Personnel Management

Personnel management - The renewed emphasis on the importance of human resources in the 1980s and 90s drew attention to the way in which people management was organized. Specifically, this meant a critical review of the functions of personnel management.

Personnel management has been a recognized function in the USA since NCR opened a personnel office in the 1890s. In other countries the function arrived more slowly and came through a variety of routes. This excerpt from Human Resource Management in a Business Context looks at Personnel management from a historical perspective.

Further notes: Traditional Personnel Functions

* Recruitment - advertising for new employees and liaising with employment agencies.

* Selection - determining the best candidates from those who apply, arranging interviews, tests, references.

* Promotion - running similar selection procedures to determine progression within the organization.

* Pay - a minor or major role in pay negotiation, determination and administration.

* Performance assessment - co-ordinating staff appraisal and counselling systems to evaluate individual employee performance.

* Grading structures - as a basis for pay or development, comparing the relative difficulty and importance of functions.

* Training and development - co-ordinating or delivering programmes to fit people for the roles required by the organisation now and in the future.

* Welfare - providing or liaising with specialists in a staff care or counselling role for people with personal or domestic problems affecting their work.

* Communication - providing internal information service, perhaps in the form of staff newspapers or magazines, handouts, booklets, videos.

* Employee Relations - handling disputes, grievances and industrial action, often dealing with unions or staff representatives.

* Dismissal - on an individual basis as a result of failure to meet requirements or as part of a redundancy, downsizing or closure exercise, perhaps involving large numbers of people.

* Personnel administration - record-keeping and monitoring of legislative requirements related to equal opportunities and possibly pensions and tax.

Personnel Management

Personnel management has been a recognised function in the USA since NCR opened a personnel office in the 1890s. American personnel managers worked within a unitarist tradition, identifying closely with the objectives of their organization (key concept 1.3). It was natural for HRM to emerge comparatively smoothly from this perspective.

In other countries, notably Australia, South Africa and the UK, the personnel management function arrived more slowly and came from a number of routes. Moreover, its orientation was not entirely managerial. In Britain its origins can be traced to the 'welfare officers' employed by Quaker-owned companies such as Cadburys. At an early stage it became evident that there was an inherent conflict between their activities and those of line managers. They were not seen to have a philosophy compatible with the worldview of senior managers. The welfare officer orientation placed personnel management as a buffer between the business and its employees. In terms of organizational politics this was not a politically viable position for individuals wishing to further their careers, increase their status and earn high salaries.

Key concept 1.3

Unitarism

A managerialist stance which assumes that everyone in an organization is a member of a team with a common purpose. It embodies a central concern of HRM, - that an organization's people, whether managers or lower-level employees, should share the same objectives and work together harmoniously. From this perspective, conflicting objectives are seen as negative and disfunctional. By definition it is the opposite of pluralism: the acceptance of several alternative approaches, interests or goals within the samr organization or society. Arguably, in the field of HRM, unitarism represents a US tradition, whereas pluralism is more typical of European attitudes towards people management.

(...) The second tradition - industrial relations - further compounded this distinction between personnel and other managers. In the acrimonious industrial relations climate which prevailed in the UK throughout much of the 20th century, personnel/industrial relations managers played an intermediary role between unions and line management. Their function was legitimized by their role as 'honest brokers'.

But from the 1980s onwards governments with a neo-liberal or free market orientation such as Margaret Thatcher's administration in the UK reined in union freedom severely. Overall, there was a marked reduction in the importance of collective worker representation in many English-speaking countries. The perceived importance of collective bargaining reduced as managerial power increased. Trade union membership declined along with centralized pay bargaining and other forms of collective negotiation - and with them, the importance of the personnel manager with negotiating experience. The focus switched from the collective to the relationship between the employer and the individual employee. To support this change, a variety of essentially individualistic HR techniques were applied to achieve business goals. These include performance measurement, objective-setting, and skills development related to personal reward.

By the 1980s, personnel had become a well-defined but low status area of management (see table 1.1). Associations such as the British Institute of Personnel Management (now the Institute of Personnel and Development) recruited members in increasing numbers, developed a qualification structure and attempted to define 'best practice'. Although the knowledge and practices they encouraged drew on psychology and sociology, they were largely pragmatic and commonsensical and did not present a particularly coherent approach to people management. Moreover, in some instances training and industrial relations were considered to be specialist fields outside mainstream personnel management. Traditional personnel managers were accused of having a narrow, functional outlook. Storey (1989: 5) commented that personnel management: '...has long been dogged by problems of credibility, marginality, ambiguity and a 'trash-can' labelling which