Models of Personnel Management

Introduction

The pragmatics of personnel practice focus on how to recruit, how to train, how to negotiate, how to administer rewards systems and what responses to employment law we have to make etc. All these are the things that people in management and personnel roles say they are particularly well equipped to do .

So we study the personnel role itself; why it exists, the scope of the work, how personnel managers slot into management structures and their capacity for influence. The " the personnel function's " existence is a world (but not globally uniform) phenomena - a structural and processual feature of business activity. The structures and processes need to be understood at

• operational levels
• strategic policy levels (company, national, international).

There is also a meta-level. We can examine the phenomenon's "true" nature. How can "it" - the structures and processes - be construed. This will take use beyond the testements of the inner-circle of practitioners and HRM advocates.

The career professional

Theory and Manifestos

Personnel messages tend to emphasise people, participation, care and sensitivity in human relations. Yet when we compare the manifesto statements of the human relations ethic with the costs and utilisation aspects of business decision-making, contradictions and inconsistencies become evident. High-minded HRM principles support a assumed ideals of "good practice" but their application seems to be of a second order level when it comes to core decision-making in many businesses.

A Critical Framework

We need a critical eye for the claims of the personnel/HRM literature. Of course sound personnel methods (important nuts and bolts) are essential. People are employed, they are trained, administered, rewarded, appraised, promoted, dismissed etc. But keep a meta-level of study in mind when evaluating the status of the personnel activity, the methods used and claims made.

• Is the picture so clear and unequivocal or is there a shimmering haze?
• Do the practices really produce the goods?
• Do the owners of the business really care? Are people extensions of machines (factors of production, horse power) or do businesses really treat people as people with a real expression of responsibility towards them. Here we might consider the paternalistic (maternalistic) ethic of employment and whether an employer can separated their responsibility from that of "society". Whatever society is!
• Why is personnel management still so frequently only a support management role? Why are personnel managers less influential than the financial analysts?
• Does the personnel framework uphold one view of socio-economic life and omit to focus on other views?

Assignment

• Challenge one personnel practice.
  Many large firms spend lots of time and money in developing and implementing staff appraisal schemes. Do they really work? Do they achieve the claims made for them? If a firm stopped doing staff appraisal today would its financial performance actually suffer? Would staff performance suffer? What would be lost?

Four Models of Personnel Management

1. Normative

   Personnel people and managers who speak about employees in the context of teams, quality, creativity and empowerment reference a normative framework. McGregor's Theory X and Theory Y reflect underpinning norms, values and opinions that managers have about the people who work for them.

   We can study personnel management as a collection of functional management activities (this is Legge's descriptive-functional perspective below). However underpinning these policies, procedures and methods the typical expectations are that we select, develop, reward and direct employees in ways that give them satisfaction and enables them to perform to their best. The normative rhetoric says:

   "Take this approach, do it this way, relate to your employees like this and ...... your organisation will achieve its goals. Personnel management is the responsibility of all managers who manage people as well as those employed to provide a specialist service."

   The oneness and integration of the organisation to achieve common purposes (unitary perspective) is emphasised (Theory Y).

   The Harsh, Cold Organisation

   Of course the "normative expression"e; of the firm's managers may be distant, erratic, off-hand, cold, negative. Their values and practices may, in behavioural terms, be exploitative and coercive. We
   • employ casual staff only (hire and fire),
   • keep wages and terms and conditions of employment to a minimum,
   • behave with insensitivity towards employees.
   • watch employees like a hawk and supervise them closely.
   • don't really behave in ways which enable employees to develop deep seated trust in the management of the firm.

   Such norms and behaviours of course fall outside the welfare, participation and empowerment norms of the neo-human relations school which might include the following:

   • we respond to the aspirations of individual members of the organisation
   • we encourage people to be part of a team
   • our employment policies and behaviours of ourt managers reflect broad societal needs for fairness and equity
   • we seek to secure optimum utilisation of the human resources of the organisation by fiting the right people into the right jobs with the right rewards (tangible and non-tangible). We match people to jobs in ways that achieve the organisations goals
   • we emphasise getting results through people not by coercive, demanding means but by securing their commitment.
   • our managers behave consistently and with sensitivity to the needs of others. We apply sound planning, organising, communicating, motivating, controlling activities to acquire, develop, maintain and use the workforce effectively and economically.

   Unitary and Pluralistic Perspectives

   The normative emphasis may be pluralistic rather than unitary. Management's role and functional human resource management policies are emphasised even more where are different vested interests and a potential for conflict between groups whose objectives are different. Managers must manage conflict in professional ways being primarily responsible for
   • taking the initiative.
   • developing institutional relationships and mechanisms to anticipate problems and minimise the potential for damaging conflicts of right and interest.
   • consulting and negotiating
   • responding to appeals/challenging/delays to the exertion of managerial authority

2. Descriptive-functional
   (the "professional systems-oriented manager approach

   An employment regulation perspective (within the internal labour market of the firm) is more evident here. Functions can be carried out within a unitary or pluralistic framework. The descriptive-functional model emphasises the policies, processes, roles and structures required to manage people at work. Personnel management is associated with regulative systems; job definition, organisational structuring, selection, appraisal, training, rewards, discipline for which managers are responsible. Indeed managers must adhere to the requirements of external regulation (the law, the constraints of emploment institutions such as imposed by trade unions).

   Goals and the means to achieve them are defined by

   • inter- and
   • intra-organisational problem-solving, negotiation, mechanisms
   • bargaining - between stakeholders of the organisation.

   In this respect for large organisations there is not one , unitary source of managerial authority - there are many. The functional perspectives on human resource management need to be seen in relation to the normative systems of the organisation.

   Where there are competiting interests amongst organisational players, managerial authority (or the authority of some managers) may be challenged. The challenges may be manager to manager. The norm of "professionalism" would have it that it is management's responsibility and personnel management's specialism to offer a professional, know-how based approach.

3. Critical-evaluative

   Watson (1986) opened up a more critical view of what personnel management is and what its functions do. He questionned the "justificatory overtones and mystifications" of the (mainly neo-human relations) normative perspective. The employment relationship may be a pluralistic melange but there is a definite imbalance. The employer-employee exchange is not one between equal partners. The law (like Dirty Harry) has to intervene to even things up a bit. But employers don't like this interference and employees generally have to be put out of a job or experience discomfort in their working life before they really can lay claim to legal protections.

   Normative values and the managerial ascendency of unitary and pluralistic professionalisms little address such matters of power and societal regulation.

   A critical view points to personnel practice as being

   • regulative and exploitative
   • secondary to the dominant strategic concerns of profitablity, market share, growth etc.

   This is a very contrasting emphasis from the "hunky-dory, lets do aerobics together in the car park and sing the company song" approach of unitary, HRM argument. The team, individual empowerment, welfare and care perspectives on employees (human relations) are servants to the economic objectives of the business. An Investors in People begins with analysis of business strategy - its strengths and weaknesses.

   Legge (1978) found that managers

   tended to have a confused and stereotyped perception of the personnel service. All agreed that...personnel department.... existed to provide a service to the line and that the line had the right to decide what the service ideally should be. But when... (asked to state what ideal service they needed)...many...... were at a loss to suggest anything other than the provision of a routine service.

   She points to a credibility gap arising from

   • the rhetoric and gloss of human relations and unitary normative aspirations
   • the contradictions of market economics and capitalism.

   Recession and the economic policies of the 1980's market and UK government labour market de-regulation put a hold on the growth of personnel specialisms and services. These had typically fed off

   • the pressures of trade union growth and power in 1960's and 1970s.
   • The growth of protective employment legislation also tended both to reduce the individual's need for union protections. Instead employers developed functional policies that ensured that they practiced personnel management within the rules defined by statute.
   • the concern for total quality re-emphasised the investment that management needed to make in their communications with employees and the development of team committment. Within the team environment - team managers become responsible for the personnel management needs of their team (within the remit of well define functional personnel policies for the organisation as a whole).

4. Descriptive-Behavioural

   This approach focuses on the actual experience and actual behaviours of personnel people and how others perceive them.

   • What do they do in reality?
   • How does it compare with normative rhetoric?

   Legge and others remind us of Clint Eastwood who as Dirty Harry, when being disciplined for his anarchic, anti-public relations behaviour, is threatened with being transfered to the Personnel section. Clint snarls:

   "Personnel is for ass-holes!"

   Good old Harry - who would ever forget this perspective on being transfered into a personnel role. Other perjorative ancedotes of personnel are

   • plush office, all costs/no profit, all talk and no saleable product
   • a pot pourri of pseudo-psychological techniques and fancy slogans
   • admin. clerk and procedure control duties
   • housekeeping from managing the car park to organising the company newsletter to retirements
   • fire-fighting when line managers get in a fix and they do not know enough about employment law

Personnel Rhetoric and Contradictions

1. weak influence over real decision-makers and risk takers
   Those in top financial and operational roles may on a day to day basis never refer to the personnel department. Decisions are made on the basis of the balance sheet and analysis of the investment portfolio. If a factory is not making a profit - it is closed or sold. The HRM person may be called in after the decision has been made and given the task of organising all the employee arrangements needed to support the strategic decision.

   This is the problem of the HRM role in strategic decision-making.

   The title "Investors in People" - typifies the 1990's human resource message. The importance of committed, skilled staff when seeking "total quality" and lean operational flexibility within the competitive, turbulent market" focuses corporate attention on the workforce's quality and contribution.

   Any change programme within a firm - such as TQM or the implementation of NVQs is a risky business needing people to renew their effort and activities. Change frequently means more pressure, re-allocation of responsibilities and new behaviours to secure implementation. There is more monitoring and evaluation.

   In the final analysis an improvement programme may be successful but it may also have expended masses of energy for little discernable result. We have to remember to that the executives who initiated the change programme will want to be able to say that it has been successful. This poses problems of evaluation.

2. not being as able as operations or finance oriented business people
   But the personnel manager must still be a business person able to analyse and synthesise from many objective, economic and social perspectives. They must be able to comprehend the employment implications of particular kinds of operational technology (the factory, the machines, the technical demands of the work) and then advise on the people issues.

   The advisory role has a common-sense element to it .......will proposals, new work arrangements and policies work with people. Will they accept them and make them work?

3. being passive, at best reactive and too woolly to be effective initiators
   Proposing change within the business may add to costs or reduced them
   • a new training programme
   • applying NVQs
   • a new personnel records system
   • closing the Northampton factory
   • employing people on short-term contracts rather than continuous contracts

   Someone in a personnel role must be able to scan the environment and analyse how well (or otherwise) current systems are working. Being an innovator means assisting the company to exercise foresight, being able to propose well-researched alteratives which (the commercial argument) add value to the business

4. administrators who apply the rules which tend to maintain a status quo
   in a large company, or even a small one with 25 employees, changing the rewards system or shift pattern is not mean problem. or acting inconsistently in permitting one employee to do something but denying the same to another.

5. operate out of a quiet office and too separate from what is really happening in the business and on the shop floor.
   the clerk of works and "talker, adviser role" tends to be office based, white collar, talking and thinking oriented rather than doing. What is built - a policy, a training programme, an contracts of employment service, a confessional service etc. The problem for the personnel professional is being a member of and staying with those groups who do make strategic decisions - not just being a hanger on but being a valued contributor.

6. too associated with welfare and a social service
   Any workplace is a social centre a focus in peoples lives. Friendships and enmities occur at work. People get married, divorced, have and loss babies. They have illnesses. Most of these things occur outside of work, some occur from workplace interaction. All may have implications as they transcend the work/external life boundary. It is ridiculous to suggest that an employer can turn to an employee and say "leave your problems at home". Such an employer would be marked as the exploiter, the uncaring employer.

These observations illustrate some everyday underpinning problems which contribute to the contradictions of delivering a personnel.

Note however that personnel seldom administer even the payroll department. This is too complex and a finance function! Often the Finance Director manages the personnel function - certainly not the other way round!

Assignment

Perhaps the personnel function arose from post-war full employment and the growth of large, corporations and that today - personnel departments and specialists are not needed. The function was transitory. Line managers are quite capable of being their own personnel managers - provided a basic policy has been defined.

What are your views? What evidence to you have to counter such a proposition.