Case for Human Resource Management - Essay Example

HERE HERE YOUR HERE HERE Case: Jobs and Work at R.R. Donnelley Discuss why Donnelley had to coordinate HR activities with the changes in jobs and work. Much of this comes down to some of the basic psychological principles of motivation, especially that proposed by Abraham Maslow. Maslow produced a hierarchy of needs model that suggests that people, even the workplace, require that their physiological needs (such as ergonomics or environment) need to be met first in order for them to progress as effective workers.

This model suggests that next tiers of needs include security and a sense of belonging in order to build a sense of self-esteem (Henslin, 2003). In the case of Donnelley, changes to the production line itself represented threats to their physiological needs, such as demanding quality improvements and changes to how the work was conducted to meet new standards. In addition, their basic needs for security and belonging were being threatened by different cost-cutting efforts that could have, at the perceptual level, put them out of a job.

These needs strongly influence whether they find value or self-confidence in their job roles, therefore issues of motivation needed to be addressed at the human resources level. People and their motivations are strongly connected to whether any structural or process changes meet with improved productivity, therefore they could not simply be dismissed. Employee needs will impact their dedication levels to meeting organizational goals or even, possibly, make them look for different work at another organization which could put high costs on the recruitment and retention budgets. 2. Identify examples of how technology has changed jobs where you have worked and which HR activities were handled well and which poorly.

At one company I worked for, there was a major project to improve the business resource planning software package so that inventory, purchasing, invoicing, and raw materials monitoring could be improved by a large margin. Technology in this case promised to eliminate all manual checks for inventory and also promised to reduce the amount of labor needed in the purchasing division. Throughout the entire project, which lasted about 18 months, workers were simply reminded that they needed to find other employment after the project was launched or try to find an opening in a different division through a bidding process.

Instead of providing counseling services or trying to motivate employees to assist in the project development, the human resources angle was missing and workers kept trying to sabotage the new project to make sure it did not launch successfully. If the company had realized motivational needs in these soon-to-be-displaced employees, I believe the project would have been ready for launch much faster than the 18 months it took to implement. In another situation, at a restaurant, the company purchased a new POS system, which is an electronic foods monitoring system and order entry technology.

This was designed to show how much was being consumed in the supply chain to avoid daily manual counting of stock totals. At the time, there were three key managers that were responsible for these efforts and they had security risk perceptions that one of them might be replaced. What happened in this situation is that their favorite employees and their own peer managers kept trying to tell the district leadership that certain managers had less strength than the others to make sure they kept their jobs.

Instead of providing leadership and calling regular meetings to discuss these security needs and the problems that were growing in the organizational culture, they simply let the employees deal with all of this animosity themselves and many simply left their long-term jobs at the restaurant because the environment had gotten so out of hand at the cultural level. The only thing handled well in this case was that the district leadership understood concepts of human psychology and recognized what was happening there.

When they were present and saw social problems happening because of this, they tried to isolate and discuss the issues with their very best employees to make sure they remained dedicated, such as offering promotions for meeting goals. Reference:Henslin, James. Sociology: A Down to Earth Approach, 6th ed, A&B Publishing, 2003.