HR Management & Leadership

MBA Essentials

Harald Meier

• Publisher: Books on Demand
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9783750498532
• eBook ISBN: 9783753428871
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

Every organisation, whether for profit or as non-profit, needs motivated employees. HR Management is often not seen as a core function and most managers do not receive a systematic and sustainable leadership training either.In this book, the essential basics of modern HR Management and Leadership are presented systematically and always with practical examples. The focus is on the scope of action as a manager responsible on any hierarchical and process level or in HR Management. Step-by-step, to understand HR Management and Leadership policy, strategies and concepts as well as for current challenges in International Management, in 4.0 and in Social Business.The target group are graduates and specialists who are systematically preparing for a new management position (e.g. in a General Management or MBA program), consultants, management trainer and lecturers.

1. HR Management Policy and Strategy

• 1.1 HR Management Policy
• 1.1.1 Corporate Policy and HR Management
• 1.1.2 Governance, Compliance and Co-determination
• 1.1.3 HR and Leadership related Megatrends
• 1.1.4 Strategic HR and Human Capital Management
• 1.2 Concepts and Instruments of HR Policy
• 1.2.1 HR and Leadership Guidelines
• 1.2.2 Employee Relations, HR Research and Survey
• 1.2.3 Works Agreement
• 1.2.4 Employer Branding
• 1.2.5 Annual HR Report and Staff Meeting
• 1.2.6 Change Management

1.1 HR Management Policy

1.1.1 Corporate Policy and HR Management

Corporate Policy (policy: consciously enforcing will) is decision making and design of the long-term corporate goals and their adaptation to internal and external framework conditions or influences – as basis for following operationalized divisional, department etc. planning activities (see following example in the HR Division).

Fig. 1.1: Corporate Business Plan and HR Management

Example Corporate Policy Operationalisation

The example is showing a typical corporate policy objective (increase profit and rentability) operationalised top down to an individual workplace objective:

Corporate Policy: Increase Profit + Rentability

HR division	Reduce HR costs, increase performance.
HR Dpt. Recruitment	Reduce Recruiting Costs. Reduce general fluctuation.
Team Management Recruitment	Train Recruiting staff in virtual interviews. Legal check per country (maximal possible probation times). Reduce absent time (shorter business trip). and fluctuation in Recruiter teams. …
Recruiting Manager	Reduce business trips (for interviews) and do virtual selection interviews. Negotiate longer probation times (6 months), and reduced salary during probation time. Overtime/shift-work (in foreign interviews). Performance related bonus (low fluctuation in recruiting process/first two years related to your recruiting segment’s performance. …

Influences on Corporate Policy

The diversity and complexity of influences on an HR and Leadership policy are resulting from many different internal and external stakeholders, company history and culture, megatrends (demography, globalisation …) and socio-political discussions (minimum wage, work-life balance …) in the society. Typical HR and Leadership related claims of stakeholders are e.g.:

• Manager: job satisfaction, high income, prestige, power and career, self-development, ...
• Employees: job and social security, healthy work conditions, training and career opportunities, social contacts, ...
• Collective partner (e.g. union, works council): compliance with and participation in a collective agreement, fairness of the negotiations, …
• Economy: labour market situation, purchase power, …
• Compliance environment: labour law, co-determination due unions and works council, …
• Socio-political: values, education, demography, diversity, income tax, policy, income distribution, minimum wage, working time regulations, …
• Technology: ICT acceptance, home office, virtual work, …

Shareholder Value- and Stakeholder orientated HR Policy

While a traditional shareholder value-orientated corporate policy is mainly stability-, conservative- and short term-oriented, the stakeholder-oriented approach is progressive and focused on long-term corporate development, investing in training and personal development of the employees.

• Shareholder Value-oriented HR and Leadership:

HR is seen as a cost factor, e.g.:

• focus on short-term oriented individual and team performance to create profit/corporate value,
• short-term oriented personnel planning and recruitment,
• performance related income concepts,
• more training for direct work success than long-term development programs.

This traditional one-dimensional focus on a short-term return on invest equity has becoming increasingly critical, not only because of the discussion about ethics.

• Stakeholder orientated HR and Leadership policy:

HR Development seen as an investment,

• primary goal is searching and creating new potential candidates, and
• feelgood-, talent- and career management for long term employer branding,

In the same as in the general corporate policy companies often move between these polarities due situational factors and corporate policy dynamics, or larger ones follow different policies parallel in their different divisions. Especially in the last two decades in the background of corporate ethics, work-life balance and CSR more and more companies are tending to become more stakeholder-oriented.

The individual corporate profit orientation as a guiding principle must to be see critically today, as it often leads beside environmental damage to individual psychological and social problems (e.g. mental problems, unemployment).

Example Criticism of the Shareholder Value approach

In our times almost 200 of the leading US-entrepreneurs (e.g. from Apple to Pepsi and Walmart) are moving away from maximizing profits in a public statement. They distanced themselves from a pure shareholder-value approach by defining new principles of corporate management: … we know that many Americans have problems. Too often hard work is not rewarded and enough is not done to allow workers to adapt to the rapid pace of economic change. In the future, the focus will be more on investing in employees, in environmental protection and in fair and ethical dealings with suppliers.¹

1.1.2 Governance, Compliance and Co-determination

Corporate Governance and Corporate Compliance are partly interdepend-dent: the governance focus in on the corporate's constitutional (legal) basis, compliance aims at whether and how these are followed, and if necessary other voluntary rules of conduct such as Business Ethics and CSR. Co-determination due unions and works council or employee participation is (culturally depending) by laws and/or a lived social standard in a society.

Corporate Governance and Compliance

Traditionally, corporate governance in the sense of shareholder value-oriented management aims at responsible management and corporate control to create value.

This has played an important role for HRM and Leadership in recent years, esp. against the backdrop of spectacular bankruptcies and the legally and ethically dubious management behaviour of known consulting firms (e.g. Arthur Anderson, EY) and companies (e.g. Wirecard, Enron, Volkswagen Dieselgate). Frequent criticism (esp. from foreign investors) is e.g. lack of transparency in company management or lack of independence of German supervisory boards. Or the unusually high manager salaries or s...

Table of contents

• About the book
• Notes
• Preface
• Epigraph
• Brief Contents
• Table of Contents
• Figures
• Abbreviations
• 1. HR Management Policy and Strategy
• 2. Leadership
• 3. HR-Organisation and Operations
• 4. Challenges in HR Management and Leadership
• Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright