Human resource management - Essay Example

The Humphrey Group not only would not be irresponsible bringing an HR representative into their corporate responsibility and bonus scandal meeting, they would in fact be irresponsible not to. In fact, it seems to be absurd to say that the solution is anything but a human resources issue. Human resources determine how wages and bonuses are controlled, given and filed; they control the hiring, firing and promotion of employees. Bonus scandals and compensation ethics begin at human resources giving bad offers to bad people after not weeding out the dishonest and end with paying those bonuses to those bad people.

When a corporation makes a bad decision, one always has to ask, “Why were there bad apples in that barrel?” Picking the apples and replacing the rotten ones is the job of HR. Further, given that most companies do not end up violating the law in such an egregious manner, it's clear that illegality is the province only of a few corporate cultures and therefore a few people. How is this anything but an HR problem? Well, superficially, the paying of bonuses and the detection of fraud thereof do fall under the purview of accounts payable, auditing, accounting and payroll, which are relevant non-HR departments.

More importantly, it is true, although misleadingly so and far less crucially so than many think, that a company is more than the sum of its parts. Ultimately, a corporation is just twenty or a hundred or a thousand people, but there are three factors that make it more than just an aggregation of those people in a random setting such as a park: 1. Past organisational culture, especially for long-lasting companies 2. Institutional roles changing people's behavior (Zimbardo, 2006) 3. Shared goals and objectives created by legal responsibilities; bureaucratic and institutional coordination A company like General Electric or even Microsoft has had far more people in it throughout its history than it does now.

People are fired, replaced, quit, demoted, hired, promoted, forced into resignation, and retire. Every person who works at a company makes a mark on its institutional culture, which means that looking at a corporation at any given moment is misleading because the institutional culture goes farther back in the past. But at the same time, it is people who choose to ignore, defy or abide by that institutional culture. Aside from that, it is clear that people in certain bad circumstances don't do those things out of them being sheer evil.

The torturers at Abu Ghraib were not torturing people for fun back in the States; corporate leaders and hucksters like Ken Lay and Madoff do not mug old ladies. People in an institutional setting, as Zimbardo discovered in his famous Stanford prison experiment, begin to adopt the behavior of their roles (Zimbardo, 2006). Even if it is a pretend prison, the pretend prisoners, pretend guards and pretend warden (who are students and a psychology professor in their day-to-day lives) act like prisoners, guards and wardens for real.

The Zimbardo experiment had normal, well-adjusted students of a variety of backgrounds, yet all of them began to fall into their roles startlingly quickly. Yet, again, human resources can