Importance of Human Resource Management - Essay Example

Running head: HUMAN RE MANAGEMENT AMOUNTS TO LITTLE MORE Human Re Management Amounts To Little More Than A Simple Reworking Of The Human Relations School Of Management. Discuss [Author's Name] [Institution's Name] Human Recourse Management Amounts To Little More Than A Simple Reworking Of The Human Relations School Of Management. Discuss Beyond all shadow of doubt, Human Recourse Management amounts to little more than a simple reworking of the Human Relations School of management. And the reason is very simple. Human Recourse Management practices can be viewed as communications from the employer to employee. The literature on message-based persuasion has its roots in David Collins (1998) two-step process of "reception"--encoding of the message (exposure to the message, attention to its content, comprehension of the content)--and "yielding"--acceptance of the message (agreeing with the message and storing it in memory). For a message to have its desired effect, both reception and yielding are necessary. (Collins, David 1998) Yet making sense of the environment often entails numerous cycles of attending to information, interpreting information, acting on it, and receiving feedback to clarify one's sense of the situation, particularly when events are highly ambiguous or subject to change. Attribution theory has been useful in helping explain message-based persuasion and in helping identify key features that will allow for messages to be received and interpreted uniformly among employees. In the Human Recourse Management context, employees are required to infer cause-effect attributions from these communications to determine what behaviors are important, expected, and rewarded. Causal inference can be understood not solely as the inner workings of the mind but also as a process by which people gather and elicit causal explanations from others and communicate their explanations to others. In order to function effectively in a social context and make accurate attributions about a situation, an employee must have adequate and unambiguous information. Although attribution frameworks have been used to explain whether an individual attributes the cause of another person's behavior to internal or external factors, Redman, T and Wilkinson, A. (2001) attribution theory details the process for making attributions not only to other people but to situational factors as well. An individual can make confident attributions about cause-effect relationships in situations depending on the degree of distinctiveness (the event-effect is highly observable), consistency (the event-effect presents itself the same across modalities and time), and consensus (there is agreement among individuals' views of the event-effect relationship). (Redman, T and Wilkinson, A. 2001) We propose that when the Human Recourse Management is perceived as high in distinctiveness, consistency, and consensus, it will create a strong situation. Using literature on message-based persuasion and social influence, we elucidate nine meta-features of Human Recourse Management that build distinctiveness, consistency, and consensus, thereby creating a strong influence situation in which employees share constructions of the situation. As such, the features help foster the emergence of a strong organizational climate, as opposed to idiosyncratic psychological climate perceptions. The strength of the Human Recourse Management can be conceptualized in terms of its effectiveness in conveying the types of information needed to create a strong situation. Distinctiveness of the situation generally refers to features that allow it to stand out in the environment, thereby capturing attention and arousing interest. We elucidate four characteristics of Human Recourse Management that can foster distinctiveness: visibility, understandability, legitimacy of authority, and relevance. (Blyton, P. and P. Turnbull 1994) Visibility of the Human Recourse Management practices refers to the degree to which these practices are salient and readily observable. This is a basic prerequisite for interpretation involving whether Human Recourse Management practice and its component parts are disclosed to employees, affording them the opportunity for sense making. Visibility or salience has long been identified as an important characteristic in determining not only whether people attend to information but how they cognitively organize it and make cause-effect attributions. For example, if performance criteria are not transparent or if pay administration outcomes are withheld, such as with pay secrecy, this certainly will not create Karen Legge (2005) strong situation, in which everyone has shared constructions of the situation and uniform expectancies regarding the most appropriate response pattern and what incentives are available. (Legge, Karen 2005) The creation of a strong organizational situation requires that situational characteristics be salient and visible throughout much of employees' daily work routines and activities. When the Human Recourse Management includes a wide spectrum of Human Recourse Management practices--for example, selection, training, diversity programs, employee assistance programs, and so forth--that affect a large number of employees, visibility is likely to be higher. Expanding the number and range of practices should enhance salience and visibility, because it increases complexity and allows for the set of practices to be more figural relative to other stimuli--both of which are principles of salience. Additionally, shared meanings cannot be developed unless most or all employees are subjected to and can perceive the same practices. Understandability of Human Recourse Management content refers to a lack of ambiguity and ease of comprehension of Human Recourse Management practice content. An organizational communication that cannot be understood can have no authority. Features of the stimulus or situation evoke cognitive categories (e.g., schemas, scripts, cognitive maps), drawing attention to some features and away from others. Sometimes profound differences exist in category systems across people. To the extent that the situational stimulus is ambiguous or unclear, multiple categorizations are likely. (Mischel, W. 1997) That is, different people are likely to use different cognitive categories to attend to different aspects of the information, resulting in different attributions. For example, employees must be able to understand how the practice works. Human Recourse Management practices such as benefit plans, gain-sharing plans, and succession plans are easily misunderstood or at least open to multiple interpretations. Legitimacy of authority: Legitimate authority of the Human Recourse Management and its agents leads individuals to consider submitting to performance expectations as formally sanctioned behaviors. Influence by legitimate authority is essentially a perceptual process--that is, one sees the behavioral requirements of one's own role as subordinate to another that stands out as the legitimate authority. It is the concept of authority whereby individuals are willing to submit to the necessities of cooperative systems. The Human Recourse Management is most likely to be perceived as an authority situation when the Human Recourse Management function is perceived as a high-status, high-credibility function and activity. This is most likely when Human Recourse Management has significant and visible top management support in the firm and can be achieved through investments in HR practices or the Human Recourse Management function, or perhaps by placing the director of Human Recourse Management in a high-level managerial position. This fits the observation about the requirements for the success of Human Recourse Management generally; namely, success depends largely on top management support, including top managers' beliefs about the importance of people, investment in human resources, and involvement of Human Recourse Management professionals in the strategic planning process. In such a way, the signal sent from top management is that Human Recourse Management is "legitimate" or "credible." This notion is related to message source in social cognition, since the characteristics of the message source are linked to attributions made and the outcomes of persuasion. Communicator credibility is a critical component in attribution, persuasion, and influence attempts. However, the elaboration likelihood model of persuasion indicates that persuasion and influence are not simply functions of features of the communicator and credibility but, rather, joint functions of the communicator's credibility and the recipients' involvement in the outcomes. (Guzzo, R. A., & Noonan, K. A. 1994) Relatedly, obedience to legitimate authority is a function of more than the individual's subordination to a position of "higher office"; it also involves an individual's interpretation of the relevance of influence attempts to them. Relevance of the Human Recourse Management refers to whether the situation is defined in such a way that individuals see the situation as relevant to an important goal. Relevance, coupled with legitimate authority, means that influence is based on both a perception of super-ordinate authority. For the latter, individuals must perceive the situation as relevant to their important goals, that the desired behaviors are clear and optimally suited for goal attainment, and that influencing agents have the personal power to affect the achievement of these goals. (Bratton J and Gold J, 2003) Here, consideration of both individual goals and organizational goals--in our case, the strategic goal desired in the form of Human Recourse Management content--is important in that individual goals should be fostered to align with those of the organization. Alignment or congruence between individuals' and managers' goals has been shown to have important consequences for both individual attitudes and behaviors, as well as for effective organizational functioning. Thus, the situation must be defined in such a way that individuals are willing to work toward goals that not only allow them to meet their own needs but, in doing so, also allow the organization to achieve its goals. For example, if the organization has a strategic goal of customer service and an employee values financial gain, then service-based bonuses will heighten relevance and allow both the individual and organization to achieve their goals. Relatedly, the relevant desired behaviors must be specified and obstacles to their performance removed. Additionally, relevance is a function of the perceived power of the influencing agent(s) to help individuals achieve relevant goals. Influence is based on the extent to which an agent (e.g., Human Recourse Management staff member or line manager enacting Human Recourse Management practices) is perceived as possessing personal capabilities and is willing to use them to aid goal achievement--separate from his or her influence based on position power and legitimate authority. Perceived power of the influencing agent(s) depends on two factors. One is whether the agent can affect some of the conditions necessary for the achievement of relevant goals through, for example, the application of unique expertise or the allocation of necessary resources. Characteristics of the agent that bear on this issue include his or her prestige, special knowledge or expertise, representativeness, control of resources, and ability to apply sanctions. A second is the perceived likelihood that the agent will actually use his or her relevant capabilities in ways that will affect the likelihood of goal achievement. Beardwell, I and Holden, L (2003) explains the relationship between relevance and the credibility or legitimacy of the message source. If outcomes (rewards, punishments, goal attainment) depend on someone else's actions as well as the individual's actions, then this creates a condition of outcome dependency, which, in turn, affects perceptions and attributions. (Beardwell, Holden 2003) To conclude, when people are more outcomes dependent, particularly when the outcomes are relevant, they direct more active attention to the person or source of communication. At the same time, when outcomes are particularly relevant, credibility of the message source has less of an influence. Thus, it appears relevance alone can enhance distinctiveness; when relevance is not strongly established, legitimacy plays a greater role. References Beardwell, I and Holden, L (2003) Human Resource Management: A Contemporary Perspective 3rd Edition Financial Times/Prentice Hall Bratton J and Gold J, (2003) Human Resource Management, Theory and Practice, Macmillan Business, 2nd Edition Blyton, P. and P. Turnbull (1994) The Dynamics of Employee Relations, Macmillan, London. Boxall, P. 1996. The strategic Human Recourse Management debate and the resource-based view of the firm. Human Resource Management Journal, 6: 59-75. Collins, David 1998, Organizational change: sociological perspectives: New York: Routledge, 1998 Guzzo, R. A., & Noonan, K. A. 1994. Human resource practices as communications and the psychological contract. Human Resource Management, 33: 447-462. Legge, Karen 2005, Human Resource Management: Rhetorics and Realities, Palgrave Macmillan Mischel, W. 1997. Personality dispositions revisited and revised: A view after three decades. In R. Hogan, J. Johnson, & S. Briggs (Eds.), Handbook of personality psychology: 113-132. New York: Academic Press Redman, T and Wilkinson, A. (2001) Contemporary Human Resource Management: Texts and Cases Financial Times/ Prentice Hall Harlow, Essex Read More