Strategic Management of a Strategic Resource - Essay Example

Strategic Management Strategic Management Analysis of the Article Main Purpose The primary purpose showcase  the inevitable significance of human resource management. The author wrote the article to explain the trends in the public sector with respect to HRM. A number of changes have been felt with resoect to the role of HRM based its significance as well as best practices circumventing HRM. Therefore, the authors aimed at emphasizing the role of human resource in the strategic management of the postindustrial society. Therefore, there is a need to expose strategic managers to both significances of human resource alongside the best practice to manage the human resource through HRM. 2) Key Question The fundamental question that the author is addressing, how does strategic HRM promote thinking about the public workforce? This is about the role of human resource and the best practice that circumvent effective management of the human resource in the postindustrial society. Such a question helps the authors showcase the myriad changes the resource itself as well as the practices to manage it has undergone along the lucrative packages attached to effective HRM in modern strategic management. 3) Important Information The most important information of the article is that strategic significance of the human resource and its origin, particularly the alteration of the goods and services production services. The article compares that pre-industrial and post-industrial periods against the significance attached to people in the final goods and services with respect to tactical and operational importance. In the pre-modern world, the article notes how individual were operationally significance when they served as common labor that culminated in the production of physical products or services. Indeed, the pre-manufacturing and office operations saw people assigned to the certain position based on the industrial-based organizations in which organizational bundles of responsibilities, duties and tasks determined how human resources were utilized. However, in the post-industrial era people are tactical and undergoes massive training, varied and not easily interchangeable with a more complex organizational frameworks when contrasted to the early industrial system. Thus, the deployment of human resource is currently determined by supervisory styles., morale and human connections, human learning as well as organization design. Moreover, there is a myriad change in the post-industrial system with respect to the relationships between productivity and people. This validates the significance of HRM as productivity surpasses a mere definition of manufacturing of things thus human resource shifts from being tactically operationally significance to critical inputs. Such critical inputs individual now produce smart, complex and knowledge intensive commodities. Such findings justify a breakthrough from the early industrial settings bondage. Thus, currently productivity is evaluated based on the skills, knowledge and abilities of trained human intellect. Therefore, the post-industrial job position has no connection to one’s occupation but rather increasingly integrated class of works benchmarked against the skills and knowledge of needed in the ‘knowledge job’. Thus, there is a substitution of the early concept in which theoretical knowledge thwarts the experimental learning an apprenticeship as the criterions to assess productivity. 4) Key Concept(s) The key concepts needed to understand this article include that fact that theoretical knowledge replaces the experimental learning and apprenticeship as the drivers to productivity. In addition, the concepts of tactical and operational human resource importance are replaced by the fact that human resource in the modern world becomes a critical input into the organization. Further, the authors applied the concept of human capital to uncover the stock of human capacity to generate goods and service from the knowledge endowment. Thus, the concept of human capital aids in the understanding the differential rates of national economic development. Finally, the paper also utilizes the concept of the strategic management of human capacity to produce to benefit the firm fully. Therefore, with the proper strategic management of the human capital, the firm benefits from quality and right quantity products. 5) Main Assumptions The main assumptions underlying the author’s thinking is based on the term ‘strategic’ that creates a lot of puzzles as the three definition always stands on their own. The term is applied by the author in the stressing the importance of effective management of human resource, human capital (the strategic resource) to increase productivity. The authors thus believe that the emergence of human capital in public production systems simply indicates that the public workforce are strategic assets and not inputs of production. Thus, human capital is a strategic resource that are included in both balance sheet side of the public enterprise, and the current income and expenses account that perceives people as cost. The author may take for granted ideas such as 6) Implications The implication of the authors thinking is that Human Resource Management leads to increase productivity alongside smart and complex goods and services. The managers who strategically manage the human capital will benefit greatly as the resource is looked as both assets and income and cost falling in both balance sheet and current expense and income. Therefore, for us to benefit from the human resource, there must be proper strategic management. 7) Conclusions The conclusions in this article are that firms must recognize the positive package attached to the strategic management of human resource. In addition, the author has successfully presented in the article the fact that the human resource should be viewed as an asset in the balance sheet as well as a cost in the current expense and income. For maximization of the organizational human resources, there is a need to have an effective HRM department to ensure that human capital is strategically managed for maximum benefits. Summary and analysis of the article This article mainly focuses on the strategic management challenges facing human resource management (HRM) in the public sector. It provies taht HRMs role  in modern production systems has drastically changed the field of HRM, as well as the criteria by which human resources’ analysts generally judge or review successful practice (McGregor, 1988). A few analysts grasped early the importance or significance of human resources in information-based economies and societies. The management literature and practice have successfully penetrated due to increased awareness of the strategic role of human resources in post-industrial organizations and societies. Both the resource and practices that manage the resource have become essential and critical to growth as well as the overall success of many public sector enterprises (McGregor, 1988). In the case of post-industrial societies and organizations, human resources often assume a fundamental importance that transforms traditional personnel administration agenda from operations management to the management of a strategic resource. Additionally, the article assesses the role of human capital in post-industrial public organizations, and the influence its has on the HRMwithin the public sector. Also, the article recognizes the fact that government personnel managers often face specific challenges associated with the strategic management of the public personnel and the management of a strategic resource (McGregor, 1988). According to the article, substantial changes in the production systems of goods and services resulted in the strategic importance accorded to human resources. Apparently, many people were tactically or operationally significant concerning final products, especially in earlier industrial systems (McGregor, 1988). For instance, people become operational resources in cases where they serve in societies or organizations merely as common labor from which a society or organization derive physical products and other routine services. Moreover, organizations were appropriate subjects for the industrial engineers whose observations about organizational efficiency and work methods were utterly based on the widespread existence of products and simple repetitive routines (McGregor, 1988). Meanwhile, people are considered tactically significant resources in advanced industrial situations where decisions for complex deployment must be made to organize the production of arguably complex manufactured goods and services. Human labor, in the tactical case, is more varied, highly trained, less easily interchangeable, and usually subject to fairly complex organizational arrangements compared to early industrial systems (McGregor, 1988). Accordingly, variables such as supervisory style, job design, morale and human relations, organization design, and human learning vastly define several human resource deployment options. The article emphasizes the role of the literature on contingency management in demonstrating the diversity of various designs that relate people and positions in productive organizations (McGregor, 1988). Early office actions and manufacturing operations derived their basis from a rather industrial form of organization where specialized bundles of duties, responsibilities, and tasks defined positions into which the organization placed people to produce final products. The relationship between productivity and people changes once again in post-industrial systems. The article points out the difficulties of understanding human capital (HC) since it takes many forms and is usually invisible (McGregor, 1988). Apparently, the human capacity to produce is locked inside people and often differs from physical commodities in several respects. Human capital is a stock of productive capacity for which marginal investments imply marginal increase. Reference McGregor, E., B., Jr. (Nov/Dec., 1988). “The Public Sector Human Resource Puzzle: Strategic Management of a Strategic Resource.” Public Administrative Review, Vol. 48, No. 6 (Nov.-Dec., 1988), pp. 941-950 Read More