human resource management essay pdf

human resource management essay pdf

The Evolution and Future of Human Resource Management: A Comprehensive Analysis

1. Introduction to Human Resource Management

The field of human resource management (HRM) has evolved throughout the years primarily due to the conflicting difficulties of industrial organizations that sought new management approaches to enhance productivity, more efficient occupational specialization, and increased employee satisfaction and well-being. This conflict intensified with the Great Depression that gravely affected the quantitative as well as humanistic areas of management. Management was forced to rethink the basis of its practices and adapt them to the rapidly changing conditions of the time. The detailed attention to human worth and the increasing influence of psychologists and social researchers occurred in large part due to a universal realization that important aspects of economic inefficiency are frequently identified as the direct result of poor human relations within organizations. This conflict of interests provided an impetus that began a shift from traditional concepts of employee management to HRM concepts. Subsequently, the underlying paradigms of labor relations and human resource management centered around socially responsible approaches to employee management that vied with traditional institutionalized concepts of direct control over employment terms where management dictated employment actions with limited influence from employees.

2. Historical Development of HRM Practices

“White collar” management and employee futures in U.S. business operations came under an intense spotlight of public critique and constant change so suddenly in 1965/66 after almost 100 years of relatively unchanged responsibilities and methods of practice that it became readily apparent that a critical new threshold had been crossed in our socio-economic evolution. With the 200th Anniversary of the American Revolution near, U.S. business management specialists in the mid-1970s are becoming increasingly aware that a second considerable threshold in socio-economic evolution of potential great significance is imminent, or might have occurred while we are preparing for its emergence. In particular, it appears that both the nature of business organizations and the systems of employment upon which business has stood from time immemorial are rapidly changing and being reshaped toward more responsive and flexible forms.

The evolution and implementation of human resource management has been closely associated with the development of the business corporation and the advent of industrial society. In the United States, from colonial times until the establishment in 1933 of the United States Civil Service Commission, direct management of human resources rested almost entirely with the individual employer. Alternatively, all employees who worked under a system of compensation at a rate less than that generally paid for the same or similar work in the particular trade or recognized comparable line of business were considered to be “employees covered by this act. By the early 1960s, the operations and methods of U.S. businesses carried on in a large number of foreign trade markets had become the subject of increasingly severe criticism by various national and local interest groups associated with the human side of business.

3. Contemporary Trends and Challenges in HRM

The paper describes and discusses contemporary trends and challenges in human resource management (HRM). It outlines five contemporary challenges for HRM and discusses how technology helps organizations to meet these. These challenges call for a broad research and development agenda to help mount organizational effectiveness. The conclusions summarize practical insight and theoretical contributions. HRM is being called to address the growing influence of technological capabilities, diversity, global economics, corporate governance, and ethics. The paper carefully articulates the dimensions of the challenges and suggests how technology can provide support and raises several research questions on how technology can support this new market for HRM.

This chapter helps to understand the environmental forces that are currently undergoing changes in human resource management (HRM). It introduces a set of general trends facing HRM directors and other human resource professionals across countries. One framework of general trends in our contemporary groundbreaking world is social changes. This work also tests HRM’s contemporary response to this social change growth by discussing five pertinent, wide-ranging challenges in post-modern management. Our ultimate purpose is to demonstrate that human resource transformation is both rapid and vast because its multiplicity is promoted by highly extensive environmental forces.

4. The Role of Technology in HRM Innovation

However, from an experiential standpoint, in some cases, the mere presence of technology—through inadequate provisioning, poor design, or poor implementation—may weaken the HR link to strategy. The minutia of the hardware/software integration process (e.g., telecoms wiring, overall capacity and data storage systems set-up, functioning of software functionalities) may not be of primary concern to HR. Yet if there are implementation flaws or service disappointments, many HR technological improvements can bring much invisible cost. The teething stage of technology also often results in unforeseen and invisible costs through pressure on the humans who must interface with the new system while maintaining their original functions.

Rapid technological innovation is certainly the most influential force that is shaping industry, work, and employment. It is then not strange that we find the impacts of technological innovation in the area of HRM. Nevertheless, the role of HRM in this issue is a little explored area. Many researchers and business analysts support the idea that technology can empower HR, arguing that greater access to a wider range of information—especially that required for advanced strategic HR activities—could foster employees’ sense of ownership for choosing corporation directions. Through this, technology could reinforce HR’s link to business strategy, providing the crucial information needed to foster the high-engagement, high-performance workplace advocated in the past. Many benefits derived from HR technology improvements. These improvements enable human resource managers to build a self-service environment for employees to handle their work assignments, benefits package, etc., and gain low-cost 24/7 access to information, thereby reducing the administrative burden of HR and accomplishing the compliance requirements of the company.

5. Future Prospects and Strategies for HRM Excellence

This process is now reshaping the largest global single economy in the world and transforming the biggest consumer economy as it does so. China’s cost advantages have been in part usurped by technology in American factories, and the production of goods for the world market was in part replaced by the rapid growth of the service economy. As with the change to the global economy that American and European factories underwent in the past, so the economies of developed and developing countries are rapidly moving forwards in time, and with the move, much of the work activities in which human beings had been utilized in the past are being replaced by machines or soon will be. This takes away the demand from workers in relatively unskilled work activities, and the work that is left, and the work that is configured in the future for any task delivery of any kind will be heavily reliant on IT and robotics, and through digital technology.

The workforce and the workplace in the developed world have changed beyond recognition over the last thirty years. The forces that have reshaped the global economy began with the worldwide rise of new technology and information technology (IT), automation of processes, and elimination of work that is transactional in nature. This saw the rapid spread of technology globally and the establishment of a global economy with production that was often based on wherever there were the lowest costs relative to where capital could be deployed. This forced change through economies which had been hitherto largely protected by tariffs and trade quotas and often funded through state capitalization.