Perspectives of Human Resource Management

1. Historical Perspective on HRM: 

We already covered historical evolution @ http://structuring-hrm.blogspot.in/p/evolution-of-hrm.html. Thus, we cover Recent trends here

Recent Trends: 

In the US, the civil rights movement of the 1960s produced a good deal of legislation bearing on employment relationships. 

Further, the increase in discrimination-based litigation during the 1970s boosted the legitimacy of the HRM function in organisations. 

This international competition has led to four conceptual trends in the HRM function:

1. The need to link human resources to the strategic management process.
2. The need to select, train, and compensate individuals to function
3. The need to understand the political dynamics that undermine rational HRM decision-making processes
4. The need to provide quantitative estimates of the money value contributions made by the human resources department.

2. Environmental Perspective of HRM:

Most organisations are more permeable to environmental pressures than even before. In addition, the environment itself also continues to change at a rapid pace. HRM

1. Deals extensively with wages and work hours. 
2. Deals with union-management relations within the organisation.
3. The rights of employees to organise and bargain collectively vis-a-vis the rights of the employer and the union.
4. The rights of the individual (or of classes of individuals, such as minorities and women) in a wide range of issues concerning employer rights

Organisations as Open Systems: Katz and Kahn (1978) proposed that organisations be viewed as open systems. "Open" means organisations are responsive to external pressures. "System" means that one response leads to other response in the integrated framework.

Buffering Strategies as an Organisational Response: 

As the environment creates uncertainly, how can managers adequately plan, organise, and control to deal with uncertainty? Organisations should develop a number of strategies, including forecasting and buffering. 

Forecasting attempts to anticipate change before it occurs. 

Buffering is concrete: Designing structural devices (such as larger or more specialised organistional units) and technological work-flow devices (such as new or more complex procedures). These buffering devices assist the organisation to be both proactive and reactive and to shield itself from the pressures of the environment. 

They both ease schedules and help managers to figure out the nature
of the environmental pressures so that they can try to make sense of them.

As a manager, you often need more time and information to deal with emerging events.Once you reasonably assess the strength or potential impact of these pressures and resources for coping with them, you are in a sound position to safeguard the organisation.

3. Strategic Perspective of HRM:

The objective of Strategic HRM is rational decision-making that aligns HRM practices with the organisation’s strategic goals.

Strategic Human Resources Management (SHRM), defined as ‘the pattern of planned human resource deployments and activities intended to enable an organisation to achieve its objectives

Galbraith and Nathanson recognized the need to fit human resources into the strategy implementation process. They identified four basic HRM sub-functions or strategies: selection appraisal, rewards, and development.

4. Political Perspective of HRM:

As you have probably experienced, in organisations not all decisions are rational, and many have very little to do with achieving organisational goals. Recent writers in HRM propose that influence and politics are a significant part of the HRM function, or at least that they strongly affect that function.

Politics is defined as ‘the management of shared meaning by individuals, groups, or organisation.’

The role of influence in HRM can be seen particularly with regard to personnel selection, performance appraisal, and promotion/reward systems.It is the inability to assess fit perfectly in an objective manner that lets politics enter the decision-making process.

You would have experienced in your work life that there is no objective standard for assessing fit.

Impression management during interview: Managing the perceptions of the decision maker can allow the applicant an opportunity to influence the decision making process in a political manner.The process of ‘impression management’ in the employment interview is an example of politics in HRM.

Performance evaluation, seems to be an area of HRM that is influenced by politics.

Promotion/succession systems are also subject to dynamics or political influence.

Although many may not want to acknowledge the existence of political influence in organisations, historical data show very convincingly that these processes are part and parcel of organisations. However, to ignore their existence is short-sighted.

5. Interpersonal Perspective on HRM

Most of the organizations function in global economy. In order to compete internationally, two general concerns are being addressed by many international companies. 

1. How does one manage a company’s citizens working overseas? 
2. How do organisational management policies and practices in other cultures differ from those in the respective home countries?

The foremost challenge for firms going overseas is the need to select and train individuals who are able to work in a foreign culture. Therefore programmes featuring international management and cross-cultural training have increased in value.

For a firm to be competitive these days, its HRM function must be characterised by:

1. Transnational Scope: Going beyond a simple national or regional perspective and making human resources decisions with a global perspective.
2. Transnational Representation: Globally competitive organisations must have multinational representation among their managerial employees.
3. Transnational Process: A decision making process that involves representatives and ideas from variety of cultures.