Selection
Employee selection process constitutes a major aspect of organization’s resourcing strategies because it defines and protects people being crucial for the organization. Due to the fact that the selection process consists in soliciting all possible information about the candidates to assess their suitability for a particular organization, it is very sophisticated, creating a solid platform for matching the recruits with the organizational staff.
Therefore, the strictness of approaches to selecting people is vital because negligence of specific criteria can lead to negative consequences.
In addition, managers should be aware of the fact that selection process should effectively supported by the technological innovation because inaccuracy of the information delivered can lead to failure of choosing the appropriate candidate, as it happened to Liverpool Direct, a leading service company located in London (Bocij, Greasely and Hickie, p. 128). The chief executive David McElinney realized the major problem and managed to eliminate the problem, but the losses were still inevitable.
Managing Diversity
Cultural diversity is identified a concept demanding serious change to all spheres of organizational activities in order to ensure that various strategies and characteristics of human resources are highly appreciated. The effectiveness of successful diversity management is evident, specifically when it comes to enhanced creativity and innovation, better comprehension of customers’ needs, and improved recruitment opportunities.
More positive moral and greater employee retention are also the outcomes of fruitful introduction of consistent diversity management. One of brightest examples of appropriate diversity management is Pacific Dunlop, a large Australian company that acknowledges the explicit connection between poor moral and negligence of social and cultural backgrounds (Steger and Erwee, n. d., p. 78).
The company strictly embraces diversity management strategies and successfully contributes to employee retention. In addition, the company’s person-oriented strategy positively influences the organizational performance as well because workers are more likely to favor the business activities in healthier environments.
Human Resource Development
On the one hand, straight course on identifying the goals and achieving the results is one of the conditions for successful business management. On the other hand, excessive focus on achievements can lead to a stressful and unhealthy situation within an employed environment.
Consequently, a good manager should be able to strike the balance between those orientations and create a harmonious, two-polar approach in the sphere of human resource management and development. Case study of Wall-Mart proves that inappropriate human resource management can lead to serious consequences for organizational productivity and performance.
Specifically, labor right violations and reluctance of managerial staff to introduce changes to treating their personnel negatively affected the company’s image and performance.
Assessing HRM Effectiveness
Inability to treat the employees effectively can put the effectiveness of human resource management in question. Failure to introduce trustful and reliable relationships between the members of an organization can have a negative impact on the organizational performance.
Traditionally, HR professionals perceive employee morale and commitment from conceptual viewpoint. However, in order to fulfill the role of HR agent effectively, concepts and theories should be substituted with evidence and practice. Inability to introduce effective human resource strategies were also observed in a leading document management company Xerox.
The problem is that the company had significant problems in terms of work culture and leadership that occurred during the tenure of Rick Thoman and Paul Allaire. People problems were specifically connected with wrong decision made by the managers in terms of sales force reorganization that was less prioritized.
Therefore, the industry personal should have been more concentrated on the organizational goals rather than on the needs of individual customers, which resulted in the company’s decline.
Regarding the discussions presented above, it should be stressed that the HR practitioners presented in the case were part of the problems related to the job analysis, recruitment, and human resource management assessment and development.
In particular, a monopolistic view on the business strategy did not provide results for the investment house Foy and Pirelli because the company did not succeed in meeting the employees’ needs. Managers strongly ignored their initiative; instead, they were more focused on their goals.
In addition, the case with MoneyPenny proves that considering cultural and social background is crucial for the success of business operations. Therefore, before initiating the project in Bangkok, the manager should think more carefully over the appropriate candidature for the business journey.
The next issue related to human resource management is the development and advancement of techniques aimed at improving working conditions and settling a more favorable emotional climate within an organization. In other words, managers should strike the balance between person-oriented and goal-oriented policies being the major conditions for reaching high management performance.
In this respect, the case with Steve Lambert proves that aggressive polices deprived of organizational moral will not contribute to positive results and achievement on the part of the employees. Similar to this case, the managers from the investment house Foy and Pirelli also failed to follow the above recommendations and did take into account individual needs as the leading in reaching high level of organizational performance. They were, therefore, part of the problem in this situation.
There were also the parties that positively contributed to the management performance, like Mike Burnett, a new manager of Foy and Pirelli who managed to solve the problem with low management performance through cultural revolution. In whole, most of the cases prove incompetence of managers in dealing with human resource management.
References
Bocij, P., Greaseley, A., and Hickie, S. (2009). Business Information Systems: Technology, Development and Management. NY: Pearson Education.
Steger M., and Erwee, R. (n. d.). Managing Diversity in the Public Sector: A Case Study of a Small City Council. International Journal of Organizational Behavior. 4(1), 77-95.