Human resource management is a function in organizations designed to maximize employee performance in service of their employer’s strategic objectives. [l] HER is primarily concerned with how people are managed within organizations, focusing on policies and systems. [J HER departments and units in organizations are typically responsible for a number of activities, including employee recruitment, training and development, performance appraisal, and rewarding. HER is also concerned with industrial relations, that is, the balancing of organizational practices with regulations arising from collective arraigning and governmental laws.
HER is a product of the human relations movement of the early 20th century, when researchers began documenting ways Of creating business value through the strategic management Of the workforce. The function was initially dominated by transactional work, such as payroll and benefits administration, but due to globalization, company consolidation, technological advancement, and further research, HER now focuses on strategic initiatives like mergers and acquisitions, talent management, succession planning, industrial and labor relations, ND diversity and inclusion.
In startup companies, HRS duties may be performed by trained professionals. In larger companies, an entire functional group is typically dedicated to the discipline, with staff specializing in various HER tasks and functional leadership engaging in strategic decision making across the business. To train practitioners for the profession, institutions of higher education, professional associations, and companies themselves have created programs of study dedicated explicitly to the duties of the function. Academic and practitioner organizations likewise seek to engage and further the field of HER. S evidenced by several field-specific publications. HER is also a field of research study that is popular within the fields of management and industrial/organizational psychology, with research articles appearing in a number of academic journals, including those mentioned later in this article. In the current global work environment, most companies focus on lowering employee turnover and retaining the talent and knowledge held by their workforce. New hiring not only entails a high cost but also increases the sis of the newcomer not being able to replace the person who was working in that position before.
HER departments also strive to offer benefits that will appeal to workers, thus reducing the risk of losing knowledge. History Antecedent theoretical development HER spawned in the early 20th century and was influenced by Frederick Taylor (1856-1915). Taylor explored what he termed “scientific management”, striving to improve economic efficiency in manufacturing jobs. He eventually keyed in on one of the principal inputs into the manufacturing recess-?labor-?sparking inquiry into workforce productivity.
The human relations movement grew from the research of Elton Mayo and others, whose Hawthorne studies (1924-1932) serendipitously documented how stimuli, unrelated to financial compensation and working conditions, yielded more productive workers-[6] Contemporaneous work by Abraham Mason, Kurt Lenin, Max Weber (1864-1920), Frederick Herbert, and David McClellan (1917-1998) formed the basis for studies in industrial and organizational psychology, organizational behavior and organizational theory, vying room for an applied discipline.
Birth and evolution of the discipline By the time enough theoretical evidence existed to make a business case for strategic workforce management, changes in the business landscape (; la Andrew Carnegie, John Rockefeller) and in public policy had transformed the employer-employee relationship, and the discipline was formalized as “industrial and labor relations”.
In 191 3, one of the oldest known professional HER associations-?the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development-?was founded in England as the Welfare Workers’ Association, hen changed its name a decade later to the Institute of Industrial Welfare Workers, and again the next decade to Institute of Labor Management before settling upon its current name. [7] Likewise in the United States, the world’s first institution of higher education dedicated to workplace studies-?the School of Industrial and Labor Relations-?was formed at Cornell university in 1945.
During the latter half of the 20th century, union membership declined significantly, while workforce management continued to expand its influence within organizations. “Industrial and labor relations’ Egan being used to refer specifically to issues concerning collective representation, and many companies began referring to the profession as “personnel administration”.
In 1 948, what would later become the largest professional HER association-?the Society for Human Resource Management (SHIRR)-?was founded as the American Society for Personnel Administration (ASP). Nearing the 21st century, advances in transportation and communications greatly facilitated workforce mobility and collaboration.
