The Role Of Hrm Essay Example for Free

The Role Of Hrm EssaySuddenly, he has pleaded guilty to charges that argon analogously to land him in prison for 10 years, forfeited $29 sensation thousand thousand he personally make from operating the off-balance-sheet entities, and agreed to fully co-operate with the prosecutors.What ca accustomd Fastows about-turn was the wishly indictment of his wife, grazing land Fastow. The unless(prenominal) condition he made for his plea bargain was that he and his wife should not go to prison at the same time. He wanted to ensure that his two children had at least one p atomic number 18nt at home. Basically, he sacriced his self-interest, as he saw it, to protect the interests of his children and, to a lesser extent, those of his wife, who was as well his high-school sweetheart. This was the same Andrew Fastow who knowing Enrons entire management system around a rm faith that employees act only their protest self-interest.You must allow people to eat what they hunt, he used to say, only therefore bequeath they hunt well. It was this philosophy that made Enron adopt one of the most extreme systems of individual incentives when you started a new venture within Enron, you got phantom stocks relevant only to your venture. As long as your efforts made money, you got rich, irrespective of what happened to other parts of the company. As a government issue, everyone in Enron, including Fastow, acted like hunters looking out only for themselves.The results of such behaviour are now well known. This is an interesting contrast, and it is by no means unusual. nigh managers know that they themselves, and most other people, care about others close to them in their personal lives their children, old friends, by chance even some of their neighbours and that they would happily incur some costs to jockstrap these people. At the same time, they too believe that, at ladder, people care only about their own self-interest. Even if they do not explicitly believe tha t, they design their companies organisational and managerial processes as if the motivation to voluntarily help others has no image in the ofce or the factory.The facts are clear. Most people pursue their self-interest. At the same time, solely for a pathological few, most people in addition have an innate preference for helping others. And they like to help others not just as a means to further their own self-interest but also as an end in itself. This is equally true for peoples personal and work lives. Also, this is not some liaison as grand as altruism its much more mundane than that its how just all of us ordinary folks are. What would happen if senior managers recognised that it was possible to realize an organisation in which people derived as much joy from the success of others as from their own success, and designed their management processes accordingly? It would vastly change those processes.As an example, make a quick inventory of your HR processes and put them into two categories those that reinforce the self-interest-seeking behaviours of people, and those that support their helping others. Look at concrete processes and mechanisms, not abstractions like values which, unless translated and embedded in specic practices, have little effect on behaviours.How long are the two lists? Can you do something to rebalance them? One possible difculty you may face is that you do not quite a know what you can do to support the more co-operative behaviours. For example, what specic kind of incentive systems might you use? What kind of decision-making processes can you adopt? Structurally, too, what can you do to hardwire non-selshness which is not at all the same thing as becoming a saint and not the obverse of self-sacrice in your organisation? These are among the come across questions that we, fellows of the Advanced Institute of Management Research, will be trying to answer. Much of the existing management inquiry makes the same assumption as Fast ow made about what motivates people at work. We will question andENRON SOMETHINGS GOT TO GIVEbroaden these assumptions with the aim of coming up with rigorously researched theories that are not victims of pessimism about people, and that will, we hope, help you build highperformance organisations that are also delightful to work in. Watch this space. Source Sumantra Ghoshal, People Management, 12 February 2004, p. 23. password questions1 What is the point of HR if employees are only out to serve themselves? 2 What role could the HR manager play in building an organisation that celebrates the success of others rather than individuals?The opening vignette gives a disturbing view of management practices. Enron encouraged employees to lose sight of organisational goals, in an attempt to serve their own goals. The chief nancial ofcer of Enron, Andrew Fastow, encouraged self-interest by offering employees shares, which reected the value of the business they brought to the company. The res ult a culture of selshness, which encouraged greed and ultimately destroyed the company. As an HR manager, your role in organisations will not be solely related to the concrete mechanisms of human resource management, such as the functions, but also abstract values, such as culture.Whether you work as a supervisor in a supermarket with responsibility for the checkout operators, the general manager of the local branch of a multinational bank, the coupler representative for a major airline or the director of HRM in a technology organisation, you will be responsible for managing people. You may have decided to choose people management because you have a love of people, but empathy for people is not necessarily what makes human resource practitioners effective. According to Hunt (1999), what is serious for HR managers, is an understanding of the structures and climate in which peoples potential can be released, substantial and rewarded. Andrew Fastow of Enron, although misguided, dis covered this in his famous quote You must allow people to eat what they hunt only then will they hunt well.However, he failed to understand the necessity of developing the whole organisation and the results are history. The Enron view of people management is not the view taken by all organisations. The John Lewis Partnership, for instance, also believes in giving its employees, or partners as they are referred to by the company, a stake in the organisation. It achieves this by encouraging workers to co-operate to full the companys aims. In turn, employees are rewarded with a share of the prots.This go for introduces you to the role of the people manager and human resource specialist. It also should be useful for general managers absentminded to successfully manage and develop their employees. The book is designed not only to introduce you to the underlying theories and concepts that state human resource practitioners but also to current practices necessary for the functions of HR M. At the moment, human resources (HR) is in a constant state of change, with Hunt (1999) suggesting that one of the following could happen.Human resources goes into decline outsourcing and downsizing has removed the HR specialist from organisations and placed the HR role with the overworked line manager.