A Global Guide to Human Resource Management

Managing Across Stakeholders

Thomas Klikauer

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781000594157
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

A Global Guide to Human Resource Management is a concise HRM introductory text offering a uniquely non-region-specific approach to people management in international business organisations.

The book presents an alternative to standard managerial approaches, reflecting the perspectives of multiple stakeholders (workers, trade unions, states and governments, NGOs) to critically evaluate HRM in practice and, in so doing, enables students to make effective decisions in their own practice, wherever their careers take them. Its accessibility and concision make it well suited to short courses for non-HRM and non-business specialists. This text covers all major introductory topics for non-specialists, introducing the concept and purpose of HRM, through recruitment, people, skills, designing work, promoting health, rewarding success, and successful and ethical people management. This edition includes a new chapter on green HRM.

Rich with pedagogical features, the book includes five case studies per chapter to connect theory with practice. It is also supported with a range of instructor materials including online guest lectures, general discussion questions, a glossary, an index, and online documentaries that explain how to manage people. It is essential reading for students interested in Human Resources and Personnel Management, Organisational Behaviour and Development and Workplace Culture.

1 Introducing Global HRM What This Book Is About and How to Use It

DOI: 10.4324/9781003293637-1

This textbook is written for students, general managers of companies, and business organisations. It focuses on three things: (1) how to manage people in organisations; (2) as managing people is generally associated with HRM, the book explains what HRM is;¹ and (3) it outlines what HR managers do. This book is the synthesis of more than a decade’s experience of teaching how to manage people under the common heading of HRM, which is taught as part of an MBA (Master of Business Administration).² Candidates on these degree programmes are predominantly from one of three groups:

1. Baby Boomers: born between 1946 and 1964;
2. Gen-X: born between late 1960s and 1980s; and
3. Gen-Y: born between late 1980s and early 2000s, often called Millennials.

Many master’s candidates come from companies³ such as AAPT, Aldi, Allianz Insurance, Coca-Cola, Coles Supermarkets, Commonwealth Bank, David Jones, IBM, IKEA, KPMG, Macquarie Bank, OPTUS, Qantas Airlines, St. George Bank, Telstra, Volkswagen, Woolworths, etc. Having taught HRM to approximately over 500 students per year for a decade, I started to recognise some of the shortcomings of country-specific Human Resource Management textbooks, as some of these HR texts deliver country-specific knowledge that is not necessarily applicable elsewhere.

While these texts are most valuable for HR managers in one country, the same might not be the case for HR managers from another country. These textbooks deliver national – not global – perspectives. Secondly, many of these texts are written specifically for HR managers – not for more general managers such as Bachelor of Management, Master of Management, BBAs (Bachelor of Business Administration) and MBAs.⁴ Often these HRM textbooks deliver great insights into the intimate integrities of HRM and are doing a great job on this. However, they fall short of a general overview that focuses on the core of HRM.

As a consequence, this textbook engages with HRM from the standpoint of general managers – BBAs, MBAs, etc. – not from the standpoint of HR managers, and not from the perspective of one country or one specific company. It is, therefore, not another standard HRM textbook written for HRM specialists. A great number of HRM textbooks – including many of those called “Happy HRM Books”⁵ – already do a reasonably good job on this while simultaneously camouflaging HRM’s numerous and rather well known “rhetoric-vs.-reality” problems,⁶ which are widely known contradictions such as HRM’s “customer first” rhetoric versus the reality of “market forces are supreme”; HRM’s empowerment rhetoric versus its tendency to offload risks onto others; or HRM’s rhetoric of so-called “high performance work systems”⁷ versus the reality of the global – and growing – “precariat”,⁸ to name but a few.

An Analytical and Critical Approach to Global HRM

A Global Guide to Human Resource Management: Managing Across Stakeholders will not shy away from looking at both sides of the coin, from examining the positives and negatives, nor from highlighting inconsistencies.⁹ But instead of putting yet another ordinary – or even Happy – HRM textbook on the pile of existing ones, this book’s foremost differentiating element is the fact that it highlights key HR themes relevant to general managers, postgraduates, engineers, and business and management students, including BBAs and MBAs. This makes A Global Guide to Human Resource Management a unique textbook as it emphasises the middle ground between textbooks that are too general (e.g. HRM for Dummies) and those too specific (e.g. standard HR textbooks).¹⁰

A Global Guide to Human Resource Management: Managing Across Stakeholders does not purport to be either and avoids getting lost in the fine nuances and inner workings of HRM. Nor does it provide HR jargon or the latest managerial buzzwords.¹¹ Instead, the book concentrates on what is relevant to HRM. A Global Guide to Human Resource Management does not use the language of a fashion magazine or a hyped up theory language pretending to be scientific when common sense ideas are present. A Global Guide to Human Resource Management is a textbook and as such uses educational and didactic language instead of the language of theories. It is practical and easy to read.

What Do HRM and HR-Managers Actually Do?

This is a general and practical textbook that uses observation, empirical research findings, and a realistic language to describe the field of HRM to non-HRM experts. In order to avoid a dummy’s approach to HRM¹² or the “ultimate expert” version of it, A Global Guide to Human Resource Management explores core themes that are most significant to a general manager of a business seeking to understand how to “manage other people at work” – in companies, businesses, and corporations. The book is designed for private, public sector, and for-profit industries. As the public sector takes on elements of private management, the book will focus more on private company management while implicitly including the public sector.¹³ The book is not a textbook to be used to organise non-profit institutions albeit many of the generic themes can also be very useful to these organisations.

Designed and written for the commercial business world, A Global Guide to Human Resource Management provides a comprehensive understanding of how to manage people, what HRM is, and how it operates. It assists general managers in managing what is easily the most important but quite often also the most complicated element in business: people. By comparison, managing numbers¹⁴ (accounting), operations (production processes), and sales (marketing) can be relatively easy. Numbers do not need to be recruited, machines are not late for work, and marketing strategies do not get pregnant – but people do all this and more.

As a consequence, this book presents HRM in a concise but also human and even humanistic way, even though HRM sees itself quite often simply as a top-down affair – “I manage you”. More officially, HRM tends to be defined as activities associated with the management of people in organisations. In fact, many would define HRM as being primarily concerned with the management of people within organisations with a focus on policies and systems. One of such systems is, for example, the ISO certification of a company. Swiss-based ISO or International Organisation for Standardisation consists of 160 countries. It develops quality standards for management (ISO 9000) including HRM (ISO 30400).¹⁵ By 2016, roughly 1.7 million companies were ISO certified.¹⁶

HR managers in HR departments are responsible for employee recruitment; they often engage in labour or industrial relations; are developing programmes for training and development; participate in workplace designs and OHS; structure and organise performance management; design benefits and reward systems; are involved in the strategic outlook of a company (HR strategy); and finally, they are concerned with business ethics and corporate social responsibility. HR and general managers often assume a managerial position believing that workers or employees only exist to carry out managerial orders and directives.

In many workplace situations, HRM assumes its role as a mediator between senior management, line management, and employees for the good of the company. Rejecting such simplicities and inherent authoritarianism, the book also explains what HR managers do. Many HR managers experience something of a “role ambiguity”,¹⁷ seeking to balance at least one of their five classical roles (Table 1.1)¹⁸:

Table 1.1 Five Classical HR Roles

	Role	Description
1	Functional expert	Focuses on administrative efficiency as part of the management team
2	Human capital developer	Focuses on developing human resources as a corporate asset (HRD)
3	Employee advocate	Focuses on the needs of employees representing these to management
4	HR leader	Focuses on developing HRM into a management leadership function
5	Strategic business partner	Focuses on the contribution of HRM at the strategic business level

Perhaps all of these roles¹⁹ have at least one thing in common: they relate to people and indeed management as much as HRM has to deal with people. HRM likes to view itself as being dedicated to two basic dichotomies: (1) the “Harvard-vs.-Michigan” model and (2) the hard-vs.-soft HRM model. Briefly, the Harvard model of HRM combines stakeholders (shareholders, management, employees, government, community, trade unions, etc.) with situational factors (workforce profile, state and legal framework, the labour market, business strategy, etc.), with HRM’s policy options (work and reward systems, employee and trade union influences, etc.), with HR outcomes (competitiveness, cost-awareness, competence, performance, etc.), and long-term planning (company and employee wellbeing, effectiveness, sustainability, etc.). The Michigan model of HRM, by contrast, focuses on recruitment and selection ⇒ performance ⇒ rewarding/development ⇒ appraisals (feeding back to performance via rewarding and developing). The second model of HRM – soft versus hard – focuses on engagement, trust, motivation, wellbeing, and development (soft HRM) or on cost-benefit calculations, direction-giving, managerial control, and overall efficiency (hard HRM).

The best way to understand HRM lies in the awareness that HRM – like marketing, operations management, accounting, etc. – is a func...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Figures
• Tables
• Case Studies
• Acknowledgements
• The Author
• 1 Introducing Global HRM What This Book Is About and How to Use It
• 2 Getting the Right People Recruitment and Selection
• 3 People in Working Relationships The Three Actors at Work
• 4 Training People Learning and Human Resource Development
• 5 Working with People Crafting Productive Work Systems
• 6 Keeping People Healthy Occupational Health and Safety
• 7 Performing People Performance Management
• 8 Rewarding People Managing Compensation and Rewards
• 9 Strategies for People Strategic Human Resource Management
• 10 People and Morality Ethics at Work and in Management
• 11 Green HRM People, Planet, Performance
• Glossary for Managing People in Organisations
• Index