Human Recourse Practitioner as an Ethical Steward - Essay Example

HR Practitioner as an Ethical Steward Student’s Name: Institutional Affiliation: HR Practitioner as an Ethical Steward Introduction Human Resource Management involves the effective management of staffs in an organization to achieve organizational growth. Many writers have defined it as productive use of human capital to achieve the organization’s strategic objectives and satisfy the individual needs of employees. Through HRM, organizations are able to attract, select, train, assess, and reward its employees competitively while managing organizational culture and leadership, and ensuring total compliance with labor and employment laws. Human resource serves as the organizations liaison in situations where employees’ desires are legally sanctioned to hold a combined bargaining agreement (Winstanley, Woodall & Heery, 1996). Organizational ethics refers to how organizations morally respond to external and internal stimulus. Company’s ethics is closely interdependent with its culture. For an organization to be ethical, four elements should be present which includes: well written standards and code of ethics, training on ethics to managers and all staffs, advice on ethical issues, and well managed systems on for reporting confidential issues. An organization’s legitimate leader should work on creation of better and ethical institution. Reinstating an ethical climate in the organization is crucial as it a key component in solving other organizational development and ethical behavior in the organizations activities. In organizational decisions and behavior, increased emphasis on ethical and virtue contributes to a more humanized culture, low chances of failure due to moral decay, ease of being happiness of all members in the organization, and increase in value generation by not only positive altitude and behavior but also through higher satisfaction. Many organizations consider ethics as an asset for their business and contribute to business excellence as it assures successful running of the businesses. Its implementation has become a common affair in the business world where managers have realized the significant advantages that are obtained by maintaining ethical behavior in the organization. Despite high observable rate of implementation of organizational mechanism in businesses, moral abuses have continued to take place worldwide involving leading corporations that have come down (Washington, Sutton & Feild, 2006). Some of these companies had relatively broad consequences in the entire world market, and their failure has materially affected the world market. As cases of unethical behavior such as use of company resources for personal gain, giving false reports, advertising deceptively, false information, presenting deceptive accounts deliberately among others continue to be to be reported by the media, it seems appropriate to move forward on studying and understanding the antecedents of ethical behavior in organizations. Recently organizations have looked to the influential power of human resources practices on promoting ethics and virtues among staffs. In the company growth and prosperity, human resource practitioners have been proved to play a vital role in the company’s management. They ensure ethical stewardship that guide the company’s actions. Although human resource management has been seen as a highly crucial department in the company, it has no direct relation with the company’s profitability as it has been claimed. HR usually takes a keen interest on human capital part of the organization and ignores other parts of the company despite the part they play in the company success. For a staff to fill motivated, his compensation and general welfare has to be looked on carefully. This is usually an expensive exercise; the company is required to take responsibility of their staffs. For proper maintenance of staffs, the company has to go an extra mile to cater for their official and personal needs. This has been viewed as additional expenses to the company since demands on staffs’ upkeep reduce the company’s earnings. On the contrary, well-managed and maintained staffs will be in a good position to perform their duties to meet the company goals and expectations. Staffs satisfaction has also been linked with high performance, which result to exceptionally output, and vice versa (Sendjaya & Sarros 2002). Proper functioning of HR department would ensure the company affairs are run smoothly with less collusion between staffs and management that may bring companies activities at standstill. These includes industrial actions, go slows, high staff turnover among others. For instance in an organization where staffs welfare is ignored, compensation is below the market rates and working conditions are pathetic workers would tend to be demotivated and demoralized leading to low output. Low output would mean that the company would end up, with low sales revenue and less profit. On the other hand, in a case where a company has invested heavily on it staffs to ensure that they are comfortable in the work place. Workers tend to be highly motivated leading to high output and sales to the company. In the company stewardship, HR functions have been identified to be of immense value to company growth. HR Professionals play a critical role in the organizations ethical management. Researches have proved that a successful ethics management depends less on formal programs on ethics and more on the employee’s fairness perceptions, ethical leadership in every level of the company and grouping of multiple informal and formal cultural systems that support ethical behavior. Through proper HR system, fairness invoked, managers’ design leadership training and organizational culture is created and maintained. It is proved that the perception employees hold on fairness in the organization are more influential than all the other factors on ethical related issues (Russell & Stone, 2002). Employees who perceive unfair treatment will rebalance their scale of justice engaging in acts that are harmful to the company. Those who fill treated fairly would, on the other hand, reciprocate by going beyond the call of their duties to assist the management to ensure adherence to ethical practices. To assure employee a fair treatment, a well HR system should be designed with emphasis on fair decision-making procedures and fair interpersonal treatment. Human resource department should work closely with ethics and compliance officers to make a follow up on employees’ ethical concern since most of the reported issues are related to fairness thus relating to HR systems. In many organizations, ethics are equated to fairness thus the connection of ethics and HR office. Ethical leadership is vital to create and maintain an ethical workforce. Usually employees are not fully formed moral agents who can be left alone to lead themselves on matters of ethics. Through research, it has been proved that most employees look out to significant others for guidance in situations of ethical dilemma. If the organization leadership cannot be able to the required guidance, they will it elsewhere mostly from peers in and out of that organization. To attain ethical leadership, a leader should be caring, listen to employees, and have the best interest of employees at mind. He should release ethical and value messages to staffs at all times. He should also act as a role model on ethical conduct and undertake his personal life ethically. This ensures that he gains employees trust and sets an example in the organization on how affairs in the company should be conducted ethically. He should hold everybody accountable; define success by both results and the way they are obtained (Ritvo, Ohlsen & Holland, 2004). Many factors have influenced the roles of HR to change. These include globalization that result to increased competition, demographic trends resulting from falling rate of birth and extended life expectancy. These trends have affect labor market and have lend to in shortage of skills in a certain area. Apart from having knowledge overall, human resource system, he is required to possess skills in the following areas: Expertise in making and implementing human resource strategies An efficient HR officer should ensure that everybody in the organization is satisfied. This is achieved through proper implementation of strategies that ensure that every employee need is looked at despite his position in the organization structure. Where one side is, left suffering at the gain of the other appear to be demotivating among employee and can greatly affect their moral in their duties. He should take keen on strategies that would ensure a good relationship among staffs and between them and management (Magill & Prybill, 2004). This plays a big role in ensuring the company stewardship is promoted to achieve its mission and vision. Recruitment-Human resource officer is usually responsible for hiring new staffs to work in the organization. In the recruitment process, his roles include sourcing new staffs, interviewing, screening, and testing those candidates with the required skills that the company requires. To ensure continued stewardship in the company the officer should ensure hat he engages a staff with all the relevant skills to fill the available vacancy. This will mean that he will turn to be productive to the company thus increased profitability. Training specialist- HR specialist should be a training expert or should have proper training mechanism in place for its staffs. This involves offering a variety of training courses to those employees who require certain skills for their job. This can include initial training for a newly engaged staffs or on the job training on team leadership training for those currently engaged and wish to progress within the company. Equipping staffs with these skills ensure that they perform their duty perfection and get the targeted results. This plays a crucial role to the company’s stewardship and continued growth (Joseph & Winston, 2005). Employees benefit and compensation- The human resource department is responsible for staffs’ compensation in the company. This includes administration of their health insurance and retirement plans. Due to frequent changes in the legal sector, he is required to be updated on any development in the staffs’ health care benefits and inform employees on the same (Henley, 2000). This would motivate employees’ highly in performance of their duties and increase their production. Promotion- in the staffs’ promotion process, care should be observed on based on pros and not anything else. This is because employees are motivated by realizing his or her fellow staff has been promoted due to her exceptionally performance of his duties. This motivates them to take a keen interest of their duties to since there is no short cut to going up the leadership leader. On the other hand, if in any case promotion is done based on anything else other than performance employees are highly demotivated in their duties. This would have a broad effect on the company performance as employees fill their efforts are not fairly compensated (Hernandez, 2008). Introduction and continued encouragement of innovation in the company leads to better productivity in the company. This could be achieved where the company offers a conducive environment in the company where the staffs are encouraged to be creative in performance of their duties. Through creativity, the company stewardship is exceedingly achieved as staffs may discover new and effective ways of performing their duties more efficiently and effectively (Block, 1995). HR department is also obliged to inform and to guide the company’s management periodically on all matters that area happening in the organization and what should be done. This is usually done through a written report that shows all what is happening in the company and recommendations on what should be done to maintain continued stewardship. It is paramount that human resource managers design a performance management, career development and a training system that: ensures that leaders are held accountable ethically for their leadership; identify those leaders who are ethical and rely on them as role models and in monitoring others and integrate ethical leadership dimension in training and development program of leadership (Alexander & Weiner, 1998). In conclusion, Human resource management function is a solution in the development and maintenance of ethical culture in the organization. HR manager should focus on how values and ethics fit in the design of his functions such as reward and performance management systems. Accountability for ethics and values in performance management should be done so that implementation of ethical values is based substantially on promotion and compensation decisions. Focus on reward system should be exemplary rewarding ethical behavior in the company. To lay its focus on discipline, unethical behavior should be consistently disciplined at high levels. This sends a message that unethical conduct is not tolerated in the company. Finally, to ensure effective ethics management regular assessment is necessary on the company’s culture. HR and ethics managers on how cultural systems align in support of ethical conduct for the organization’s common goal. References Alexander, J. A., & Weiner, B. J. (1998). The adoption of the Corporate Governance Model by Nonprofit Organizations. Nonprofit Management & Leadership, 8(3), 223-242. Block, P. (1995). Stewardship. San Francisco, CA: Berrett-Koehler Publishers. Farling, M. L., Stone, A. G., & Winston, B. E. (1999). 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