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Human resource management

Approach to the effective management of people in a company

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The overall purpose of human resources (HR) is to ensure that the organization can achieve success through people. HR professionals manage the human capital of an organization to maximize employee performance. They can specialize in finding, recruiting, selecting, training, and developing employees, as well as maintaining employee relations or benefits. Training and development professionals ensure that employees are trained and have continuous development. This is done through training programs, performance evaluations, and reward programs. Employee relations deals with the concerns of employees when policies are broken, such as in cases involving harassment or discrimination. Managing employee benefits includes developing compensation structures, parental leave, discounts, and other benefits. On the other side of the field are HR generalists or business partners.

HR is a product of the human relations movement of the early 20th century when researchers began documenting ways of creating business value through the strategic management of the workforce. It was initially dominated by transactional work, such as payroll and benefits administration, but due to globalization, company consolidation, technological advances, and further research, HR as of 2015 includes strategic initiatives like mergers and acquisitions, talent management, succession planning, industrial and labor relations, inclusion, employee retention and lowering employee turnover.

History

Precedent theoretical developments

The human resources field began to take shape in 19th century Europe. It is built on a simple idea by Robert Owen (1771–1858) and Charles Babbage (1791–1871) during the Industrial Revolution. These men concluded that people were crucial to the success of an organization. They expressed the thought that well-being of employees led to perfect work; without healthy workers, the organization would not survive.

The term "human resource" was first coined by labor economist John R. Commons in 1893. HR emerged as a specific field in the early 20th century, influenced by Frederick Winslow Taylor (1856–1915). Taylor explored what he termed "scientific management" (sometimes referred to as "Taylorism"), striving to improve economic efficiency in manufacturing jobs. He eventually focused on one of the principal inputs into the manufacturing process—labor—sparking inquiry into workforce productivity.

Meanwhile, in London C S Myers inspired by unexpected problems among soldiers who alarmed generals and politicians. During the First World War, he co-founded the National Institute of Industrial Psychology (NIIP) in 1921. He set seeds for the human relations movement, this movement, on both sides of the Atlantic, built on the research of Elton Mayo (1880–1949) and others to document through the Hawthorne studies (1924–1932) and other studies how stimuli, unrelated to financial compensation and working conditions, could yield more productive workers. Work by Abraham Maslow (1908–1970), Kurt Lewin (1890–1947), Max Weber (1864–1920), Frederick Herzberg (1923–2000), and David McClelland (1917–1998) formed the basis for studies in industrial and organizational psychology, organizational behavior and organizational theory.

Birth and development of the discipline

By the time there was enough theoretical evidence to make a business case for strategic workforce management, changes in the business landscape—à la Andrew Carnegie (1835–1919) and John Rockefeller (1839–1937)—and in public policy—à la Sidney (1859–1947) and Beatrice Webb (1858–1943), Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal of 1933 to 1939—had transformed employer-employee relationships, and the HRM discipline became formalized as "industrial and labor relations". In 1913 one of the oldest known professional HR associations—the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD)—started in England as the Welfare Workers' Association; it changed its name a decade later to the Institute of Industrial Welfare Workers, and again the next decade to Institute of Labour Management before settling upon its current name in 2000. From 1918 the early Soviet state institutions began to implement a distinct ideological HRM focus alongside technical management—first in the Red Army (through political commissars alongside military officers), later (from 1933) in work sites more generally (through partorg posts alongside conventional managers).

In 1920, James R. Angell delivered an address to a conference on personnel research in Washington detailing the need for personnel research. This preceded and led to the organization of the Personnel Research Federation. In 1922 the first volume of The Journal of Personnel Research was published, a joint initiative between the National Research Council and the Engineering Foundation. Likewise in the United States, the world's first institution of higher education dedicated to workplace studies—the School of Industrial and Labor Relations—formed at Cornell University in 1945. In 1948 what would later become the largest professional HR association—the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM)—formed as the American Society for Personnel Administration (ASPA).

In the Soviet Union, Stalin's use of patronage exercised through the "HR Department" equivalent in the Bolshevik Party, its Orgburo, demonstrated the effectiveness and influence of human-resource policies and practices, and Stalin himself acknowledged the importance of the human resource, exemplified in his mass deployment of it, as in the five-year plans and in the Gulag system.

During the latter half of the 20th century, private-sector union membership in the U.S. declined significantly, while workforce-management specialists continued to expand their influence within organizations. In the U.S., the phrase "industrial and labor relations" came into use to refer specifically to issues concerning collective representation, and companies began referring to the proto-HR profession as "personnel administration." Many current HR practices originated with the needs of companies in the 1950s to develop and retain talent.

In the late 20th century, advances in transportation and communications greatly facilitated workforce mobility and collaboration. Corporations began viewing employees as assets. "Human resource management" consequently became the dominant term for the function, with the ASPA even changing its name to the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) in 1998.

"Human capital management" (HCM) is sometimes used synonymously with "HR", although "human capital" typically refers to a narrower view of human resources; i.e. the knowledge the individuals embody and can contribute to an organization. Other terms sometimes used to describe the HRM field include "organizational management", "manpower management", "talent management", "personnel management", "workforce management", and simply "people management".

Several popular media productions have depicted human resource management in operation. The U.S. television series The Office, HR representative Toby Flenderson is sometimes portrayed as a nag because he constantly reminds coworkers of company policies and government regulations. Long-running American comic strip Dilbert frequently portrays sadistic HR policies through the character Catbert, the "evil director of human resources". An HR manager is the title character in the 2010 Israeli film The Human Resources Manager, while an HR intern is the protagonist in 1999 French film Ressources humaines. The main character in the BBC sitcom dinnerladies, Philippa, is an HR manager. The protagonist of the Mexican telenovela Mañana es para siempre is a director of human resources. Up In the Air is centered on corporate "downsizer" Ryan Bingham and his travels. As the film progresses, HR is portrayed as a data-driven function that deals with people as human resource metrics, which can lead to absurd outcomes for real people.

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