Human Resource Management

Human Resource Management as a Function

Human resource management as a new label for the personnel function and as a descriptive term for labor policies was developed in the United States in the early 1980s. The work of Harvard academics was especially influential, as seen in the book by Michael Beer, Bert Spector, Paul Lawrence, D. Quinn Mills, and Richard Walton. The usage of the term spread rapidly in the Anglo-American world and beyond. At the same time, it attracted widespread criticism for its excessive managerialism and seeming exclusive concern with the management prerogative and the achievement of shareholder value to the neglect of other stakeholders. The critical question then, as now, is whether human resource management was a new approach to labor management or merely a new label on an old bottle. This relabeling of the personnel function is itself of interest, since it reveals one of the conceptual problems with the term and points to the long-running difficulty of the role and influence of the function. Criticism of professional personnel managers and departments for their lack of influence and inability to make meaningful contributions to the achievement of strategic objectives has been long running. The rapid spread of the nomenclature human resource management for professional labor managers and their departments can be seen as an attempt to gain legitimacy and respect from senior executives by downplaying the welfare image of personnel management and giving emphasis to the contribution to business strategy. By the early years of the 21st century the term business partner was widely adopted although not universally accepted.

This link between human resource management as a set of labor policies and the description of the function is one source of confusion whenever the term human resource management is used. Often the meaning of the term is bound by the policies and practices that are designed by the function itself and found within the human resource manual, or Web site. There are three major limitations to this way of defining human resource management. First, many of the human resource policies designed by the human[Page 614] resource function rely on other managers, especially line managers, to implement them. There is frequently a gap between the espoused and the enacted. To define human resource management as only those formal policies found in the manual is to severely limit understanding of how the human resource of the firm is managed. Second, not all firms have a dedicated human resource department or manager, yet they too, of course, need means of managing their human resources. Third, if we ask how the human resource in the firm is managed in the sense of how it is recruited and selected, trained, motivated, and deployed and how the aspirations and expectations of employees are dealt with, a much wider array of managerial behaviors have to be included. Increasingly the very broad term people management is used to cover this wider area of interest. People in this context includes managers themselves considered as employees, as well as others whose labor power is utilized by the firm, and rewarded for it, whether temporaries, labor agency staff, or the self-employed.

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