“During its 125 year history, the core concern of the people management function has varied from employee welfare, to industrial relations, to manpower planning and more recently organisational effectiveness.
What do you think should be the central focus for people managers and the HR function over the coming 10 years and why? How would this change the nature of HR activity in contemporary organisations?”
Human Resource Management is a strategic approach to managing employment relations which emphasizes that leveraging people’s capabilities is critical to achieving sustainable competitive advantage, this being achieved through a distinctive set of integrated employment policies, programmes and practices (Bratton & Gold, Page 7). Human resource management has grown and evolved as a discipline since the years following the First World War. Personnel management began in this period as a fusion of two separate industrial movements: scientific management and welfare work. Personnel management has evolved from the goals of eliminating waste, inefficiency, and human suffering, to human resource management, focusing on the organizational perspective and performance enhancement (J M Hoobler & N B Johnson, Page 655). It was all due to the industrial revolution that the need to control and use your human resource to its full potential came about.
Around the 1900’s an era emerged that became well known for its explicit emphasis on man-machine efficiency to increase productivity, In accordance with the scientific management philosophy the approach was to engineer the job and then fit the employee to it. (K M Rowland & G R Ferris, Page 4). From this led to the “Human Relations” era which gave considerable emphasis to improving social relationships between ...