CHAPTER ONE

AN OVER VIEW OF HUMAN RESOURCE MAMAGEMENT

Introduction
Organizations are made up of people and function through people. Without people
organization cannot exist. The resource of money, men, material and machineries are
collected, coordinated and utilized through people. These resources by themselves cannot
fulfill the objectives of the organization. They need to be united in to a team. It is through
the combined effort of people that material and monetary resources are effectively
utilized for the attainment of common objectives
1.1 MEANING AND DEFINITION
Human resource management has been defined in various ways by many scholars. The
following are few definitions by different scholars:
Simply put, Human resource management (HRM) is a management function that helps
manager’s recruit, select, train and develops members for an organization. Obviously,
HRM is concerned with the people‘s dimension in organization.

Human Resource Management is the planning, organizing, directing and controlling of

the procurement, development, compensation, integration, maintenance, separation of
human resources to the end that individual, organizational and societal objectives are
accomplished.
Human Resource Management has been defined as the function or a unit in an
organization that facilitate the most effective utilization of human resources to achieve
the objectives of both the organization and the employees.

Human Resource Management is concerned with the people dimension in

management. Since every organization is made-up of people, acquiring their services,
developing their skills, motivating them to higher levels of performance and ensuring that
they continue to maintain their commitment to the organization are essential to the
achievement of organizational objectives.
Thus, it is true, regardless of the type of the organization – government, business,
education, health, recreation, or social action.

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1.2 Characteristics of human resource management
 Comprehensive function
Human Resource management is concerned with managing people at work. It covers all
type of people in the organization. It applies to workers, supervisors, officers, managers
and other type of personnel.
 People- oriented
Human Resource Management is concerned with employees as an individual as well as
groups. It is the task of dealing with human relationship with an organization. It is the
process of achieving the best fit between individuals, jobs, organizations and the
environment. It is the process of bringing people and organizations together so that the
goal of each are met.
 Action oriented
Human Resource Management focuses on action rather than on record keeping or
procedures. It stresses the solution of personnel problems to achieve both organizational
objectives and employee’s personal goal.
 Individual oriented
Under Human Resource Management, every employee is considered as an individual so
as to provide service and programs to facilitate employee satisfaction and growth.
 Development oriented
Human Resource Management is concerned with developing potential of employees so
that they got maximum satisfaction from their best effort to the organizations.
 Future oriented
Human resource management is concerned with helping organizations to achieve its
objectives in the future by providing competent and well-motivated employees.
 Challenging Function
Managing of Human Resource is a challenging job due to dynamic nature of people.
People have sentiments and emotions so they cannot be treated like machines. It is,
therefore, necessary to handle them tactfully. It is not simply managing people but
administrating a social system.

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 Continuous Function
Management of Human Resource is an ongoing or never ending exercise rather than a
‘one shot’ function.
 Pervasive function
Human Resource Management is inherent in all organizations and at all levels. Each and
every manager is involved with human resource function.
 Science as well as an art
Human Resource Management is a science as it contains an organized body of
knowledge consisting of principles and techniques. It is also an art because it involved
application of theoretical knowledge to the problems of human resource.
 Globally oriented
Human Resource Management is not only an American function or activity; it is being
practiced efficiently and continuously in Mexico, Poland, Hong Kong and all over the
world.
1.3. Importance of human resource management
The significance of HRM can be discussed in four dimensions: corporate, professional,
social and national.
1. HRM can help an organization in achieving its goals more efficiently and
effectively in the following ways:
 Attracting and retaining the required talents ---through effective HRP,
recruitment, selection, placement, orientation, compensation and promotion
polices.
 Developing the necessary skill and the right attitudes among employees—through
training, development, performance appraisal etc.
 Securing willing cooperation of employees through motivation, participation,
grievance handling, etc.
 Utilizing effectively the available human resource.
 Ensuring that the enterprise will have in future a team of competent and dedicated
employees.

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 2. Professional significance
Effective management of human resources helps to improve the quality of work life. It
permits team work among employees by providing a healthy working environment. It
contributes to professional growth in the following ways:
o Provide maximum opportunities for personal development of each employee
o Maintain healthy relationship between individuals, and different work groups
o Allocate work properly
3. Social significance
Proper Human Resource Management has a great significance for the society. It helps to
enhance the dignity or self-respect of labor in the following ways:
 Provide suitable employment that provides social and psychological satisfaction to
people.
 Maintaining a balance between the jobs available and the jobseekers in terms of
numbers, qualifications, needs and aptitudes.
 Eliminating wastage of human resources through conservation of physical and
mental health.
4. National significance
Human resources and their management play a vital role in the development of a nation.
The effective exploitation and utilization of a nation’s natural, physical and financial
resources require an efficient and committed man power.
There are wide differences in development between countries with similar resources
due to difference in the quality of their people. Countries are underdeveloped because of
their peoples are back ward.
The level of development in the country depends primarily on the skills, attitudes and
values of its human resources. Effective management of human resources helps to speed
up the process of economic growth which intern leads to higher standard of living and
fuller employment.
1.4. Objectives of human resource management
The objectives of Human Resource Management is to provide with efficient and effective
work force that is to provide the right people with the right talent , knowledge and

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experience that are able to contribute towards the achievement of objectives. The
objective includes:
Owners’ objectives
Owners objective of private and public organizations require that the objective of
which the organization has been established should be fulfilled through the
contribution of HR .Owners of business require their employees to contribute to
the profitability of their organization through the satisfaction of customers.
Owners of non-business require that the human resource attribute to the
satisfaction of the client or user through economic operation.
Employee’s objective
Employees of organizations require the HRM to assist them in achieving
personnel goals such as
Adequate income
Security
Pleasant working condition
Room for growth and development , and
Better quality of work life
Social objectives
The society provides challenges to HRM. They require the HRM to contribute the
product quality of a high value by promoting fair Promotion and healthy
environment, etc.
Legal objectives (legal requirement)
Governments require HRM to comply with government laws and regulations such as:
Avoid discrimination based on Avoid negligent hiring claim
sex, age, disability etc. Avoid Sexual harassment etc.
Allow equal employment
opportunities
Fair treatment
Minimum pay
Affirmative action
Fair working conditions,

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OBJECTIVES OF HRM FUNCTION (to an enterprise)
The contributions of HRM makes to organizational effectiveness include the following
 Helping the organizations reach goals
 Efficiently employing the skills and abilities of the work force
 Providing the organization with well- trained and well – motivated employees
 Developing and maintaining a quality of work life that makes employment in the
organization desirable.
Communicating HRM policies to all employees
 Helping to maintain ethical policies and socially behavior
 Managing Change to the mutual advantage of individuals, groups, the enterprise, and
the public.
1.5 Evolution and Development of Human Resource Management
The history of HRM can be traced to England, where carpenters, leather workers, and other
craftspeople organized themselves into guilds. They used their unity to improve their work
conditions. These guilds became the forerunners of trade unions. The field further developed
with the arrival of the Industrial Revolution in the latter part of the 18th century, which laid the
basis for a new and complex industrial society. The Industrial Revolution was characterized by:
 The development of machinery
 The linking of power to machines
 The establishment of factories employing many workers, and
 Extensive specialization of labor – that is, individual workers performing very narrow
tasks was a key feature of the job design in these factories.
The consequence of grouping workers into shops and factories, and the specialization of labor,
was a gradual emergence of more systematic attention to:
The design of jobs
The choice of workers for those jobs (selection)
The provision of pay and benefits (compensation), and
The welfare of employees both on and off the job
Scientific management and welfare work represent two concurrent approaches that began
in the 19th century and along with industrial psychology, merged during the era of the
world wars.

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The Scientific Management Movement
The scientific management movement of the late 1800s and early 1900s concentrated particularly
on job design, selection, and compensation. The name most closely associated with this
movement is Frederick W. Taylor. Working in the steel industry in the late 1870s, Taylor
believed the same techniques used by scientists in the laboratory – experimentation, forming and
testing hypotheses, and proposing theories based on research and testing – could be used by
management to increase efficiency in the work place. And he attempted to discover the “one best
way” and the one fastest way to do a job. The science of management included systematic job
design that began with observation, recording, and classification of job activities as they were
typically carried out. Tasks could then be simplified and jobs made more efficient. Scientific
selection involved choosing workers with the skills and capacities needed to carry out the
efficiently organized jobs. Scientific training and development meant training workers for
particular task and was intended to replace the centuries-old practice of permitting workers to
choose their own work methods and train themselves as best they could.

The Industrial Welfare Movement

In addition to directing attention to scientific management around the turn of the century, many
firms were beginning to be involved in what has been called the industrial welfare movement.
The industrial welfare work consisted of “voluntary efforts on the part of employers to improve,
with the existing industrial system, the conditions of employment in their own factories.”
Actually, the movement was extended beyond the work place to some aspects of the workers’
lives off the job.
Management made available various facilities such as libraries and other recreational premises,
offered financial assistance for education, home purchase and improvement, provided medical
care and instituted hygienic measures. As an outgrowth of this movement, many business firms
began to employ staff members called social secretaries or welfare secretaries. These people
were employed to help with employee finances, housing, health, recreation, education, and other
matters.
Early Industrial Psychology
Applications of psychology to business and industry, or industrial psychology, began to emerge
in the 1890s and early 1900s as psychologists studied selling techniques and ways of testing job

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candidates. The most notable industrial psychologist was Hugo Munsterberg, whose major
contributions were:
The analysis of jobs in terms of their physical, mental, and emotional requirements. The
development of testing devises for selecting workers.

The Human Relations Movement

What came to be called the human relations movement has been a major influence on modern
human resources management. This movement is characterized by its focus on group behavior
and workers’ feelings as they relate to productivity and morale. Some of its beginnings were with
a group of researchers in an industrial plant near Chicago.

The Hawthorne studies

In 1924 researchers at the Western Electric Company’s Hawthorne Plant near Chicago began
some experiments to determine how lighting affected workers and their output. In one
experiment, production increased when the lighting was improved, but in another it also
increased when lighting was severely reduced. After three years of experimentation with such
“illogical” results, the researchers concluded that, in experiments involving people, it was
impossible to change one variable (lighting) without affecting other variables such as worker
interaction or worker-supervisor interaction. It became clear that it was human interaction that
was affecting morale and motivation, which, in turn, were affecting production.

The organization as a social system – further inquiry and experimentation led researchers to
conclude that productivity depended at least in part on the extent to which the employees became
a team and cooperated wholeheartedly and spontaneously. Worker cooperation and enthusiasm
seemed to be related to the interest in the workgroup shown by the supervisor and experimenters,
the lack of coercion or force, and the extent to which workers participated in making decisions
and changes that would affect them.
The drastic changes in technology, the growth of organizations, the rise of unions, and
government concern and intervention concerning working people resulted in the development of
personnel departments. There is no specific date assigned to the appearance of the first personnel
department, but around the 1920s more and more organizations seemed to take note of and do

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something about the conflict between employees and management. Early personnel
administrators were called welfare secretaries. Their job was to bridge the gap between
management and the operator (worker); in other words, they were to speak to workers in their
own language and to recommend to management what had to be done to get the best results from
employees.
The early history of personnel still obscures the importance of the HRM function to
management. Until the 1960s, the personnel function was considered to be concerned only with
blue-collar or operating employees. It was viewed as a record-keeping unit that handed out 25-
year tenure pins and coordinated the annual company picnic. Drucker stated that the job of
personnel was “partly a file clerk’s job, partly a house keeping job, partly a social worker’s job,
and partly firefighting, heading off union trouble.