Total Quality in Managing Human Resources

Joe Petrick, Diana Furr

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9781884015243
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351407892
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Human Resource Management
• Index: Business

Human resource management is a particularly challenging role, both domestically and globally. This challenge can be viewed either as an opportunity or as a threat. As an opportunity, the principles and practices of total quality presented in this book can help human resource professionals or anyone who manages people, transform institutionalized mediocrity into organizational excellence. The focus of this book is on managing the difference TQ makes in human resources. Whereas the traditional nature and scope of responsibility for most human resource professionals has been that of staff support geared to administrative compliance, the total quality approach offered here reveals the keys to developing and sustaining commitment to world-class performance. These keys include strategic input and continual improvement of the human resource system to enhance internal and external customer satisfaction both now and in the future. The full meaning of these new TQ role demands is explored in light of the driving forces reshaping the HR environment into the 21st Century. In addition, this book offers practitioner assessment instruments, practical TQ tools, and specific implementation steps to take in order to make the TQ difference in managing human resources domestically and globally.

CHAPTER 1

WHY TOTAL QUALITY IN MANAGING HUMAN RESOURCES?

Why read a book about total quality in managing human resources? There are at least four possible answers to this question. First, it may be a matter of intellectual curiosity. The terms total quality management, continuous quality improvement, and managerial and corporate reengineering are currently very popular. Why not find out what they are about and how they may apply to managing human resources? Second, someone may be involved with the subspecialties of human resource management (HRM) concerned with recruitment, selection, placement, training and development, compensation and benefits, or labor relations and safety and want to know how total quality impacts each area. Third, someone may be concerned about the conditions and changes in the organizational environment surrounding the human resource (HR) functions. In fact, one may be motivated to read this book because such changes are viewed as threats to HR professionals. Finally, this book may be read in the search for a better way to help create a more effective and efficient work culture for the future.¹

Whatever the reason for reading this book, one of its goals is to help establish that a need exists to transform HRM for the 21st century. This is a particularly exciting and turbulent time in the HR field, both domestically and globally.² Nevertheless, change may be viewed as an opportunity rather than a threat, and the principles and practices of total quality can aid in this transformation.

The focus of this book is on five targeted groups: (1) educators and students who address HRM, strategic management, total quality and organizational development areas; (2) practicing senior-level and line business managers involved in HR decision making; (3) practicing HR professionals integrating quality into their repertoire of skills; (4) practicing administrators/managers involved in HR decisions in public, nonprofit, and professional contexts; and (5) prospective business and HR professionals undergoing formal in-service training to assume future work responsibilities. Each group of stakeholders can benefit from the material contained in this text.

The domain of the book is the area of managing human resources. The traditional nature and scope of responsibility for most HR professionals has been that of staff support geared to administrative compliance procedures. The total quality orientation to managing human resources redefines line managerial and employee roles and accords new responsibilities to the traditional HRM function. The latter’s new role includes strategic input and continual development of the HR system to increase customer satisfaction now and in the future. The full meaning of these role changes will become apparent in light of the driving forces that are reshaping the HR environment, as discussed in the next section.

The outcome of this book for the individual reader is an increased understanding of the impact of total quality on managing human resources and practical guidance on meeting the new HR challenges in today’s work environment.

DRIVING FORCES RESHAPING THE HUMAN RESOURCE ENVIRONMENT

The need to focus on total quality and managing human resources is indicated by the following six trends.

1. Successful international competitors have challenged U.S. HRM practices. It is possible to look at all businesses as having three principal resources: capital, natural, and human resources. Many economic competitors of the United States, such as Japan, Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore, have few natural resources but they use the same basic technologies as the United States. They have been forced to develop their competitive international advantage primarily through their cultivation of human resources. The human resource is the only one that competitors cannot copy and is the only one that can synergize; that is, produce output whose value is greater than the sum of its parts.³ Konosuke Matsushita, a leading Japanese industrialist, reinforced the critical importance of the HR emphasis in a speech before a group of U.S. executives in 1988:⁴

We will win and you will lose. You cannot do anything about it because your failure is an internal disease. You firmly believe that good management means executives on one side and workers on the other. On one side men who think and on the other side men who can only work. For you, management is the art of smoothly transferring the executives’ ideas to the workers’ hands.

We have passed [that stage]. For us, management is the entire work force’s intellectual commitment to the service of the company, without self-imposed functional or class barriers. Only the commitment of the minds of all its employees can permit a company to live with the ups and downs and requirements of its new environment. Yes, we will win and you will lose. For you are not able to rid your minds of the obsolete [human resources practices] that we never had.

This Japanese prediction has begun to be realized in the multi-billion-dollar U.S. trade deficit with Japan, the wholesale takeover of industries that were once dominated by U.S. firms, the absence of Japanese union strikes to disrupt production, and the level of coordinated technical expertise brought to bear on producing high-quality, low-cost products.⁵ While Japanese firms have utilized an array of different resources to achieve their stunning victories, superior HRM policies and practices have been a contributing factor to their success and a challenge to U.S. HR professionals.⁶ Japan grafted highly scientific and rational work processes onto the minds of the work force, allowing them to be exceedingly data-driven and rigorously scientific in researching and improving work processes—without engendering burnout.

2. Successful organizations accord high priority to proactively and systematically understanding and responding to current and future external customer needs. The evident economic success of Japanese firms and the preeminence they accord anticipating, meeting, and exceeding customer expectations through interviews, focus groups, and surveys has been an important lesson for U.S. managers and HR professionals.⁷ U.S. corporations typically place highest priority on investor returns and focus on increasing short-term and long-term financial payoffs for stockholders. In contrast, corporations in Japan accord lower priority to short-term business profitability and higher priority to market share through increased customer satisfaction and work process improvements.⁸ Better financial results such as cost reduction and higher profits can be viewed as the outcomes of process improvements based on increased customer sensitivity. Therefore, the objectives of these corporations include a systematic attunement to and strategic alignment with customer satisfaction.⁹

Customer satisfaction has, in fact, become an umbrella phrase for a range of additional conceptual refinements made in successful organizations. Distinctions have been made between customers (purchasers of products and services) and consumers (the end users of products and services), both of whom need to be satisfied but are sometimes the same and at other times different. Distinctions have also been made among dissatisfiers (unstated customer expectations that are taken for granted and if absent result in customer dissatisfaction), satisfiers (stated customer expectations which, if fulfilled, lead to satisfaction), and exciters/delighters (unstated and unexpected consumer desires which, if met, lead to high perceptions of quality and likely purchase). Over time, exciters/delighters become satisfiers as customers become used to them, and eventually satisfiers become dissatisfiers, thereby requiring ongoing innovation and customer research to ensure customer satisfaction.

The examples of successful international and domestic companies that place a priority on customer satisfaction provide important signals to mainstream U.S. businesses to indicate that meeting and exceeding customer expectations is an area that has been deemphasized too long.¹⁰ The challenge for HR professionals is to move beyond their technical subspecialties to provide improvements to the HR dimension of organizational systems focused on increasing customer satisfaction.¹¹ Those HR professionals who cannot or will not contribute to and support the new alignment expectations of HR policies with strategic priorities are likely to play only marginal roles.

3. Successful organizations proactively and systematically understand and respond to current and future internal customer needs. The ultimate competitive advantage is an organization and a culture that develops the creative energies of all employees better than the competition through formal processes that anticipate, meet, and exceed employee expectations. The reality today in the United States is that employee needs are often ignored and unmet in a frenzy of restructuring and downsizing to cut costs and enhance profit margins. Granted that recent periods of slow growth have caused even some Japanese employers to dismiss employees for financial reasons, the balance of impersonal financial factors and personal HR needs always accords the latter a significant weight in Japan.

Because domestic and international firms in this information age require high-level technical, analytical, and problem-solving skills to compete, knowledge workers are at a premium.¹² Their sustained and committed contributions to organizational survival and prosperity were previously secured through an implicit and/or explicit psychological contract.¹³ The psy...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Foreword
• Series Preface
• Authors’ Preface
• 1 Why Total Quality in Managing Human Resources?
• 2 Customer Satisfaction: Strategy Dimensions
• 3 Continuous Improvement: Process Dimensions
• 4 Speaking with Facts: Project Dimensions
• 5 Respect for People: Performance Dimensions
• 6 Implementing Total Quality Human Resource Management
• Minicases
• Index