Human Resource Management Models - Essay Example

Human Resource Management Models Managing a business is clearly about much more than organizing finances and production, it isalso about managing and understanding people. In order to understand the way people function together, we have to understand their psychology, sociology and intrinsic ability to manipulate. There are two ways, essentially of viewing staff and employees and they come in terms of both humanistic and empirical means. The 'hard' theoretical approach sees people as commodities or as having numerical value while the 'soft' approach looks at the humanistic approach. The soft approach appears to be the better option considering the human ability to change and adapt, but as we will see, it cannot be used alone to manage human resources. We need to integrate approaches and find a multidisciplinary approach to dealing with people. How much of people management depends on theory and how much cannot be measured "In theory, practice and in the workplace experience, though people appear to be of central concern, the rich, warm, unpredictable face of humanity are all too clearly absent." Perhaps the most difficult question to answer is whether people are better lead or managed. Do people respond better when encouraged by a leader or when they are managed To begin with, it is necessary to understand what human resource management is and how it works. Every business runs on resources and the one resource that it cannot function without, is its staff. Human resource management is therefore about getting the most out of staff members (Human Resource Management Guide). Human resource management also, however, includes deciding which individuals are better suited to which position as well as conducting sufficient research to determine the best placement of individuals (McNamara 2008). We can now determine what has to be done with regards to human resource management, but there are two ways of going about this: we can either look at the humanistic approach or at the objective 'hard' approach. The first issue we are faced with is that while the humanistic or 'soft' theoretical approach may appear to be the most logical and ethical approach, it is far from reality. There have been attempts to form a normative theoretical framework for human resource management, but this too is embedded in the 'hard' and 'soft' models (Gill 1999: 3). Two schools of thought were developed with hard and soft theories in mind: Harvard and Michigan. Harvard follows the soft model more closely while Michigan is based on the soft model. The normative model seeks to consolidate both the strategic management of the business as well as the interpretive model which is considered soft (Gill: 3). The problem here is that according to Gill (1999) "there are problems in the integration of HRM policy with business strategy and evidence indicates that HRM is more ad hoc than strategic."(Gill 1999: 3). In this case, one cannot assume that what is good for he business is necessarily good for the employee (Gill 1999: 3). The hard model would therefore focus on the employee as a resource, assuming that whatever causes the business to soar, will automatically uplift the employee (Gill 1999: 4). The intuitive problem is that humans are not controllable and they are not constant. Human's cannot be 'paid off' or compensated with more pay without regarding emotions or feelings even though this is a simple solution to a complex issue. In Gill and Meyer (2007) it was ascertained that outsourcing of certain business portions yielded dramatic results (Gill and Meyer 2007: 4). These results were not necessarily good ones, in the sense that businesses no longer had to employ people to do the jobs they could outsource, leading to job-losses and retrenchment. Despite this, there has to be an increase in individual 'soft' model relationships with employees if the employee numbers are smaller (Gill and Meyer 2007: 4-5). According to Gill and Meyer too, human resource management has to "manage the simultaneous pursuit of soft and hard reality, because there has been a trend towards a contractual relationship between employers and employees, which has a focus on mutual self interest."(Gill and Meyer 2007: 6). As already ascertained, this is difficult to achieve, especially considering the constantly changing personalities of people. Consider that the human employee is not the same as a machine that has to perform a certain function. There is always the possibility that a machine may break down or that maintenance needs to be performed to keep the machine in working order, in the human perspective, the machine too has to be maintained and looked after. What we are unable to bank on is the stress factor and possible illness. A study conducted by Gill and Meyer (2007) proposed that the introduction of a soft model or rhetoric would produce positive results. This was proved to a degree, based on Identity Theory but disproved the critical theory that soft policies obscure gaps between rhetoric and reality (Gill and Meyer 2007: 23). This further concludes that there is limited support for Identity Theory and ultimately this means that the perception of how human resources management is constructed is not based on a single model alone. The success of human resource management apparently lies in the improved outcome for both employers and employees. Yet despite the knowledge of what hard and soft models of human resource management is and notwithstanding this knowledge, what is the best way to treat employees in the workplace There are of course utopian ideals of how the employee should be seen. These ideals are largely based on rhetoric rather than reality and once again while it is not ideal to treat employees as commodities or 'putting them in their place', one has to have a degree of control (Ellem 2005: 245). One can see the employee as merely a 'worker' or a commodity or we can see them as being placed in the best possible position to create the highest form of production (Ellem 2005: 246). Clearly too, these are means to create an obscured version of the hard model of management insomuch as there cannot be a prescribed method of treating employees in workplace environments. This means that while it is well established that we have to balance the way we perceive staff members quite carefully based on legal grounds as well as ethical. In an effort to stabilize the ways in which human resources are controlled, legislations enforce the neutral treatment of all staff members (Foster and Harris 2005: 6). The use of the law essentially also suppresses any effort to retain a fully soft model of human resources in the sense that it is purely objective and leave little room for interpretive skills in the workplace. In public arena, qualitative research was conducted in the public sector to ascertain models used within its infrastructure. This raised a number of questions that included the changing face of business today which is no longer simply face-to-face relationships but also the use of the internet as a business tool (Foster and Harris 2005: 7). The diversity which has occurred over time has elicited an business evolution which can by no means be treated in the same manner as it was at the turn of the 20th century. Part of the legislation as seen in the UK today implements the fair treatment of all employees either as applicants or recruits, in every manner. New models exist now for the growth of diversification in the workplace that deals with the individuality of the workforce as a whole (Foster and Harris 2005: 9-10). Part of this diversification implies that not only the job description itself should be tailored to the individuals needs, but also the way they are dealt with by their superiors. Another means of identifying whether a human resource management technique works or not is ascertaining what clients think about the business. For this reason, many businesses overhaul their strategies in terms of modernization. The use of structured questionnaires administered to staff members can give the employer and idea of how they perceive their environment (Beirne et al 2004: 98). Gaining an understanding of how the staff perceive the business is a good indicator of how the public perceive it as the employer may not see things at ground level the way the staff does. The importance of this is to improve the understanding on two levels: the understanding between the public and the employees; and the understanding of the employees by the employers. With this, we return to the placement of employees in the correct environments, for which psychometric testing has been an important tool. For instance, it would be erroneous to place an introverted computer 'geek' in the position of public relations, meaning that as part of the soft model or rhetoric, the individual attributes can clearly make a difference to how the business is run. Placing the right person in the right positions becomes imperative to controlling staff on a hard model level. While the business itself simply has to see the employees as a commodity that brings in capital, it cannot base its management on this entirely (Beirne et al 2004: 99). In this sense, rather than obscuring hard model people management, soft rhetoric is used to enhance the hard model tactics of people management. When we measure resources in a business situation, we look at what is needed to complete, for instance, the process of producing a cotton ear-bud. We look at the raw materials needed; the machinery that is necessary and also the people needed to operate the machinery. In this example the relationship between material commodity and human resource is symbiotic - one cannot exist independent of the other. We can see human resources in the same manner except that we take the person as the product and look at what is needed to keep the product active. The hard approach sees the person as the commodity needed as part of the production process while the soft approach deals with the input into that commodity. Now that we have determined the relationship between soft and hard models, what purpose does training have in the situation Choosing the right person for the job is the same as choosing the highest quality materials to make a product. If the business is question is an accounting firm, employing the best accountants will help to ensure a better reputation and more business. So if in fact, keeping the employees well trained means "employers need to ensure that these people remain at the forefront of their field, not only in terms of professional expertise and product knowledge but also through working in teams or in interpersonal relations."(Marchington and Wilkinson 2005: 76). The hard approach sees this training as a form of maintenance while the soft approach sees this as tailoring to the individual's needs and abilities. Whatever way you wish to see this, if the individual believes that they are seen as valued and unique, they will increase their own worth as a commodity in the business. Meta-theory seeks to consolidate the gap between hard and soft theoretical models in the form of recognizing the importance of both the positivist and interpretive framework for understanding (Hesketh and Fleetwood 2006: 683-684). There are institutional norms that make up the behaviour of a business infrastructure embedded in ontological views of work-personal relationship (Hesketh and Fleetwood 2006: 685). The nature of being depends on the systems that function within this business structure and the hierarchies that are present. The basis of this ontological approach sees that there are two separate entities present in the scheme: the professional and the personal. In order to create a holistic reasoning between the two, there has to be acceptance of them both. To consolidate this, one has to understand that they function as an inseparable entity. For further reference, the blurring between the soft and the hard approaches means that there has to be a middle ground upon which a balance is created. The statement that humanistic approaches and the soft model being people oriented, as stated in the opening paragraph makes sense in the fact that even though a soft model intends to approach the humanistic side of business, it in fact functions to serve the business, not the people. We know that in order to produce better and higher quality services of products, we have to ensure that the machinery used is maintained properly and is comfortable in its position. By the term 'machinery', we mean the people that make up the workforce. The soft rhetoric certainly does have utopian qualities but this is as stated - utopian. It does not reflect the reality although it can be used together with the hard model to enhance the way human resources are managed. References: Beirne, Martin et al. 2004. Controlling Business Agency and Constraint in Call Centre Working. Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Ellem, Bradon. 2005. Putting Work in its Place: The Making of Ideal Workers and Social Contracts. Asia Pacific Journal of Human Resources 43(2). Foster, Carley and Harris, Lynette. 2005. Easy to Say, Difficult to Do: Diversity Management in Retail. Human Resource Management Journal Vol. 15(3). Gill, Carol. 1999. Use of Hard and Soft Models of HRM to Illustrate the Gap Between Rhetoric and Reality in Workforce Management. RMIT Business Gill, Carol and Meyer, Denny. 2007. Does Human Resource Management use Rhetoric to Construct Reality for Employees Hesketh, Anthony and Fleetwood, Steve. 2006. Beyond Measuring the Human Resources Management - Organizational Performance Link: Applying Critical Realist Meta-Theory. Organization Articles Vol. 13(5), SAGE publications. Human Resources Management Guide. Maps and Models of HRM. http://www.hrmguide.co.uk/introduction_to_hrm/maps-and-models.htm Marchington, Mick and Wilkinson, Adrian. 2005. High Commitment HRM and Performance. Human Resource Management at Work CIPD. McNamara, Carter. 2008. Human Resources Management. Free Management Library. http://managementhelp.org/hr_mgmnt/hr_mgmnt.htm Read More