Essay on Human Relations Perspective in Management

1. Ch 1, page 60-61, question 4: What is “evidence based HR”? Why might an HR department resist becoming evidenced based?

2. Give some examples of ethical issues that you have experienced in jobs, and explain how HR did or did not help resolve them.

Theory X and Theory Y, developed by Douglas McGregor, grew out of opposition towards classical management methods. Classical management theorists, such as Fredrick Taylor, focused on scientific training and efficiency and did not account for personal and behavioral issues, such as management styles or job satisfaction. McGregor saw these deficiencies in the classical school of management which lead him to develop a theory of management that would factor the importance of the individual worker. If a manager could tap into the feelings and attitudes of their workers, then the manager would be able increase their employee’s motivation which would then increase production. McGregor’s theory viewed the employee as a person and not as a machine

Compare and contrast of the classical school of management and the human relations school of management

Douglas McGregor was a management professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management. He introduced a new motivational theory in his book ‘The Human Side of Enterprise’, stating that all workers were divided into two groups: Theory X and Theory Y. Theory X workers were lazy, irrational and unreliable, and were only motivated by money and threatened by punishment. Theory Y workers were able to seek and accept responsibilities and fulfil any goals given.

People are the key to business success. However nowadays of business this is often neglected and people are seen to be a necessary expense. A successful business does not just rely on a person’s power instead it involves continuous effective teamwork and communication. Storey (1995) defines that human resource management is an individual approach to employment management which seeks to achieve competitive advantage through the strategic deployment of a highly committed and capable workforce, using an integrated array of cultural, structural and personnel techniques.

Human Resources constitute as one of the most imperative components of any organization, be it small scale business or a large conglomerate. Some of the key functions of the Human

In today’s environment, Human Relations seem to be more relevant to the business management than scientific management. Scientific management looks for the efficiency of productivity of the workers. Human Relations is more concern on the workers’ need, which will change over the years. It shows that human relation approach is more acceptable to the world today, as well as the ability to adapt to the constant changing of the worker needs.

After working on the reflective blogs, I noticed that many management concepts related to each other. One of the key concepts I felt was important came from the human relations movement and was proposed by Douglas McGregor. According to Kinicki and Williams (2017), McGregor came up with Theory X and Theory Y to describe how manager’s attitude can play an essential role in employee’s performance and job satisfaction (p. 51). This theory can help explain how managers’ expectations for employees can be partly responsible for high employee turnover rate since “job satisfaction is moderately associated with performance and strongly related to turnover” (Kinicki & Williams, 2017, p. 365) Ethical

2007). Kermally (2005, p.36) explain that McGregor believed ‘how managers manage people in practice depends on what assumptions they make about workers’. It means that which kind of leadership managers choose, according to how managers perceive workers’ attitudes toward their job. Managers believe their workers related to Theory X and Y normally use strict supervision approaches to reduce workers’ control on their job, in contrary, managers allow workers to be innovative and willing to authorise more responsibility to Theory Y workers (Waddell et al. 2007).

Human Resource Management involves a wide array of functions that encompasses the time from when an employee enters an organization to the time the employee leaves the organization. The specific activities that are involved in HRM include job design and analysis, recruitment, orientation and placement, development and training of the personnel, employee remuneration, and performance appraisal (Aswathappa, 2007: 5). This paper shall focus on three main activities which are recruitment, training, and personnel development. When it comes to recruitment, it is incumbent upon the Human Resource Manager to bring into the workforce, employees that are both wiling and competent to accomplish specific tasks. The work of recruitment goes hand in

In the early 1900’s, some of the first ideas were thrown together to allow an organization to flourish in the upcoming modern era. The first theories were known as scientific and classical management, which focused on three separate theories from Frederick Taylor, Henri Fayol, and Max Weber. The three theories have similar ideology in the fact that organization is driven by management authority, employees only source of motivation is money, and organizations are machinelike with employees making up the parts of the machine (Papa, Daniels, & Spiker, 2008). In the Prophecy Fulfilled case study, Mary Ann (senior auditor) takes on a management role with subordinates similar to that of Weber’s Bureaucratic Theory (Daniels 1987, pp. 77-78).

McGregor 's revolutionary assumption, Theory Y contends that individuals are self-motivated and self-directed while his other assumption, Theory X insists that employees must be commanded and controlled. Every day managers that utilize McGregor’s assumptions have the choice to either believe Theory X and control their

Human Relations School theory is indeed an efficient management approach with a profusion of benefits. Being a large business, the human relations system is beneficial as directors are appointed and decision making is made based on discussions. This was the case when after negociations, the sales manager was in charge of price cutting to keep customers, the advertising manager taking charge of new adverts and Roberto concentrating on the prospect of entering the gluten-free market.

In this philosophy there was a large focus on rules and lack of discretion, thus meaning that the main focus of this philosophy is high control (DeNisi & Griffin, 2014) . This theory of Human resource management is thought to be best suited for X-type workers according to the McGregor X and Y Theory (Robbins & Judge, 2013). Human Resource Managers who would use this viewpoint intend on increasing Productivity by forcing workers to abide by the rules of a strict script because the workers are considered to be lazy and lacked motivation therefore they are need to pushed to perform tasks and have to be forcibly directed to doing tasks the do not like (French & Rees,