The Biggest Hrm Lies

Many myths have been perpetuated In the field of personnel administration during the 20th century. These misconceptions were really never true in the 1900s, and they are especially misleading and Inaccurate now, as we enter the 21st century. The five misconceptions to be discussed In this article Include:

1. Human resources are our most Important assets.

2. Experience and superior qualifications will help you get a job.

3. Good Individual job performance will result In accelerated pay Increases.

4. Loyalty, commitment, and seniority are rewarded within organizations.

5. Technology and automation will reduce the need for human effort.

It is certainly true that many of the ideas taught in college classrooms within business schools are not experienced in the real world of work. This is true in all of the business disciplines, including accounting, economics, finance, management, and marketing-and their various academic subdisciplines. This article, however, deals with only management topics and their subset of human resource management, formerly known as personnel administration (industrial relations, employment, staffing, labor-management relations, et al.).

Actually, it is not a rarity to find erroneous teachings in colleges today. Examples are numerous and easily come to mind for people who are familiar with the HRM literature and field, or any other academic discipline. This article will simply examine some major HRM lies, which have relevance to other areas as well.

Theory vs. Practice

Why are the teachings wrong? One explanation is that there is simply a gap that exists between ivory-tower theory and real-world practice. The assumption is that theory is the good or ideal way, and that practice is the often not-so-good, actual way of the real world. But we must ask, if theory is so far off so frequently from describing behavior in the real world, is it useful? Might not society be a lot better off if the flawed theory were to be replaced with models that better prepare students and other people for life in the culture as it really exists? This is a difficult question to answer and an impossible one to reach agreement and closure on.

In The Beauty of The Beast, Geoffrey Bellman explains why we keep creating organizations that fall so short of our dreams for them.I He shows how individuals doing what makes sense create organizations that make no sense at all. Everywhere we look, we see organizations struggling with their structures and mistreating many of the people they were created to serve. This is true within business corporations, government agencies, school systems, health care providers, social services, and even religious institutions. Winston Churchill once said, "First we shape our structures, then, our structures shape up." Today, our ability to create organizations exceeds our ability to control them. We live in a struggle to find meaning within structures that were not built with us in mind.

Profits Overemphasized

Profits and money have been inappropriately overemphasized as respective motives of institutional and individual behavior. All large private organizations began as small entrepreneurships. Studies of entrepreneurs repeatedly rate autonomy, independence, pursuing an avocation/calling/vocation, and utilizing experience ahead of making more money as reasons for starting and maintaining a business. Additionally, a large portion of fresh, private sector jobs in today's economy is due to a resurgence of newly created small businesses. Furthermore, more than half of all new employment opportunities today in America are within the public, not the private, sector. Profits, movies, and customers, although important, are not the main driving forces within personal and proprietary ventures. Values, mores, and ethics explain human behavior better than do volumes, movies, and economics?

Focusing on marketing and customers is just a new variation on the old profit-maximization theme. Elsewhere, researchers have argued and explained why moral maximization should replace profit maximization as the main goal for both public and private institutions.3 Ethics are, or should be, more important than economics when determining appropriate decisions.4 Mores, not movies, are superior choice criteria. Whether something is good or bad and right or wrong are far superior decision criteria than is the idea of which choice results in the most money or profits

Tainted Theory

Another explanation as to why FIRM myths exist is that they are simply due to inaccurate management theory. Perhaps it should not surprise us when human resources are organizationally discarded, since management theory has historically taught that productivity is king, profits are priority, change is good, and global competition is desirable. Management by objectives and/or results stresses ends (outcomes, assessments) not means (process, interactions). Quantity over quality, profits over ethics, immediate paybacks over projected revenues, and self over others are all American enterprise priorities.6 It is, perhaps, expecting too much for human resources to thrive when such tainted theory persists. This author is one among many who think that better management and HRM theory is needed in the new millennium to resolve and solve the human problems and world challenges of the future.

Inappropriate theory comes from inappropriate assumptions. According to author Margaret Wheatley, "Each of us lives and works in organizations designed from Newtonian images of the universe. But science has changed. Revolutionary discoveries in chaos and complexity theory, quantum physics, and biology are overturning the models of science that have dominated for centuries. Today, there is a new scientific management which requires new theories and new ways of viewing organizations and their purposes."7

Two new books from Berrett-Koehler Publishers, Inc. and their "Beyond The Bottom Line" textbook series illustrate the type of rethinking and retheorizing that needs to be done. The Divine Right of Capital is by Marjorie Kelly, editor of Business Ethics magazine, and in Part One, entitled "Is Maximizing Returns to Shareholders a Legitimate Mandate?" she states; "Corporations favor stockholders even when there's no rational reason to do so. It's a form of discrimination based on property. It's aristocratic. And it's out of step with