Topic 11 - Human Resource Management - Evans Chapter 7

The Scope Of Human Resource Development And Management

Human resource management (HRM) consists of those activities designed to provide for and coordinate the people of an organization.

What activities are included in human resources management?

Leading Practices

What are the tasks to be accomplished by Human resource management?

What are the human resource strategies of leading companies?

 

Linking Human Resource Plans And Business Strategy

Because work is accomplished by people, human resource plans should be aligned with business plans derived from company strategy.

What are the topics usually addressed by human resource plans?

What five areas must managers consider when aligning human resource plans with strategic plans?

Designing High-Performance Work Systems What is work design?

What is job design?

 

What 3 levels of the organization should work design strategies focus?

 

What are the top five employee needs?

 

An integrating theory that helps us understand how job design impacts motivation, satisfaction, and organizational effectiveness was proposed by Hackman and Oldham." Their model, which has been validated in numerous organizational settings, is shown in Figure 7.2. The model contains four major segments:

    1. Critical psychological states

2. Core job characteristics

    1. Moderating variables
    2. Outcomes

Three critical psychological states drive the model. Experienced meaningfulness is the psychological need of workers to have the feeling that their work is a significant contribution to the organization and society. Experienced responsibility indicates the need of workers to be accountable for the quality and quantity of work produced. Knowledge of results implies that all workers feel the need to know how their work is evaluated and what the results of the evaluation are.

Five core job characteristics have been identified as having an impact on the critical psychological states:

  1. Task significance: the degree to which the job gives the participant the feeling that it has a substantial impact on the organization or the world.
  2. Task identity: the degree to which the worker can perceive the task as a whole, identifiable piece of work from start to finish.
  3. Skill variety: the degree to which the job requires the worker to use a variety of skills and talents.
  4. Autonomy: the degree to which the task permits freedom, independence, and personal control to be exercised over the work.
  5. Feedback from the job: the degree to which clear, timely information about the effectiveness of performance of the individual is available.

What is job enlargement?

 

What is job rotation?

 

What is job enrichment?

 

Employee Involvement

What is employee involvement?

 

What are the levels of employee involvement?

Employees are motivated through exciting work, responsibility, and recognition. El provides a powerful means of achieving the highest order individual needs of self- realization and fulfillment.

What are the advantages of Employee Involvement over traditional management practices?

Suggestion Systems

What is a suggestion system?

Why participation in suggestion system poor in the United States?

How suggestion system in Japan different than those in the United States?

What are the benefits of a suggestion system?

Empowerment

What is empowerment?

What changes in work systems are required for Empowerment to be sucessful?

Empowerment also means that leaders and managers must relinquish some of the power that they previously held. This power shift often creates management fears that workers will abuse this privilege. However, experience shows that front-line workers generally are more conservative than managers.

Empowerment gives managers new responsibilities. They must hire and develop people capable of handling empowerment, encourage risk-taking, and recognize achievements.

Giving employees information about company finances and the financial implications of empowered decisions is also important.

What are the benefits of empowerment?

Training and Education

Training is one of the largest initial costs in a total quality initiative.

The benefits of quality-based training outweigh the costs by at least 30 to 1

In a total quality environment, employees need to understand the goal of customer satisfaction, to be given the training and responsibilities to achieve this goal, and to feel that they do indeed make a difference.

Training plans should based upon job skill requirements and strategic initiatives of the company.

Leading com panies have formal training departments, whose systems and approaches evolved along with their overall quality systems.

Teamwork and Cooperation

Alfie Kohn, who studied issues of cooperation and competition among employees over five years, concluded that the ideal amount of competition in any company is none at all. Any informal competition that may develop is best discouraged; management should go out of the way to design cooperative work groups and incentive systerns.

Research has shown that the effectiveness of supervisors and subordinates alike is positively related to cooperation and negatively related to competitiveness. Even at the organizational level, cooperation between such departments as design and manufacturing, doctors and hospital administrators, and business managers and orchestra conductors is not the norm.

What is a team?

What are characteristics of effective teams?

What are the different types of teams?

Work teams and quality circles typically are intraorganizational; that is, members usually come from the same department or function.

Management teams, problem- solving teams, project teams, and virtual teams are usually cross-functional; they work m specific tasks or processes that cut across boundaries of several different departments regardless of their organizational home.

What are the most advanced form of teams?

What are the 3 basic functions of a team?

Quality Circles A quality circle is a small group of employees from the same work area who meet regularly and voluntarily to identify, solve, and implement solutions to work-related problems

Self-Managed Teams Many companies have now adopted the self-managed team (or self-directed work team) concept. A self-managed team (SW) is defined as 'a highly trained group of employees, from 6 to 18, on average, fully responsible for turning out a well-defined segment of finished work.

What are the characteristics of Self-Managed Teams?

What are the benefits of self managed teams?

Developing Successful Teams

Many companies rush out and form the wrong kind of teams for a specific job.

For example, quality circle-type teams cannot achieve the same type of results as a cross-functional problem-solving team or a self-managed team.

Managers should examine their organization's goals, objectives, and culture to evaluate its readiness to develop and support team-based initiatives. This step may be the most difficult portion of the process, because it demands a hard self-appraisal of the organization as a whole.

Managers should then analyze the work required. Teams take a lot of maintenance, and if the work can be done faster and better by a single person, a team should not be used.

Peter Scholtes, a leading authority on teams for quality improvement, has suggested 10 ingredients for a successful team:

1. Clarity in team goals. As a sound basis, a team agrees on a mission, purpose, and goals.

2. An improvement plan. A plan guides the team in determining schedules and mileposts by helping the team decide what advice, assistance, training, materials, and other resources it may need.

3. Clearly defined roles. All members must understand their duties and know who is responsible for what issues and tasks.

4. Clear communication. Team members should speak with clarity, listen actively, and share information.

5. Beneficial team behaviors. Teams should encourage members to use effective skills and practices to facilitate discussions and meetings.

6. Well-defined decision procedures. Teams should use data as the basis for decisions and learn to reach consensus on important issues.

7. Balanced participation. Everyone should participate, contribute their talents and share commitment to the team's success.

8. Established ground rules. The group outlines acceptable and unacceptable behaviors.

9. Awareness of group process. Team members exhibit sensitivity to nonverbal communication understand group dynamics, and work on group process issues.

10. Use of the scientific approach. With structured problem-solving processes, teams can more easily find root causes of problems.

What are the 2 common routes for the development of self managed teams?

 

 

Overcoming Resistance to Change

 

Compensation and Recognition

 

Compensation

When is money a motivating factor?

 

What are the 4 objectives of a good compensation system?

Special Recognition and Rewards

Special recognition and rewards can be monetary or nonmonetary, formal or informal, individual or group.

What are the benefits of Special recognition and rewards?

 

What are the 6 key practices of effective employee recognition and rewards?

 

Health, Safety, and Employee Support Services

Labor Relations Issues

Managing Human Resources In A Total Quality Environment

Recruitment and Career Development

What are 2 definitions of motivation?

Content Theories

Many of the theories of motivation developed by behavioral scientists over the past 75 years use simple content models that describe how and why people are motivated to work.

What is Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs Theory?

What is McGregor's Theory X-Theory Y?

What is Herzberg's Motivation and Maintenance Theory?

Process Theories

Process theories and their models explain the dynamic process of how people make choices in an effort to obtain desired rewards.

What is Porter and Lawler's model?

Environmentally Based and Other Motivation Theories

Applying Motivation Theories to TQ

Performance Appraisal

Organizations use performance appraisals for what 4 reasons?

What are the 6 Objections to conventional performance appraisal systems?

When are Performance appraisals are most effective?

When are Performance appraisals a motivator?

What is 360-degree feedback?

Measuring Employee Satisfaction and HRM Effectiveness

Why do we need to measure employee satisfaction?