Semester 4, Lesson 10 (55)

WHAT IS human resource management?

 

I.       Read the following words and word combinations. Try to match up each of them to its Ukrainian equivalent.  Use your dictionary if necessary.

 

a)     to forecast b)    to develop c)     skill d)    to recruit e)     to select f)      concerned with

g)     to bring h)    appropriate i)       performance j)       appraisal k)    to evaluate l)       accomplishment

m)  to reward n)    compliance with o)    reason p)    sound q)    to ensure r)      to meet

s)     need t)      to design u)    to implement v)    workforce w)  competitive

 

 

а) винагороджувати  б) виконувати в) доброякісний г) забезпечувати д) набирати е) конкуруючий  є) уміння, майстерність ж) відповідність (чомусь) з) прогнозувати  и) вибирати, відбирати і) причина ї) потреба к) планувати

л) приводити, доставляти м) задовольняти (щось), відповідати (чомусь) н) виконання о) розвивати(ся) п) працівники, робоча сила р) досягнення с) оцінювати т) оцінка у) придатний ф) що має відношення до (чогось), що займається (чимось)

 

2. Which verbs in A can go with which nouns in B?

E.g. to forecast the number of employees

A

to forecast   to develop   to recruit    to carry out     to evaluate    to reward        to meet        to implement

 

B

best employees     HR programs     work accomplishments    the skills    the number of employees      individuals      the work      the needs

 

 

II.      1. Read and translate text 26:

 

TEXT 26    The nature of human resource management

 

Nature of human resource management (HRM) includes activities that first forecast the number and type of employees an organization will need, then find, and develop employees with necessary skills.

For example, human resource planning, recruiting, and selecting are programs concerned with bringing the appropriate individuals into the organization. Orientation and training programs develop the skills required by employees to carry out the work of the company. Performance appraisal evaluates work accomplishments, while compensation can reward those who perform at high levels.

Compliance with the law is also important, but such compliance is not the major reason for developing sound human resource programs. The primary reason is to ensure a sufficient number of employees who have the appropriate skills to meet the organization’s needs.

If these HR programs are appropriately designed and implemented, the organization will have an efficient workforce that serves as a primary strength in competitive markets.

 

2. Comprehension check.

 

Are the following statements true or false? Correct the false ones.

 

a)     One of the functions of human resource management is to predict the organization’s future demand for staff. 

b)    Selecting programs involve developing the proficiency necessary for doing the work of the company.

c)     Performance assessment is the judgement about how an employee is working.

d)    The main goal of working out a good human resource program is to comply with the law.

e)     The company’s effective employees act as a key force in competitive markets.

 

 

3.     Read the text once again. Find words in the text that mean the same as the following.

 

 

a. actions	g. institution	n. employment	u. demand
b. cause	h. involves	o. assesses	v. put into practice
c. requirements	i. planned	p. functioning	w. proficiency
d. main	j. effective	q. do	x. assessment
e. achievements	k. proper	r. administration	y. high-class
f. staff (three words)	l. improve	s. choosing	z. involved in
	m. predict	t. instruction

 

III Match up each of the words and phrases in A to its synonym or an explanation for it in B. Use your dictionary if necessary.

 

A                                                                                                    B

1.     organization	a.     to make a choice
2.     work-related	b.     qualified
3.     to make a decision	c.    a company that sells the same goods or services as another company
4.     reason
5.     to face	d.     to try to be more successful
6.     competitor	e.      to take action to do smth
7.     costs	f.       to influence
8.     to compete	g.     connected with work
9.     skilled	h.     personnel
10.                       to deal with	i.       to provide what is necessary
11.                       issue	j.      work that is done to keep sth in good condition
12.                       to affect
13.                       complex	k.     to meet
14.                       to meet the needs	l.       to discover
15.                       workforce	m.  existing
16.                       to be concerned with	n.     to involve
17.                       maintenance	o.     common
18.                       to find	p.    problem
19.                       general	q.     cause
20.                       current	r.      company
21.                       to concern	s.      difficult
	t.     to give attention to smth because it is important
	u.     expenses

 

IV. Work in small groups.

Say which of the following suggestions would be appropriate activities or inappropriate activities for a human resource manager.

 

If I were a human resource manager...

 

a.     ... I would be responsible for lowering labour costs.

b.     ... I would have to make laws affecting employment decisions.

c.   ... I would make every effort to meet the needs of the organization for an effective work force.

d.     ... I would fire unqualified employees.

e.      ... I would try to find skilled employees in the general work force.

f.       ... I would be in charge of developing skills in current employees.

 V. Reading

1. Skim through text 27 and think of the suitable title.

TEXT 27                                          TEXT 2

 

A basic activity of HR managers is collecting information to use in making job-related decisions about individuals. Most HR programs use some combination of three types of information: job characteristics, worker qualifications, and job performance.

Job analysis is the systematic process of gathering information about important work-related aspects of a job. It identifies the first of two types of information, which includes the tasks that make up the job; the worker knowledge, skills, and abilities (KSAs) needed on the job; the information, equipment, and materials used; and the working conditions.

Table 1 provides some example task statements and KSAs that are appropriate for the position of regional sales manager.

Performance appraisal, discussed in a later section, is the process of collecting the third type of information, job performance of individual employees.

 

Table 1

 

A partial list of tasks and KSAs for the position of regional sales manager

 

Job Tasks

1.     Use data from last year’s sales, the present state of the economy, and the number of competitors in the region to develop a sales forecast for each product item for the next six months. 2.     Interview applicants for sales positions and, together with the district sales manager, decide which applicants to select. Use training and experience forms, ability tests, and performance tests. 3.     Develop promotion and sales campaigns using data from the sales forecast, recent sales, company-sponsored market surveys, and competitors’ promotion and sales practices.

Knowledge, Skills, and Abilities Needed

Knowledge of algebra Ability to use situational interviewing for selection of sales staff Ability to design a promotion campaign for each product for a six-month time period Skill in use of personal computer for word processing and development of mathematical tables for sales forecasting

 

2. Comprehension check.

 

Working in pairs, answer the questions.

 

a)      What information must be collected to have full characteristics of job? 

b)      What does the abbreviation KSAs mean?

c)       What must a good sales manager be proficient in?

d)      What must a regional sales manager do to work out a sales forecast for each product item?

e)       What does a regional sales manager need a sales forecast for?

f)        In what way does a regional sales manager select applicants for sales positions?

 VI. Writing

You are going to be interviewed for the position of HR manager. To be well prepared, you need to make a table showing duties and KSAs that are required for this job.

 

VII Individual work:   Read the texts, translate and answer the questions:

TEXT 28                                         People management

HRM has become the dominant approach to people management throughout much of the world. But it is important to stress that HRM has not ‘come out of nowhere’. There is a long history of attempts to achieve an understanding of human behaviour in the workplace. For a century and more, practitioners and academics have developed theories and practices to explain and influence human behaviour at work. HRM has absorbed ideas and techniques from a wide range of these theories and practical tools. In effect, HRM is a synthesis of themes and concepts drawn from a long history of work, more recent management theories and social science research.

Over and over again, managers must deal with events that are clearly similar but also different enough to require fresh thinking. For example:

●               businesses expand or fail

●               they innovate or stagnate

●               they may be exciting or unhappy organizations in which to work

●               finance has to be obtained

●               workers have to be recruited

●               new equipment is purchased, eliminating old procedures and introducing new methods

●                staff must be reorganized, retrained or dismissed.

Some items we have listed are clearly to do with people management (for example, recruiting or reorganizing staff). Others – such as innovation or stagnation – are less obviously so. However, they are likely to be affected by having trained, motivated people with suitable skills in place. Some seem irrelevant to HRM, and you might have identified ‘raising finance’ in this category. But compare two businesses: one has an excellent industrial relations record with no strikes or disputes, while another has many such problems that have been reported in the media. For which company would you find it easier to raise extra finance? Businesses are made up of people and there is no business activity that might not be touched on by HRM.

Human resource management draws on many sources for its theories and practices. Sociologists, psychologists and management theorists, especially, have contributed a constant stream of new and reworked ideas. They offer theoretical insights and practical assistance in areas of people management such as recruitment and selection, performance measurement, team composition and organizational design. Many of their concepts have been integrated into broader approaches that have contributed to management thinking in various periods and ultimately the development of HRM (see Figure 1.1).

1. Answer the questions

1. Who has developed theories and practices to explain and influence human behaviour at work?

2. What events must managers deal with?

3. What listed in the text events are clearly to do with people management?

4. What specialists contributed a constant stream of new and reworked ideas into human resource management?

5. What are the influences on the development of HRM (see Figure 1.1)?

TEXT 29

Background and origins of people management

The roots of people management and, therefore, of HRM lie deep in the past. Just as the tasks that have to be done in modern organizations are allocated to different jobs and the people who perform those jobs, humans in ancient societies divided work between themselves. The division of labour (see Key concept 1.1) has been practised since prehistoric times: family groups shared the work of hunting and gathering; tasks were allocated according to skills such as ability to find food plants, track animals or cook; age, strength and health were taken into account and the oldest and youngest members were not expected to travel far from home or to be involved in the dangers of hunting.

Social customs determined separate roles and tasks for males and females. Traditional self-sufficient communities, dependent on agriculture or fishing, rarely had  more  than 20–30 categories of labour, in contrast to modern industrial states that have thousands of different job types. Some functions, such as religious and political leadership or medicine, were restricted to individuals with inherited or specialist knowledge. As civilization and technology evolved, however, specialization led to a proliferation of different forms of work, and farmers and fishermen were joined by skilled craftworkers using metal, pottery, and wood.

Every generation believes that its problems and achievements are greater than those of the past. Modern business is seen as being uniquely complex and on a larger scale than the enterprises of earlier times but, in the ancient world, large numbers of people were organized to build great pyramids, fortresses and irrigation systems; military leaders marshalled huge armies; slave owners operated massive plantations and mines. Leadership, power and organization, therefore, have been matters of study and debate for thousands of years. The Farmer’s Almanac, a 5000-year-old Sumerian text, includes useful tips on the supervision of farm labourers – making it the oldest known HRM textbook (Kramer, 1963: p.105). The text advised the farmer to prepare a selection of whips and goads to keep men and beasts working hard. No idleness or interruptions were to be tolerated. Even planting barley seed had to be closely supervised as the unfortunate labourers were not trusted to do it properly.

This authoritarian approach has predominated throughout most of recorded history, but there has been a continuing and increasing search for less coercive ways of managing people.

 

 

Key concept 1.1          Division of labour The subdivision of work so that specific tasks or jobs are allocated to individuals deemed most suitable on the basis of skill, experience or cultural tradition. All societies practise division of labour. Some cultures traditionally allocated tasks to particular social groups, such as the caste system in India. In others, higher status jobs have been reserved for the members of a power elite such as the products of the British ‘public school and Oxbridge’ system or the French ‘grandesécoles’. Modern HRM aims to identify and develop the best people for specific jobs, regardless of background, class or gender.

 

 

In 16th century Italy, for example, Niccolo Machiavelli (1469–1527) wrote The Prince (by which he meant a leader), detailing a wide range of strategies and tactics that continue to offer insights into the exercise of power. Although famous for advocating ruthlessness in the conduct of public (i.e. political) activities, Swain (2002) considers Machiavelli to be the originator of three themes more relevant to private management: modernity, publicness and the executive. According to Swain (2002, p.281) Machiavelli’s modernity distinguished his world from that of antiquity:

When Machiavelli jettisons the Christian religion and ancient philosophy as sources of guidance in the human condition, he may do so for the sake of politics, but the ramifications spill over into all other aspects of human life. The modern enterprise, simply put, is humankind taking care of itself as best it can in an otherwise pretty lonely universe. Science and technology are harnessed to make life more pleasant. Politics and political orders are mostly guided by the ends of political stability and serving humankind’s needs.

According to Machiavelli, the ideal leader should have a degree of virtue and be regarded with both fear and love – although, if only one was possible, it was better to be feared than loved. Amongst his other prescriptions, the leader should be both a Fox and a Lion, able to exercise cunning and be a champion.

The division of labour required the most suitable people to perform skilled tasks, producing an early interest in the differences between individuals. According to Smith (1948, p.10):

 

 

In the 16th century John Huarte wrote a book in Spanish concerning what we should now refer to as vocational guidance and selection. It was translated into Italian, and from this version an English translation was made under the title of ‘The Tryal of Wits’, which, translated into modern speech, means the testing of intelligence. He maintained that it is nature which enables a man of ability to learn, and that it is quite superfluous for good teachers to try to teach any particular subject to a child who has not the disposition or the ability required for it. Each person, unless he is a dolt, has some predominant quality which will enable him to excel in some way.

Huarte produced the following classification (Smith, 1948, p.11):

1               Some have a disposition for the clear and easy parts, but cannot understand the obscure and difficult.

2               Some are pliant and easy, able to learn all the rules, but no good at argument.

3               Some need no teachers, they take no pleasure in the plains but seek dangerous and high places and walk alone, follow no beaten track; these must fare forthwith, unquiet, seeking to know and understand new matters.

 

Individuals perform their jobs within a wide environmental context. In 1776, Adam Smith (1723–1790) published An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. This foundation text for the science of economics began by emphasizing the importance of the division of labour in achieving increased productivity, thereby anticipating the Industrial Revolution. The UK is conventionally regarded as the first country to experience this process which then spread throughout Europe and North America and continues to transform developing countries. However, Cannadine (1992, p.18) observes that:

The view that Britain was the first industrial nation, whose achievements all others consciously emulated, has also been severely undermined, especially in the case of France where, it is now argued, industrialization was taking place in a different way and where, in any case for much of the eighteenth century, its productivity was higher than Britain’s.

‘Revolution’ implies a rapid transition from craft to industrial methods but British industrialization was a relatively slow process in comparison with the recent development of the ‘tiger’ economies of east Asia. At the end of the 18th, and the beginning of the 19th centuries, workers were gradually concentrated in factories and work centres, more or less under their own free will. This concentration was linked to increasing mechanization and the consequent need for machine-operating skills. Developing from older craft-based industries, work was divided between employees according to the nature of their skills. One worker would no longer be totally responsible for all stages of production, such as making a piece of furniture

Key concept 1.2 Alienation

A state of estrangement, or a feeling of being an outsider from society. Karl Marx observed that although work in a traditional, agricultural or craft-based society had been exhausting, workers had control over their own jobs. Their work required considerable knowledge and skill that had been removed from many factory jobs. Dull, boring and repetitive work induces a feeling of alienation. Assembly line workers are involved with a small part of the final pro- duct, have little control over the rhythm of their work and may have no idea of the significance of their contribution. Their work can appear to be alien with no relationship or meaning to their lives other than to produce income. As a consequence they may feel little enthusiasm and, often, active hostility towards what seems like forced labour.

 

In the industrial system the task was subdivided into simpler, less skillful jobs. Different people would deal with parts of the process: one would turn chair legs, another would prepare seats, yet another would stain and polish, and so on.

By the late 19th century, the size and complexity of the new industries demanded more sophisticated methods of control and organization, eventually evolving into modern management. Until this time, workers were not directly employed by large capitalists: their employers were gang bosses, subcontracted to provide and organize labour. In the developed world, sub- contractors of this kind continue to exist in the building sector and in fruit and vegetable- picking. In developing countries their power is even greater. Under autocratic but lost control, skilled or unskilled workers largely organized their own efforts, forming autonomous teams. However, as factories grew larger and people were concentrated in greater numbers in specific locations, this indirect approach became increasingly unworkable. People were needed to control permanent workforces, which were directly employed by factory owners.

Initially they took the form of overseers, foremen or supervisors; exercising ‘coercion by means of observation’ (Foucault, 1977, p.175). At first they were people promoted from the workforce: the concept of a distinct managerial class with separate recruitment paths evolved slowly. Jacques (1997) points out that ‘the foreman was not in any sense a middle manager, but a key player in a form of control in the works radically different from and preceding management.’

In the 19th century industry was dominated by individual owners, family businesses and partnerships. The principals of these companies managed their businesses in a direct, personal way, partly because the numbers of people involved were small enough to be within the span of control of a few individuals. Family-controlled businesses became a major economic force and many achieved considerable importance. Some of the most successful were happy to publicize their methods and were featured in the media of the time. Biographies were written glorifying their achievements and presenting their ideas in largely uncritical terms. George Cadbury is one such example and he is featured in the case study at the end of this chapter. Along with explorers, scientists and colonial adventurers, business heroes were presented as role models for the masses. Such books met the demands of a reading population who preferred to perceive the world in terms of good and bad, heroes and villains, and required a presentation of success in simplistic terms. Examination of modern ‘pop management’ books suggest that little has changed.

 

VIII. Grammar  Unreal Past

The past tense is sometimes used in English to refer to an 'unreal' situation. So, although the tense is the past, we are usually talking about the present, e.g. in a Type 2 conditional sentence:

If an elephant and a mouse fell in love, they would have many problems.

 

Although fell is in the past tense, we are talking about a hypothetical situation that might exist now or at any time, but we are not referring to the past. We call this use the unreal past.

Other situations where this occurs are:

·         after other words and expressions like 'if' (supposing, if only, what if);

·         after the verb 'to wish';

·         after the expression 'I'd rather..'

 

Expressions like 'if'

The following expressions can be used to introduce hypothetical situations:

- supposing, if only, what if. They are followed by a past tense to indicate that the condition they introduce is unreal:

Supposing an elephant and a mouse fell in love? (= but we know this is unlikely or impossible)

What if we painted the room purple? (= that would be very surprising)

If only I had more money. (= but I haven't).

These expressions can also introduce hypothetical situations in the past and then they are followed by the past perfect.

Examples

If only I hadn't kissed the frog (= I did and it was a mistake because he turned into a horrible prince, but I can't change it now.)

What if the elephant had trodden on the mouse? (She didn't, but we can imagine the result!)

Supposing I had given that man my money! (I didn't, so I've still got my money now.)

 

The verb to wish

The verb to wish is followed by an 'unreal' past tense when we want to talk about situations in the present that we are not happy about but cannot change:

I wish I had more money (=but I haven't)

She wishes she was/were beautiful (= but she's not)

We wish we could come to your party (but we can't)

 

When we want to talk about situations in the past that we are not happy about or actions that we regret, we use the verb to wish followed by the past perfect:

I wish I hadn't said that (= but I did)

He wishes he hadn't bought the car (= but he did buy it.)

I wish I had taken that job in New York (= but I didn't, so I'm stuck in Bristol)

 

NOTE: When we want to talk about situations we are not happy about and where we want someone else to change them, we use to wish followed by would + infinitive:

I wish he would stop smoking. (= I don't like it, I want him to change it)

I wish you would go away. (= I don't want you here, I want you to take some action)

I wish you wouldn't squeeze the toothpaste from the middle! (= I want you to change your habits.)

I'd rather and it's time...

These two expressions are also followed by an unreal past. The verb is in the past tense, but the situation is in the present.

When we want to talk about a course of action we would prefer someone else to take, we use I'd rather + past tense:

I'd rather you went

He'd rather you called the police

I'd rather you didn't hunt elephants.

 

NOTE: the stress can be important in these sentences, to show what our preference is:

I'd rather you went = not me,

I'd rather you went = don't stay

He'd rather you called the police = he doesn't want to

He'd rather you called the police = not the ambulance service

Similarly, when we want to say that now is a suitable moment to do something, either for ourselves or for someone else, we use it's time + past tense:

It's (high) time I went.

It's time you paid that bill.

Don't you think it's time you had a haircut?