Handle with care

Human resource management (HRM) accounts for almost one-third of the Organisational Management syllabus, so it is crucial that you familiarise yourself with the subject, which covers the key activities concerning the management of people. These include human resource planning, recruitment and selection, training and development, reward and motivation, career and succession planning, induction, performance appraisal, dismissal, retirement and redundancy. The fact that you will have first-hand experience of many of these activities might give you the impression that HRM is a relatively easy part of the syllabus. Virtually everyone has gone through the processes of recruitment and selection, has experienced some training and is familiar with the idea of motivating people with reward systems. This is a good thing in many ways, because the subject matter is something to which we can all relate. But there are hidden dangers, because we can be lulled into a false sense of security – a feeling that we don’t need to work hard on the subject since we already know something about it. The term HRM is really about people, but the word “resource” is potentially confusing. It suggests that human resources are similar to other resources, such as plant, equipment and buildings, and should be managed accordingly. While it’s true that labour (in the form of people) is required in the production process, it’s also clear that people are not like any other resource. It’s stating the obvious, but we need to remind ourselves that the human resources in any organisation consist of individuals like ourselves. They can be motivated or demotivated; they can co-operate with the management or resist it; and they can think, create, imagine, plan, learn, feel emotion and perform a huge number of activities. The second reason for the complexity of HRM is the extent to which its activities relate both to each other and to the organisation more generally. Before considering these relationships in more detail, it is useful to review the overall purpose of HRM. This can be derived from the definition offered in the CIMA core text, Human Resource Management, Theory and Practice, by John Bratton and Jeffrey Gold (1999). It argues that HRM is “that part of the management process that specialises in the management of people in work organisations. HRM emphasises that employees are critical to achieving sustainable competitive advantage, that human resources practices need to be integrated with the corporate strategy, and that human resource specialists help organisational controllers to meet both efficiency and equity objectives.” As well as stressing the importance of human resources for the achievement of competitive advantage, this definition also emphasises the relationship between human resource practices and the organisation’s