Human Resources Managing your Most Important Resource
Managing your Most Important Resource; Human Resources
In the business world today there is a constant pressure to achieve ever-higher standards of performance. There is little or no room for complacency in the global market. Companies are always in search of getting more for less. As a result of this the stress factor has gone up in many companies. “Downsizing” and “restructuring” is just a couple of expressions that employees and their representatives have come up with as the employees try to improve the company by reducing staff costs. (Mabey 1998)
Yet we have seen the development of a management philosophy that can be summarized in the phrase “our people are our greatest advantage”. Human resource management is an example of that philosophy. And arguably, human resource management has become the leading theory to people management in English-speaking countries. But it is important to state that human resource management has not come out of nowhere, it has taken ideas from many areas. And a lot of literature has been written about the topic, showing how you best can manage your employees. But throughout the twentieth century, practitioners and academics have searched for theories that can help them manage people at work. A lot of things happen in a business that both influence the employees and the employer alike for instance: new equipment must be bought, old procedures are replaced with new, staff must be reorganised, retained or dismissed. And this shows that workers and managers must deal with events that need fresh thinking. (Price 1997)
Many sociologists, psychologists and management practitioners have tried to work out theories that can help companies in developing their human resource management. They have given ideas in areas like people management such as recruitment and selection, team building and organizational design. These theories have been a part of the development of human resource management. The most significant theories are:
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Scientific management: detailed task specifications and selection of the 'best man' for the job. It was the function of managers to think - workers were expected to do exactly as they were told.
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Fordism: a philosophy of production based on the continuous assembly line.
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Human relations: In the 1920s and 30s researchers in the USA demonstrated that work performance and motivation did not depend simply on pay and discipline. People worked for many other reasons.
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Management by objectives: The workers could clarify and set their own targets.
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Strategic management: This is...