Introduction to Human Resources Management (HRM)

Week 1: Introduction + HRM & Context

• HRM pertains to policies, practices, and systems influencing employee attitudes, behavior, and performance.
• HRM strategically aims to achieve a competitive edge by deploying a skilled and committed workforce, utilizing cultural, structural, and personnel methods.
• HRM practices encompass programs, processes, and techniques operationalized within an organization, reflecting concrete ways people are managed.
• Employee relations involve managing overarching employment and workforce policies like bargaining and collective employee voice.
• Employee commitment and retention rely on employee relations and collective communication, aligning with exchange theory.
• Determining present and future staffing needs through job analysis and human resource planning guides recruitment.
• Selection identifies the most suitable candidate from applicants post-recruitment.
• Personnel shortages and competition ("war for talent") currently impact recruitment.
• The use of AI in recruitment may perpetuate biases, outweighing potential benefits.
• Gamification assesses soft skills, such as communication and leadership, by involving candidates in game-like assessments.
• Performance Management facilitates conversation between managers and employees regarding priorities and achievements.
• HRM analytics provide a data-driven approach to managing people and improving performance.
• Rewards motivate employees and foster engagement, representing the largest operating cost for most businesses.
• Bonuses and performance-related pay are current reward trends, with potential motivational and efficiency implications.
• Training systematically modifies behavior through learning, programs, and instruction to enhance job effectiveness.
• Development facilitates the growth and realization of a person's potential through learning and educational experiences.
• Talent and employability management and learning organizations are current challenges.
• Investing in employees involves risk as trained employees may leave, yet not training them poses a risk if they stay, known as the employability paradox.
• Psychological contract theory highlights expectations beyond formal contracts, including loyalty and security exchanges.

HRM in Context & Relevance

• Studying HRM matters due to each country's cultural uniqueness and individual differences.
• Cross-cultural, international, and comparative HRM are three main approaches.
• Globalization, marked by growing extensity, intensity, and velocity of global interactions, necessitates international management skills.
• International and outward-looking management, along with comparing different nations and cultures, is a requirement.
• Strategic and governmental processes are integral to international HRM.

Best Fit vs Best Practice Debate

• The Best Fit perspective emphasizes aligning HR strategy with the business environment.
• HRM practices' effectiveness relying on their fit with internal and external contexts.
• The Best Practice perspective asserts specific HR practices enhance organizational performance and employee attitudes.
• Superior organizational performance stems from a set of HRM practices.
• With increasing globalization, trends point towards the adoption of best practices.

Perspectives on HRM

• The Universalistic perspective posits that certain HRM activities are superior, leading to optimal organizational output.
• It seeks the best practice through hypotheses, often excluding compliance and government relationships.
• High-Performance Work Systems (HPWS) organize work to maximize employee performance through motivated, engaged, and empowered employees.
• HPWS characteristics: comprehensive recruitment and training systems, information sharing, clear job design, local participation procedures, attitude monitoring, performance appraisals, and proper grievance procedures.
• The promotion and compensation schemes reward high-performing members of the workforce.
• The Contingent perspective suggests management styles should align with the context or environment.
• It adds variables, such as strategy and learning capability, into management style.
• The Configurational perspective implies coherent HR practice bundles reinforce one another.
• Combining different elements into harmonious patterns represents different orientations.
• The Contextual perspective focuses on the relationship between individuals and their worlds, examining sociocultural and environmental influences.
• This aids in framework for HRM decision-making.

Black Box

• The "Black Box" concept refers to employee decision-making processes lacking transparency.
• HR openness about decision-making fosters employee understanding and fairness.

Factors affecting IHRM policies & practices

• National-level factors, including culture and institutions, influence HRM policies.
• Home/parent country factors encompass domestic cultural, legal, political, and economic aspects.
• Organizational age, size structure, ownership, and internationalization stage are contingent factors.
• Corporate and HRM strategies create organizational factors.
• Management attitudes, corporate culture, and HR policies are firm-specific factors.

Comparative HRM: CRANET

• The Cranfield Network on International Human Resource Management (Cranet) provides regular international surveys of HRM policies across the world.
• It benchmarks Europe against global developments, enabling comparative analysis of HRM trends.
• Cranet's investigations cover HRM similarities and differences across 42 countries, re-evaluating every three years.
• Findings in directional convergence indicate increases in HR strategic potential and HR professionalization.
• Final convergence shows no convergence in HR configuration and HRM practices.

Internationally Operated Organizations

• MNCs vary by type; they need an HR department.
• Large companies generate high percentage of the world's output, making them crucial.
• BRIC economies now dominate the world with high FDI.
• There is a growing need for IHRM which is important for an organisation to succeed due to differing institutional constraints and multicultural assumptions about the way people should managed.
• Rapidly changing political, economic and social upheavals make globalisation hard for companies.

Individuals in MNCs

• Individuals that work in international companies/contexts need to be competent in:
• Interpersonal skills (e.g cultural empathy)
• Influencing and negotiating skills
• Analytical and conceptual abilities
• Strategic thinking
• International business/finance/labour legislation
• Cultural differences
• Local labour markets
• International compensation and benefits

Employee relations

• It focuses on bargaining, governance of employment relationships and collective employee voice.
• Social regulation of work and employment relationships impact management and performance
• Unions aim to ensure employees' interests are heard and act as a key role in employee relations.
• They are central to the governance of employment relationships outside management hierarchy.
• Unions are different in different countries
• Multi-employer bargaining is the negotiation process where representatives of multiple employers bargain with representatives of labor unions.

Week 2 - Trends & Challenges & links with outcomes + HRM practice 1: Training and development

• Workforce aging and personnel shortages necessitate training & development, recruitment & selection practices.
• Talent management systematically attracts, identifies, develops, engages, retains, and deploys valuable individuals.
• HRM practices, including recruitment & selection, reward and performance management, address it.
• Flexibility and Work-life balance accommodate fluctuations in throughput or demand.
• Flexibility consists of company-based adjustments (work hours and overtime) based flexibility measures (autonomy in work schedules).
• The current legal requirements on laws are constrained or influenced per country by:
• Culture, financial requirements and corporate requirements, legislation, training and multi-employer aggreements.
• These legal measures include annual leave, working time and parental leave.
• There are also laws that are associated with workers taking time of for dependant care, or to take matenerty/ adoption leave.
• Law changes on workers rights can vary per country
• HRM practices focus on work engagement and commitment, influence behavior such as organizational citizenship, and performance outcomes such as productivity.

Wright & Boswell

• Organizational practices by Wright and Boswell look at the individual at industrial and high performance factors
• The importance of their models is to apply HR practices to the Micro Research, while recognising the distinction between organisations policies and practices.

Reversed Causality Model (Paauwe)

• The Reversed causality depends on the level which one can invest in HR practices.
• If you do will as a company you and invest more, which means you will do even better etc etc etc..

Wright & Nishii

• The model used to be fine, but now we see that this is not always enough.
• People from organisation are more involved in what you do. You see that this model is more circular compared to the first m odel because you keep l

Worklife Balance

• WLB starts with the employee, while employer seeks to adapt to the emplyees new work-life integration.
• Businesses have potential beniefits to employer that inroduce worklife balance.
• This increased, flexibility and customer service.
• It is increased for retention a and a diverse workforce with the HR practices.

T&D Global

• T&D has various aspects to look at regarding organisation. Levels if education etc, and is dependent with culture.
• Business and National characteristics look at global perspectives for T&D. The systems is all economics related.

Week 3 - HRM practice 2&3: Recruitment and selection + Performance Management

• Excellent recruitment is vital to effective HRM. The efficiency of various humans source depend greatly on what is sourced well.
• They flow linked activities with inside the organisation from job reviews, screening collection place through to training.

Recruitment Strategies

• Those are impacted buy Remote work possiblity, social justice etc
• A increase the pool it many costs, to succeed in selection procedure and to allow the potential of subsequent retention

Goals with Selection

• obtain all necessary statistics for a person, to a decision for destiny behaviour and ensures all requirements of staff are met

HR Oganisation

• the more you follow and understand organisations, HR requirements analysis this process of training
• it shows good success though teamwrok though the method they chose

WLB contrains in legal rights depending on cultures etc.

Week 9 - HRM Practices - Q & A

• HRM is often used in the development stage as it promotes development in different aspects of HR