Human Resource Management

John Martin

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2008
• Print ISBN: 9781412945103, 9781412945097
• eBook ISBN: 9781446243060
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Human Resource Management
• Index: Business

The SAGE Course Companion on Human Resource Management is an accessible introduction to the subject that will help readers to extend their understanding of key concepts and enhance their thinking skills in line with course requirements. It provides support on how to revise for exams and prepare for and write assessed pieces. Readers are encouraged not only to think like an HRM student but also to think about the subject critically.

Designed to compliment existing textbooks for the course, the companion provides:

- Easy access to the key themes in HRM

- Helpful summaries of the approach taken by the main course textbooks and their strengths and weaknesses

- Guidance on the essential study skills required to pass the course

- Sample exam questions and answers, with advice on common themes that must always be addressed, how to use information effectively and pitfalls to advoid

- Themes that run throughout the major points covered by the book

- Taking it Further sections that suggest how readers can extent their thinking beyond the `received wisdom?

Much more than a revision guide for undergraduates, it is an essential tool that will help readers take their course understanding to new levels and help them achieve success in their undergraduate course.

part one
introducing your companion

This SAGE Course Companion offers you an insider’s guide into how to make the most of your studies and grasp the key concepts covered in your human resource management (HRM) course. It will provide you with essential help to enhance your understanding of HRM and develop your thinking skills in line with course requirements. It will also help you with revision for your exams, and in preparing and writing assignments.

This book should be used as a supplement to your HRM textbook and lecture notes. You may want to glance through it quickly, reading it in parallel with your course syllabus, noting where each topic is covered in both. Ideally, you should buy this book at the beginning of your HRM course – it will provide you with a quick explanation of any topics you are having trouble with, and of course the advice on getting the most from your course will not be much help if you have already finished!

It isn’t intended to replace your textbooks or lectures – it is intended to save you time when you are revising for your exams or preparing coursework. Note that revision implies that you are refreshing your memory and focussing your understanding of previously studied material in preparation for an assignment and/or exam!

This Companion will help you to anticipate exam questions, and gives guidance on what your examiners will be looking for. It should be seen as a framework within which to organise the subject matter, and to extract the most important points from your textbooks, lecture notes, and other learning materials from your HRM course.

This book should direct you to the key issues in the HRM field. Whichever textbook you are using, the basics are the basics and we have given some guidance on where topics are covered in specific books. However, you should read the Companion in parallel with your textbook to identify where specific topics are covered in it because some topics appear in more than one location in a textbook. For example, performance appraisal has relevance to reward management, training and career development and might be covered in each of those chapters in a textbook.

There is also a study and revision skills guide in Part Three which will help you to learn more efficiently. Learning is best accomplished by studying a topic from several different angles – which is why you are strongly encouraged to attend lectures and tutorials; read the textbook; and read around the subject in general. This book will help you to bring together these different sources.

How to use this book

Ideally, you should have bought this book before your course starts, so that you can get a quick overview of each topic before you go into the lecture – but if you didn’t do this, all is not lost. The Companion will still be equally helpful as a revision guide, and as a way of directing you to the key themes and topics in HRM.

This first part introduces your Companion and also provides some insight on how to think like an HRM practitioner; it will help you to get into the mindset of the subject and think about it critically. As a bonus, it also means learning how to think like your examiner! Examiners want to see that you can handle the basic concepts of the subject appropriately; if you need a quick overview of the background to HRM, this is the section you will find most useful.

Part Two goes into the curriculum in more detail, taking each topic and providing you with the key themes and debates. Again, this does not substitute for the deeper coverage in your lectures and textbook, but it does provide a ‘primer’ to use before lectures or as subsequent revision guide – or, of course, both. Each section in this part contains the following features:

• Material presented in summary form and tips on handling the information in assessed work that also serve as reminders of key issues. These will help you to anticipate assessment questions and to remember the main points when answering them.
• ‘Think about it?’ boxes. These serve several purposes, for example: putting the theory into a ‘real-world’ context; asking you to undertake further research or reading; or prompting you to think about and draw reasoned conclusions about a particular issue. All of these can be used to strengthen your understanding of a topic and used in exams and/or coursework to elaborate and deepen the points you make. This reflects the type of thinking that moves you from a bare pass level of answer towards a 2:1 or a First!
• Input from key thinkers in the HRM field. These will be useful to quote in exams, as well as providing you with the main influences in the development of HRM.
• Sample exam and assignment questions with outline answers. These should help you be better prepared for the actual questions, even though they will (of course) be different.
• Textbook guides. These will direct you to the main chapters from major textbooks that build on what has been covered in each section in Part Two of your Companion.

Part Three of this Companion is a study guide which will help you in getting more from your lectures, remembering more when you are sitting exams, and with writing essays.

The final section of this Companion is a handy compendium of useful information, including a glossary, bibliography, list of useful websites and a general index of key terms.

Thinking like a well-informed HRM student

HRM is a relatively young discipline, and it is important to note that there is still considerable disagreement and debate among academics and practitioners about what HRM is and what it is not.

The difficulty in seeking to define HRM arises because the term ‘human resource management’ is used in two different ways. Firstly it can refer to the department within an organisation that has the responsibility for policy and practice in relation to ‘people management’ within the business. The primary activities embraced within such a department would typically be those covered by most HRM textbooks, including this Course Companion. As such it reflects a discrete subset of the management activities within the organisation and can be differentiated from the marketing, finance, production, design and engineering departments. Used in the second way, HRM seeks to reflect a particular approach to the management of people as distinct from the earlier approach adopted under the umbrella term ‘personnel management’. Because the practices associated with the organisational need to manage people are subject to constant adaptation as a consequence of fashion, legislative, social, educational, organisational, economic and labour market changes it has been argued that personnel management had become outdated and that the philosophy, focus and approach to people management offered by HRM more effectively met the needs of modern organisations.

It is useful to reflect on the origins of HRM in order to better understand it and the current debate about its definition. The management of people has existed for many thousands of years in one form or another. Consider for example the Roman Empire and the need to ‘run it’, with all that this implies. The military, political and trading activities all needed people to run them and, while much of the labour was slavery based, people still needed to be directed, controlled and organised in order to meet the needs of ‘empire’. In modern organisations staff must be recruited, persuaded to stay, trained, motivated, paid, directed, and so on – all within the cultural and legal conventions of the time and location. In that sense HRM simply reflects the latest in a long line of people-management approaches. The major difference today compared with the past is that people management has become a discrete and specialised discipline within management as opposed to being part of every manager’s job. To some extent things have turned full circle in that it is now increasingly recognised that the management of people is a major line management responsibility and that the function of HR is to facilitate that responsibility, not to subvert it by taking responsibility away from the line manager.

Modern HRM began to emerge in the nineteenth century, based on the work of social reformers such as Robert Owen. The Industrial Revolution had fuelled the growth in factories and large urban development and as a result had changed the way that work was organised. Working and living conditions were poor and this led to demands for fundamental social reform. This pressure for change continued into the early years of the twentieth century. Torrington et al. (2005) identify five phases of personnel and HR management over that period. They are:

1Social justice. Covering the period just described, this phase saw the beginnings of personnel management in the search to reduce the exploitation of workers and to be able to offer welfare services. It was the influence of major business owners such as Rowntree and Cadbury who, based on their Quaker beliefs, encouraged the development of a caring employer approach during this period.

2Humane bureaucracy. This phase saw the development of a greater involvement in a range of people management activities for the fledgling personnel specialists. In the UK, for example, during the First World War vast numbers of men were taken away from their usual work and conscripted into the armed forces. They were largely replaced by women who undertook those roles for the first time. Staffing and training issues came to the fore and of course, given the nature of war, welfare retained its significance. Following this great upheaval the human relations movement emerged (which emphasised social relations in the workplace) as a counter trend to the previous scientific management emphasis.

Think about it?

What welfare and other people management issues might have become significant during the First and Second World Wars? Why?

3Negotiated consent. Following the Second World War (the late 1940s onwards) labour became a scarce commodity due to relatively high employment levels. This contributed to a growth in the membership and bargaining power of the trade unions. As a result managers needed to find ways of managing the conflict and working within a collective bargaining framework. The need for personnel officers to work in these areas was identified and encouraged by the governments of the time. Government assistance with advice and conflict resolution was provided through a body that was eventually to become the Advisory, Conciliation and Arbitration Service (ACAS).

4Organisation. By the late 1960s personnel specialists began to take responsibility for developing training and career planning activities within organisations in addition to the above responsibilities. This period saw the emergence of a management orientation (in addition to a worker focus) to the work of personnel practitioners.

5Human resource management. This emerged during the late 1980s. Given the previous discussion about the difficulty in defining HRM it is not surprising that there exists a range of perspectives on the differences between HRM and personnel management. It has been argued by some that personnel management reflected a management function that sought to represent the management to the workers and the workers to management. On the other hand HRM has been described as the management discipline that sought to ensure the recruitment, training, motivation and management of employees in a way that maximised their utility to management. In that sense totally management focussed and supportive.

If you take nothing else away from this discussion be aware that many social, cultural, organisational and legal factors have changed over the years and that personnel management has evolved into the present day HRM within that changing environment.

The above discussion refers to the evolution of HRM over the past 150 years or so. In academic terms the question of what differentiates personnel management and HRM is comprehensively addressed by Legge (2005). Professor Legge identifies four types of personnel management model, including:

1Normative models. Models that broadly define it as, ‘the optimum ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Dedication
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Part One: Introducing your companion
• Part Two: Core areas of the curriculum
• Part Three: Study, writing and revision skills: (in collaboration with David McIllroy)
• Glossary
• Bibliography
• Useful websites
• Index