MANAGING PEOPLE

Abstract

The history of managing people has reflected prevailing beliefs and attitudes held in society about employees, the response of employers to public policy (for example, health and safety and employment legislation) and reactions to trade union growth. In the early stages of the Industrial Revolution, the extraordinary codes of discipline and fines imposed by factory owners were, in part, a response to the serious problem of imposing standards of discipline and regularity on an untrained workforce. In the 1840s common humanity and political pressure began to combine with enlightened self-interest among a few of the larger employers to make them aware of alternative ways of managing their workforce, other than coercion, sanctions, or monetary reward. Theorists also suggest that the ways in which organisations choose to manage their employees are in a state of transition. Labour management practices have assumed new prominence in the 1990s as concerns persisted about global competition, the internationalisation of technology and the productivity of workers. It is argued that these market input push work organisations to adjust their system of managerial control strengthen effective utilisation of human resources.

The assignment consist in studying the need for new approach to the management of people in order to reflect the way in which organisations are evolving at the start of the 21st century.

To proceed I will first introduce the debate concerning organization evolution and the need for new approaches to manage people. Then I will carry out an review of new methods to managing people in the organisation context, as well as people management philosophy and practices which concentrate on the way in which organisation overall approach of people contribute to the effectiveness.

I will conclude with the controversy between the Modernist and Post-Modernist paradigms in regard to management science and empirical research. A fundamental belief in Modernism is that all problems can be solved rationally by the application of scientific and social theory, and thus justify management theories that aim to explain human behaviour. Post-Modernists argue that it is impossible to derive a universal truth, and therefore empirical studies do not reflect the reality within organisations.

Artist and poet create theirs works in response to the time in which they lives, wars emerge out of economic and political pressure. Companies change their structures in response to the need to follow their customers overseas, for instance. Therefore, to better understand the Human Resource's role in organisation today, it's necessary to understand first how companies themselves are changing and the trend that are causing these change to occur. Perhaps the most important, organisations today are under intense pressure to be better, faster, and more competitive. The combined effects of the globalisation, the dematerialisation of economic activity, the acceleration of technological and social change, and the emergence of new trends toward a service society and the information age. The trends that have dramatically increased the degree of competition are virtually all industries, while forcing firms to cope with unprecedented product innovation and technological change. Companies in such environment either become competitive high-performers or die. Indeed these trends have changed the nature of work. For example, telecommunications already makes it relatively easy to work at home, and the use of Computer-Aided Design/Computer-Aided Manufacturing (CAD/CAM) systems is booming. Manufacturing progresses like these will eliminate many blue-collar jobs, replacing them with more highly skilled jobs, and these new workers will require a degree of training and commitment that their parents probably have never imagined of. In the same way being better, faster, and more competitive is also more important because for many industries the comfortable protection provided by government regulations has been swept away. For example in the United States (and in many other industrialized countries such as England, France, and Japan), industries from airlines to banks must now compete nationally and internationally without the protection of government to regulate prices. One major consequence has been the sudden and dramatic opening of various markets to competition. MCI/Worldcom and other long distance phone companies have entered the previously protected monopoly of AT&T, and start-ups from Kiwi Air to Morris Air compete head-to-head with industry giants like Delta airline, for instance. Prices for hundreds of services from airline tickets to long-distance calls have dropped dramatically, often far below what they were 10 years ago, it means also that companies must get their costs down.

As a result, to remain competitive, jobs and organization charts will have to be redesigned, new incentive and compensation plans put in place, new job descriptions written, and new employee selection, evaluation, and training programs defined all with the help of Human Resource Management.

In the earlier type of organisations, before the 1950's much effort was placed on getting the workforce motivated. Administrators in management positions gave minimal consideration to the internalisation of how the human beings in the organisation interpreted their organisation. Managers and leaders were responsible for designing motivational factors such as hierarchical staff structure and long term employment to maintain a productive workforce. After the Industrial Revolution, some theorists have argued in favour of a new type of organisation theory, even a Post-modern one, from the point of view that we are entering a post-Fordist era (Gergen,1992), and the new emergent revolution appears to be the Organisation Revolution or the Cultural Revolution: The Post Modernist theories. Epistemology is the foundation for studying Post-Modernism. Theorists who study that part of philosophy, which deals with the origin, nature, and limits of knowledge play an important role is analysing this era of organisational development style. In the functionalist approach to organisational management the manager is the controlling element. The manager organises the Human Resources and prescribes how productivity, motivation, moral, work effectiveness and efficiency should be managed for optimum product performance. This method works efficiently and effectively in economically and educationally developing countries, however faces challenging situations in the Post-modern organisation. Cultural and social developments are seen to be the driving force in shaping the currently emerging organisation. This then proves the theoretical perspective for theorists to adopt. The Post-Modernist perspective grew out of a reaction to the Modernist perspective of organisations. Modernists saw organisations very much the same way functionalists' theorists saw them. Bureaucratic control was one of the main features in this school of thought. Indeed the Post-modern organisations are thus different from the traditional modern bureaucracy where people were subject to rationally set rules of regulation and hierarchical control. The Post-modern organisation is one in which highly qualified employees find themselves within culturally complex, but flexible, production structures which are held together by information technology networks (Hassard, 1993).
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The cultural issues are key management concerns in the era of Post-Modern organisations. The cultural perspective of Post-Modernism is about "flexibility and flexible strategies" (Toffler 1990). They allow wide access to information and the transfer of information across boundaries. Flexibility accommodates change in the structure of power relationships (workers do own the means of production) they are specialised in their field of task , which task employees work on tasks and problems that originate from within the team rather than on problems and tasks given to them by the formal hierarchy. To enhance flexibility, organisational management tends to ...

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