A Framework for Human Resource

Management,
5th ed.
Gary Dessler

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Managing Human Resources Today

Ch 1

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 When you finish studying this chapter,
you should be able to:

• Answer the question, “What is human

resource management?”
• Discuss the components of the changing
environment of human resource
management.
• Describe the nature of strategic planning.
• Give examples of human resource
management’s role as a strategic partner.

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What is Human Resource Management?

• Human resource (HR) management

- refers to the practices and policies you need
to carry out the personnel aspects of your
management job

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 Human Resource Management

• Conducting job analyses

• Planning labor needs and recruiting job
candidates
• Selecting job candidates
• Orienting and training
new employees
• Managing wages and
salaries
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Human Resource Management (cont.)

• Providing incentives and benefits

• Appraising performance
• Communicating
• Training and developing
• Building employee commitment

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 What a Manager Should Know About

• Equal opportunity, ethics, and affirmative

action
• Employee health and safety, and ethical
treatment
• Grievance and labor relations

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Why Is HR Management Important to
All Managers?
Personnel mistakes you don’t want to
make:
• Having your employees not performing at
peak capacity
• Hiring the wrong person for the job
• Experiencing high turnover
• Finding employees not doing their best
• Having your company taken to court
because of your discriminatory actions
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Why Is HR Management Important to
All Managers? (cont.)
Personnel mistakes you don’t want to
make:
• Having your company cited under federal
occupational safety laws for unsafe
practices
• Allowing a lack of training to undermine
your department’s effectiveness
• Committing any unfair labor practices

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 Line Versus Staff Authority

• Authority
- the right to make decisions, to direct the work
of others, and to give orders

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 Line Versus Staff Authority (cont.)

• Line managers
- authorized to give orders

• Line managers are associated with

managing functions (like sales or
production) that the company needs to
exist

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 Line Versus Staff Authority (cont.)

• Staff managers
- assist and advise line managers in
accomplishing these goals

• Staff managers generally run departments

that are advisory or supportive, like
purchasing, human resource
management, and quality control

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 Line Managers’ HR Responsibilities

• Placing the right person in the right job

• Starting new employees in the
organization
• Training employees for jobs that are new
to them
• Improving the job performance of each
person
• Gaining creative cooperation and
developing smooth working relationships
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 Line Managers’ HR Responsibilities
(cont.)
• Interpreting the company’s policies and
procedures
• Controlling labor costs
• Developing the abilities of each person
• Creating and maintaining departmental
morale
• Protecting employees’ health and physical
conditions
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 Human Resource Department’s
Management Responsibilities
• Compensation and benefits
• Recruiting
• Training and development
• Job analysis
• Equal employment opportunity
• Labor relations

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Insert figure 1.1

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 HR in Small Business

• Small firms generally don't have the

critical mass required for a full-time human
resource manager.

• Their human resource management tends

to be “ad hoc and informal.”

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 HR’s Changing Role

• The metamorphosis of personnel into

human resource management reflects the
fact that in today’s business environment,
highly trained and committed employees
are often a firm’s main real sustainable
competitive advantage.

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 HR’s Changing Environment

• Globalization
- refers to firms’ tendency to extend their sales,
ownership, and/or manufacturing to new
markets abroad

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 HR’s Changing Environment

• Technological advances
• Nature of work
- service jobs
- outsourcing
- human capital

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Workforce Trends

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 HR’s Changing Environment

• Growing emphasis on “knowledge

workers” and human capital

• Human capital
- refers to the knowledge, education, training,
skills, and expertise of a firm’s workers

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 Demographic and Workforce Trends

• Labor force growth is not expected to

keep pace with job growth
• Labor force is getting older
• Shift to nontraditional workers

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 Gen Y

• May be “the most high maintenance

workforce in the history of the world”

• Their capacity for using information

technology will also make them the most
high-performing

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 The Strategic Role of
Human Resource Management
• Main responsibility facing human resource
managers is to institute policies and
practices that produce the employee
competencies and behaviors the company
needs to achieve its strategic goals

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 The Strategic Role of
Human Resource Management (cont.)
• Strategy
- the company’s plan for how it will balance its
internal strengths and weaknesses with
external opportunities and threats in order to
maintain a competitive advantage

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 HR’s Role in Executing Strategy

• Study found that mergers and/or

acquisitions in which the human resource
teams had been involved were more likely
to have been successful

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 Strategy and HR – Albertson’s

• Albertson’s human resource management team

chose a computer system from Unicru of
Portland, Oregon that collects and analyzes the
information entered by applicants online.
• It ranks applicants based on the extent to which
they exhibit the customer-focused traits that
predict success in retail jobs and helps track
candidates throughout the screening process.

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 Two Strategic Human Resource
Challenges
1. Focus on boosting competitiveness,
reducing costs, and improving employee
performance
2. Be more involved in both formulating and
implementing company strategy

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Corporate Strategy

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 Basics of Strategic Planning

• Corporate-level strategy
- identifies the portfolio of businesses that
comprise the company and the ways in which
these businesses relate to each other

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 Basics of Strategic Planning

• Business-level/competitive strategy
- identifies how to build and strengthen the
business’s long-term competitive position in
the marketplace

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 HR and Competitive Advantage

• Competitive advantage
- “any factors that allow an organization to
differentiate its product or service from those
of its competitors to increase market share”

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 Basics of Strategic Planning

• Functional strategies
- identify the basic courses of action that each
of the business’s departments will pursue in
order to help the business attain its
competitive goals

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Strategic Human Resource Management

• Strategic human resource management

- formulating and executing HR systems that
produce the employee competencies and
behaviors the company needs to achieve its
strategic aims

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Linking Corporate and HR Strategies

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 HR’s Role in Formulating Strategy

• HR participates by supplying information

regarding the company’s internal human
strengths and weaknesses

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 High-Performance Work System

• High-performance work system

- an integrated set of human resource
management policies and practices that
together produce superior employee
performance

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 Measuring HR Performance

• Employers expect their human resource

management teams to provide
measurable evidence of their
effectiveness.

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 Sample Metrics - IBM

• Human resource managers need access

to the performance measures (or
“metrics”), as well as to comparable,
benchmark-able figures from similar firms.
• For example, median HR expenses as a
proportion of companies’ total operating
costs average about 0.8%.
• There tends to be between 0.9 and 1.0
human resource staff persons per 100
employees.
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 The HR Scorecard

• HR scorecard
- shows the quantitative standards, or “metrics,”
the firm uses to measure HR activities, and to
measure the employee behaviors resulting
from these activities, and to measure the
strategically relevant organizational outcomes
of those employee behaviors

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 HR and Technology

• Self-service
• Call centers
• Productivity improvement
• Outsourcing

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 HRIS

• HR portals provide employees with a

single gateway to all HR information
• Streamline the HR process and enable HR
managers to focus more on strategic
issues

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All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a
retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic,
mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written
permission of the publisher. Printed in the United States of America.

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