Page 24 - DLIS104_MANAGEMENT OF LIBRARIES AND INFORMATION CENTRES

Unit 3: Human Resource Management

But these traditional expressions are becoming less common for the theoretical discipline. Notes
Sometimes even employee and industrial relations are confusingly listed as synonyms, although
these normally refer to the relationship between management and workers and the behavior of
workers in companies. The theoretical discipline is based primarily on the assumption that
employees are individuals with varying goals and needs, and as such should not be thought of as
basic business resources, such as trucks and filing cabinets.
Human Resource Management (HRM) is seen by practitioners in the field as a more innovative
view of workplace management than the traditional approach. Its techniques force the managers
of an enterprise to express their goals with specificity so that they can be understood and undertaken
by the workforce and to provide the resources needed for them to successfully accomplish their
assignments. As such, HRM techniques, when properly practiced, are expressive of the goals and
operating practices of the enterprise overall. HRM is also seen by many to have a key role in risk
reduction within organisations.
Synonyms such as personnel management are often used in a more restricted sense to describe
activities that are necessary in the recruiting of a workforce, providing its members with payroll
and benefits, and administrating their work-life needs. So if we move to actual definitions,
Torrington and Hall (1987) define personnel management as being:
“A series of activities which: first enable working people and their employing organisations to
agree about the objectives and nature of their working relationship and, secondly, ensures that the
agreement is fulfilled”.

Academic theory
Research in the area of HRM has much to contribute to the organizational practice of HRM. For the
last 20 years, empirical work has paid particular attention to the link between the practice of HRM
and organizational performance, evident in improved employee commitment, lower levels of
absenteeism and turnover, higher levels of skills and therefore higher productivity, enhanced
quality and efficiency. This area of work is sometimes referred to as ‘Strategic HRM’ or SHRM.
Within SHRM three strands of work can be observed: Best practice, Best Fit and the Resource Based
View (RBV).
The notion of best practice — sometimes called ‘high commitment’ HRM - proposes that the
adoption of certain best practices in HRM will result in better organizational performance. Perhaps
the most popular work in this area is that of Pfeiffer who argued that there were seven best
practices for achieving competitive advantage through people and ‘building profits by putting
people first’. These practices included: providing employment security, selective hiring, extensive
training, sharing information, self-managed teams, and high pay based on company performance
and the reduction of status differentials. However, there is a huge number of studies which provide
evidence of best practices, usually implemented in coherent bundles, and therefore it is difficult to
draw generalized conclusions about which is the ‘best’ way (For a comparison of different sets of
best practices see Becker and Gerhart, 1996.
Best fit, or the contingency approach to HRM, argues that HRM improves performance where
there is a close vertical fit between the HRM practices and the company’s strategy. This link
ensures close coherence between the HR people processes and policies and the external market or
business strategy. There are a range of theories about the nature of this vertical integration. For
example, a set of ‘life cycle’ models argue that HR policies and practices can be mapped onto the
stage of an organization’s development or life cycle. Competitive advantage models take Porter’s
(1985) ideas about strategic choice and map a range of HR practices onto the organization’s choice
of competitive strategy. Finally ‘configuration models’ provide a more sophisticated approach
which advocates a close examination of the organisation’s strategy in order to determine the
appropriate HR policies and practices. However, this approach assumes that the strategy of the
organisation can be identified - many organisations exist in a state of flux and development.
The Resource Based View (RBV), argued by some to be at the foundation of modern HRM, focuses
on the internal resources of the organisation and how they contribute to competitive advantage.
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