Differences between Human Resource Management and Personnel Management - Essay Example

Over the years, there has been unending debates and continuous conversations between human resource authors on whether there are actual difference between HRM and personnel management. A host of these authors have argued that the most obvious change has been the “re-labeling process” (Koster, 2007.p.4). Koster argues that the relabeling would not have necessarily represented any change but was important in that it helped rid personnel management from its unlikeable welfare image. The overall effect was that it helped safeguard personnel management from marginalization.

All the same, this study surmises that the development of HRM was not entirely a “re-labeling” campaign but there must have been a change of concept or approach (Koster, 2007.p.6). It is this change that defines the difference between personnel management and HRM. In this study, we trace these differences in light of various models as well as examine their application using two functional areas, recruitment and selection and training and development. Personnel Management and HRM Over the past 50 years, the term personnel management has been employed to refer to the function of management that deals with the recruitment, employment, training, redeployment, safety and departure of employees (Cole, 2004.p.4).

Simply, personnel management was a function within the organization concerned with managing people, the main goal being achieving efficiency and justice for all those within an enterprise. Key in this definition were the reference to justice and efficiency, this represented a cordial approach to employee affairs within an organization. Up to the 1990s, personnel management was holistically involved in handling collective relationships with employees and their representatives and mediating individual employment relationships (Cole, 2004.p.5).

In regard to stakeholder roles and relationships, the personnel manager was largely under pressure from the managing director, trade union representatives, and line management colleagues. Around the personnel managers there would be the board of directors at the top whereas at the same level or just below them there would be: the senior line managers, junior colleagues, union representatives, statutory bodies and individuals employees. The board, and especially the managing director, would be dependent on the personnel manager to guarantee that workers relationships were both calm and predictable (Storey, 1999.p.26).

Senior line managers were keen to guarantee that there would be no interruptions to their production programs. The conditions therefore in which personnel management was conducted at the time could conveniently be explained as highly synchronized, subject to considerations of relative power among the board and worker’s representatives, and rigid in regard to labor mobility (Cole, 2004.p.6). In this context, personnel managers were treated like the highly-respected company advocates charged with advising the senior management on how best to avoid, or curtail conflict.

It is because of this In the contemporary situation, the prime role of personnel/HR practitioners is that of developing the organization’s staff resources so as to enable people to make a flexible, multi-skilled input to the general