using sensitivity or T-groups in which individuals were encouraged to speak about their experiences of work and their feelings about their job. This first phase in his three-step approach he called ‘unfreezing’. We could argue that this was an early example of emergent change in that what he attempted to achieve in this first phase encouraged workers to be frank about their beliefs and expectations of their jobs and allowed the change agent to hear at first hand what were taken-for-granted assumptions or beliefs that might be difficult for managers or change agents to challenge without generating resistance from the workforce. Following the second phase involving the change itself, Lewin saw the third phase as being ‘refreezing’ workers’ attitudes and practices around the new work regime. His work was influential both at the time and later and it is no mischance that Argyris, Schein and McGregor, who were all early collaborators with Lewin in his work, went on to develop their own approaches to developing people in organizations through such change interventions.

In the UK the human relations movements in the 1950s pursued similar initiatives to involve workers in changing their working conditions or solving problems whose solutions were not immediately apparent to the organization or its managers. The solution might be much more obvious to the workers themselves (Trist and Bamforth, 1951). A sympathetic listener, facilitator or change agent might well uncover such solutions listening to the workers discussing the options they perceived for making effective changes. In a similar tradition, Action Learning found a very supportive and active proponent in Reg Revans (2011), whose work as Director of Education in the coal industry enabled him to develop the concept and share his experiences in getting workers more proactively involved in managing their own working environment, solving problems and implementing solutions to secure their jobs and the industry itself.

The personnel function

This interest in workers’ welfare and their ideas found its focus in the work of the personnel department. Henry Ford is alleged to have said that all you needed was a girl and a filing cabinet, but most large companies included a dedicated team whose responsibilities might cover traditional personnel functions for all departments in their day-to-day dealings with individuals. One of the most important would be recruitment and selection procedures, dealing with job applications, sifting through applications, arranging interviews, drawing up job contracts and keeping up-to-date files on all individuals in the company. So, too, induction training might be part of the remit of the personnel department and there might be a dedicated training manager, particularly for the more general aspects of induction training in company policy, procedures and practices, and health and safety at work.

For many companies, too, the work of pay and pensions took up a significant amount of time and might similarly be delegated to the personnel department. Pay itself was often governed by annual incremental pay awards, so keeping abreast with promotions and taking part in union negotiations to secure pay differentials between grades could well be an important part of personnel’s work.

In the public sector, there was a strong tradition of personnel as a counselling provider and mediator where misunderstandings occurring between individuals at work could be discussed and resolved. In this respect personnel could provide advice on personal or work concerns when they arose, though personnel were rarely involved with strategic decisions made by the senior managers. So, in that sense personnel’s work was reactive to demands from requests for help and support from individuals inside the company, or to outside change affecting employment law and its implementation in company policy and procedures.

In this respect, however, there were significant changes in the legal constraints on employment in the 1970s with the Health and Safety at Work Act in 1974 and a series of acts intended to curb discrimination of all kinds in all workplaces. In the 1980s there was further legislation intended to curb militant union action and in all these respects personnel was responsible for ensuring the company’s policy, procedure and practices were brought in line with current legislation and suitable training given to staff involved in applying that new legislation with their own staff.

The birth of Human Resource Management

Interest in more proactive approaches to managing people at work found a voice in a popular book entitled In Search of Excellence by Peters and Waterman (1982). They drew up eight factors that they saw as characterizing excellent companies:

1 a bias for action, active decision making – ‘getting on with it’. Facilitating quick decision making and problem solving tends to avoid bureaucratic control;

2 being close to the customer – learning from the people served by the business;

3 autonomy and entrepreneurship – fostering innovation and nurturing ‘champions’;

4 productivity through people – treating rank and file employees as a source of quality;

5 being hands-on, value-driven – management philosophy that guides everyday practice – management showing its commitment;

6 sticking to the knitting – staying with the business that you know;

7 simple form, lean staff – some of the best companies have minimal HQ staff;

8 simultaneous loose–tight properties – autonomy in shop-floor activities plus centralized values.

It should be said that the context in which they wrote had more corporate organizations that might encompass many different businesses and the authors believed that this detracted from the single-minded approach needed to run a business successfully. At the time, the book triggered much debate among managers seeking to build up an excellent company. It also attracted attention from academics, who were on the whole more sceptical of the validity of the claims made by its authors. In the context of the time, however, Peters and Waterman did stimulate a significant debate among managers and, as proof of a more general interest in the issues they raised, the book sold more copies than any previous book on management. The fact that 75 per cent of companies they cited as being excellent went out of business within five years made no difference to those who wanted to improve their business effectiveness using the principles outlined.

Shortly after this came the advent of HRM, whose roots may be found in the Michigan model of HRM (Fombrun et al., 1984).

Basically, the model shows how the recruitment and selection process leads into the performance that can be achieved and this performance is regularly appraised leading to reward and development. Thus, engaging staff in a more consistently linked career path feeds back to continuing performance development and career opportunities.

These links indicate that joined-up personnel should be a more dynamic and deliberate process that is managed to ensure that there is a constant review of the factors that can be traced between the people who work in the organization, their performance, the appraisal of their performance and the outcome in terms of reward and development – leading once more to enhanced performance. The review also includes reinforcing continuing development and drawing attention to the implications for the profile of people the business needs in the future.

In a sense what we see here is an attempt to connect the management interventions with individual workers to reinforce the links between what will become the stages of a human resource development (HRD) list which would include:

• recruitment and selection

• induction training

• supervision

• management

• review

• appraisal

• reward

• development

• structure

• communication.

Linking these in the way the Michigan model suggests makes sense because it becomes a virtuous circle that governs the working life of everyone working in the company. The best outcome is that communication then becomes the sum of all the experiences that people have with the company in the management interventions that have taken place in their working life from the time that they joined the company through to their leaving.

But HRM’s proponents also extended their attention to different groups that lie outside the company. These aspects are laid out in the Harvard model of HRM (Beer et al., 1984). In this example the context of the company, referred to by the authors as situational influences links with the stakeholders (includes shareholders but not just them exclusively) and these include the government, the unions and the local community. These together lead to what the authors describe as HR policy factors (going back to the content of the way in which people are managed). This in turn drives the HR outcomes which include commitment, competence, congruence and cost-effectiveness. This leads to long-term consequences for the individual, the organization and society. Once again these factors feed back into benefits for the situational influences and the stakeholders.

One of the important aspects of the second diagram is its focus on the external groups crucial to the company’s planning. These are often external to the company – its context (what goes on outside it, which is not always either accessible...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• List of abbreviations
• 1 Introduction to HRM
• 2 Strategy and strategic integration
• 3 The business environment and human resource management
• 4 Human resource management in an organizational context
• 5 Managing change/changing managers
• 6 Employee resourcing
• 7 Developing your people
• 8 Performance management
• 9 Rewarding people at work
• 10 Employee relations: equality and diversity
• 11 Disciplinary, grievance and sick absence
• 12 IHRM, review, critique and developments
• Index