HR

COMPEDIUM
2020
“ Nothing we do is more
important than hiring and
developing people. At the
end of the day, you bet on
“
people, not on strategies
-Lawrence Bossidy

Department of Management Studies

INDIAN INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY DELHI
(Institute of Eminence, Govt. of India)
Human Resources
Human resources or HR is the company department charged
with finding, screening, recruiting, and training job applicants,
and administering employee-benefit programs. As companies
reorganize to gain a competitive edge, HR plays a key role in
helping companies deal with a fast-changing environment and
the greater demand for quality employees.

An HR department is an essential, if not critical, component of

any business regardless of the organization's size. It focuses on
maximizing employee productivity and protecting the
company from any issues that may arise from the workforce.
HR responsibilities include compensation and benefits,
recruitment, firing, and keeping up to date with any laws that
may affect the company and its employees.

Human Resource Management

A human resource is a single person or employee who works
within an organization. Human resource management is the
strategic approach to the effective management of people in a
company or organization such that they help their business
gain a competitive advantage over others. It is something
designed to maximize employee performance while serving
employer's strategic objectives. Human resource management
is primarily concerned with the management of people within
organizations, focusing on policies and systems. The overall
purpose of human resources is to ensure that the organization
is able to achieve success through people.

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In simple words, HRM is a process of making the efficient and
effective use of human resources so that the set goals are
achieved.

Objectives of HRM
The basic objective of human resource management is to
contribute to the realization of the organizational goals. Some of
its specific objectives are:

▪ To ensure effective utilization of human resources because

all other organizational resources will be efficiently utilized by
the human resources.

▪ To establish and maintain an adequate organizational

structure of relationship among all the members of an
organization by dividing the organization tasks into functions,
positions and jobs, and by defining clearly the responsibility,
accountability, authority for each job and its relation with
other jobs in the organization.

▪ To generate maximum development of human resources

within the organization by providing them opportunities for
advancement through training and development
opportunities.

▪ To ensure reconciliation of individual/group goals with

those of the organization in such a manner that the
personnel feel a sense of commitment and loyalty towards it.

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▪ To identify and satisfy the needs of individuals by offering
monetary and non-monetary rewards.

▪ To ensure that legal, ethical, and social environmental

issues are suitably dealt with.

▪ To create coordination and harmonious functionality within,

and between different departments.

Importance of HRM
Human Resource Management has a place of great
importance. Some of them are:

▪ It helps management in the preparation adoption and

continuing evolution of personnel programs and policies.
▪ It supplies skilled workers through scientific selection
process.
▪ It ensures maximum benefit out of the expenditure on
training and development and appreciates the human
assets.
▪ It prepares workers according to the changing needs of
industry and environment.
▪ It motivates workers and upgrades them so as to enable
them to accomplish the organization goals.
▪ It helps in reducing costs and helps in increasing
productivity through innovation and experimentation in the
fields of personnel,
▪ It contributes a lot in restoring the industrial harmony and
healthy employer-employee relations.

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▪ It establishes mechanism for the administration of
personnel services that are delegated to the personnel
department.
Thus, the role of human resource management is very
important in an organization and it should not be undermined
especially in large scale enterprises. It is the key to the whole
organization and related to all other activities of the
management i.e., marketing, production, finance etc.

Human Resource Processes

1. Human resource planning

2. Employee remuneration and Benefits Administration
3. Performance Management.
4. Employee Relations.

The efficient designing of these processes apart from other

things depends upon the degree of correspondence of each
of these. This means that each process is subservient to other.
You start from Human resource Planning and there is a
continual value addition at each step. To exemplify, the PMS
(Performance Management System) of an organization like
Infosys would be different from an organization like Walmart.

Human Resource Planning: The process of recognizing and

forecasting the current and future human resource
requirements of an organization to achieve its goals.

Recruitment: It aims at attracting applicants that match a

certain job criterion.

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Selection: The next level of filtration. It aims at short listing
candidates who are the nearest match in terms qualifications,
expertise and potential for a certain job.

Hiring: Deciding upon the final candidate who gets the job.

Training and Development: Those processes that work on an

employee onboard for his skills and abilities upgradation.

Employee Remuneration and Benefits Administration: The

process involves deciding upon salaries and wages, Incentives,
Fringe Benefits and Perquisites etc. Money is the prime
motivator in any job and therefore the importance of this
process. Performing employees seek raises, better salaries and
bonuses.

Performance Management: It is meant to help the

organization train, motivate and reward workers. It is also
meant to ensure that the organizational goals are met with
efficiency. The process not only includes the employees but
can also be for a department, product, service or customer
process; all towards enhancing or adding value to them.
Nowadays there is an automated performance management
system (PMS) that carries all the information to help managers
evaluate the performance of the employees and assess them
accordingly on their training and development needs.

Employee Relations: Employee retention is a nuisance with

organizations especially in industries that are hugely
competitive in nature. Though there are myriad factors that
motivate an individual to stick to or leave an organization, but
certainly few are under our control.

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Employee relations include Labor Law and Relations, Working
Environment, Employee health and safety, Employee-
Employee conflict management, Employee- Employee
Conflict Management, Quality of Work Life, Workers
Compensation, Employee Wellness and assistance programs,
Counseling for occupational stress. All these are critical to
employee retention apart from the money which is only a
hygiene factor.

Organizational Behavior and Human Resource

Management

Organizational behavior is a term used to explain the concept

of the behavior of individuals who constitute the human
elements of an organization. This is related to human
resources, which is a concept that is used to describe the
management of the employees in any organization. From the
description of the two terms, it is easy to see how
organizational behavior (OB) and human resource
management (HRM) are related. Organizational behavior looks
at the individual behavior, and then moves to group behavior,
progressively to the organization behavior, which we can also
call the organization culture. It requires skills to understand
how the organization and its members affect each other. Its
areas include frameworks for diagnosing and resolving
problems in organizational settings. Thereby we can say that
organizational behavior (OB) is the study of individual and
group dynamics within an organization setting whereas human
behavior, call it individual behavior is a sub-set of organization
behavior.

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New Role of Human Resource Management

Human Resource Management in the New Millennium 'has

undergone a great revolution by questioning the accepted
practices and re-inventing the organizations as well as
structures. Many traditional practices have been thrown out. As
an example, it can be seen that hierarchies are vanishing and
there is greater emphasis on flat organizations. It means a great
deal of specialization and skills. It also means upgrading the
norms and standards of work as well as performance.

The new role of human resource management is much more

strategic than before. Some of the new directions of the role of
HRM can be summed up as follows:

1. A Facilitator of Change: To carry people through upheaval

requires the true management of human resources.

2. An Integrated Approach to Management: Rather than being

an isolated function, human resource is regarded as a core
activity, one which shapes a company‘s values. In particular,
this can have an impact on customer service.

3. A Mediator: Establishing and balancing the new and

emerging aspirations and requirements of the company and
the individual.

These changes, which are taking place, involve more

commitment of the organization to the development of people
by improving performance and cutting costs.

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As a result of this, the duration of tenure, which was
traditionally long standing, is now limited, future is becoming
less certain, management opportunities are self-determined
and motivational factors are more concerned with enhancing
future employability rather than loyalty to the company and, at
the same time, the rewards are going up in terms of higher
salaries. The future creative careers, will require a more
involved approach to career development, which will include:

• Share employees with strategic partner organizations

(customers of suppliers) in lieu of internal moves.

• Encourage independence: Employees may go elsewhere

for career development, possibly to return in a few years.

• Fund-groups of employees to set-up as suppliers outside

the organization.

• Encourage employees to think of themselves as a business

and of the organization's various departments as customers.

• Encourage employees to develop customers outside the

organization.

• Help employees develop self-marketing, networking and

consultancy skills to enable them to search out, recognize
or create new opportunities for both themselves and the
organization.

• Identify skilled individuals in other organizations who can

contribute on a temporary project basis or part-time.

• Regularly expose employees to new people and ideas to

stimulate innovation.

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• Balance external recruitment at all levels against internal
promotion to encourage open competition, ―competitive
tendering‖ for jobs to discourage seeing positions as
someone‘s territory which causes self-protective
conformity.

• Foster more cross-functional teamwork for self-

development.

• Eliminate the culture of valuing positions as career goals in

favor of portraying a career as a succession of bigger
projects, achievements and new skills learned. The
concept of position is part of the outside static concept of
the organization. Positions are out. Processes and projects
are in.

• Abandon top-down performance appraisal in favor of self-

appraisal based on internal customer satisfaction surveys
and assessing people as you would suppliers.

• Replace top-down assessment processes with self-

assessment techniques and measure performance in term
of results.

Levels of Organizational Behavior

Organizational behavior is a relatively new, interdisciplinary

field of study. Although it draws most heavily from the
psychological and sociological sciences, it also looks to other
scientific fields of study for insights.

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One of the main reasons for this interdisciplinary approach is
because the field of organizational behavior involves multiple
levels of analysis, which are necessary to understand
behavior within organizations because people do not act in
isolation. That is, workers influence their environment and are
also influenced by their environment.

• Individual Level of Analysis: At the individual level of

analysis, organizational behavior involves the study of
learning, perception, creativity, motivation, personality,
turnover, task performance, cooperative behavior, deviant
behavior, ethics, and cognition. At this level of analysis,
organizational behavior draws heavily upon psychology,
engineering, and medicine.

• Group Level Of Analysis: At the group level of analysis,

organizational behavior involves the study of group
dynamics, intra- and intergroup conflict and cohesion,
leadership, power, norms, interpersonal communication,
networks, and roles. At this level of analysis, organizational
behavior draws upon the sociological and socio-
psychological sciences.

• Organization Level Of Analysis: At the organization level of

analysis, organizational behavior involves the study of
topics such as organizational culture, organizational
structure, cultural diversity, inter-organizational
cooperation and conflict, change, technology, and
external environmental forces. At this level of analysis,
organizational behavior draws upon anthropology and
political science.

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Human Resource Development (HRD)
Human resource development management identifies,
nurtures and uses the abilities of the employees working for
the company. They are there to create a suitable climate for
their people to help them and the companies develop. It
creates a structure for helping the employees of the
organization in developing their organizational and personal
abilities, know-how and skills.

The HR department of an organization that is growth-oriented

creates opportunities for employees to know and develop
their skills through employee training, career development
program of the employee, managing their performance,
coaching, monitoring, identifying key employees.

Human resource development focuses on creating a very

useful work culture by developing a very efficient workforce
that both the organization and the employee obtain their own
career goals to serve their customers better.

Importance of HRD
HRD is a continuous and planned manner in which the
employees of an organization are guided to perceive the
following points:

1. To gain and polish their abilities that are required to

execute different roles which are related to their existing
and future job responsibilities to help them perform well.

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2. To help the employees develop their inner potential and
also learn new ones by learning how to explore their own
capabilities for self as well as organizational development.

3. To develop the organizational culture in which the

relationship between the supervisor and the subordinate
contributes to collaborate amongst different units in the
organization with teamwork and strong contribution of
professional well-being by motivating the employees.

Conclusion
Human Resource Management is concerned with the
managing people as an organizational resource rather than
as factors of production. It involves a system to be followed
in business firm to recruit, select, hire, train and develop
human assets. It is concerned with the people dimension of
an organization. The attainment of organizational objectives
depends, to a great extent, on the way in which people are
recruited, developed and utilized by the management.
Therefore, proper coordination of human efforts and
effective utilization of human and others material resources is
necessary.

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