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Business issues and the context of HR

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THE ORGANISATION

The organisation is the background within which the HR function works. Understanding the deep nature of the organisation has to be the main goal for HRM as the nature of the organisation has a huge impact on how people are managed in the business.

The organisation is defined as the planned coordination of the activities of a number of people for the achievement of some common, explicit purpose or goal, through division of labour and function, and through a hierarchy of authority and responsibility (Schein, 1980).

Historically, there have been many definitions of organisations, depending on whether they focus on:
• Their size: SMEs, Large and Public Sector. (Curran and Stanworth, 1988);
• Their prime …show more content…

In “The Human Side of Enterprise” by McGregor, he distinguished between:
• Theory X, that adopts the authoritarian view that people normally abhor working and must be forced to work with punishment for failing to meet the objective. These people actually prefer to be directed and lack ambition.
• Theory Y, adopts the participative management style, which operates on the idea that people are inherently motivated to work if they find the job fulfilling

The System Theories focused attention on organizations as 'systems ' and on the complexity and interdependence of relationships of their inter-related sub-systems. This approach attempted to synthesize the classical approaches (organizations without people) with the later human relations approaches that focused on the psychological and social aspects ( 'people without organizations).

The Contingency theory, developed in 1950s, argues that there is no 'one best way ' to structure an organization and we face different possibilities when determining how it should be structured and how it should be managed. Successful organizations adopt structures that are an appropriate response to a number of variables, or contingencies (Enoch, 2006).

Practically speaking, management is the act of getting people together to accomplish desired goals and objectives using available resources efficiently and effectively. There are several different resource types within management, such as:

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