HR System
The human resource theories have proved to come up with different policies and systems in order to raise awareness and positively contribute to the innovative forms of workers performance in most organizations. Traditionally, the role of controlling the workforce and ensuring that the workers are sufficiently motivated through the policies of appraisal, recruitment, and training was left to the senior management. These approaches resulted in the operational tasks being diverted away from the main preoccupations and led to the relatively marginal position and low priority of the workers motivation agenda.
The recent years have seen organizations considering human resources as a crucial factor not just in the recruitment and training of workers, but also in motivating them and developing a positive attitude towards work (Schuler and Jackson, 1999). The HR department in many organizations utilizes coherent approaches towards ensuring a better working environment in their respective organization. The HR managers adapt the organization routes with the high likelihood of payoff in the particular configuration of policies directed at the personnel. The policies are out to ensure highly innovative and flexible working practices, secure worker’s commitment, and produce a skilled workforce in order to sustain high quality performance. Many organizations put extra emphasis on bettering approaches to human resources to make sure they have reached a consensus, which is a major variable of competitive advantage. Indeed, human resource management (HRM) is largely responsible for the behavior, skills, and values of the employees and is vital to maintaining high performance standards (Schuler and Jackson, 1999).
The HR approaches towards motivating employees can be categorized into two main groups: the universal model and contingency model. The universal model focuses on the best ways in which high performance can be achieved regardless of the specific circumstances or context of the organization. The contingency model, on the other hand, associates HR policies in organizations with the specific aspects of the organizational environment. The two models add value into the organizational set-up by highlighting important issues and demonstrating the significance of the strategic approaches used in HR. The HR ability to come up with the strategic motivational approaches that fit the culture and local conditions is important in distiling the values and core processes that are the key to a successful workforce management (Gratton, 1999).
For the strategies to be effective, HR have to approach the issue in three broad perspectives: ownership, internal fit, and external fit. With regards to ownership, the workers are considered as the main resource that can be developed and nurtured by the management of the organization in support of the approaches adopted by the HR department. It is important, in guiding the reform, to assume a strong HR leadership in order to maintain the reform momentum. The internal fit takes into consideration the coherent HR policy approaches that do not depend on a particular element, such as training, but put together the HR guidelines into a bundle of integrated processes and techniques. The external fit refers to the effective approaches to the organizational HR which rely on the external environment. The strategies are planned in such a way that they can be easily incorporated in case of changes in the external environment.
The HR approaches are also in a position to modify plans or confront upcoming issues internally (Gratton, 1999).Research Area (job design) The role played by HR in any organization affects a lot employees’ motivation towards work and influences their attitude. HR are mostly responsible for the selection and recruitment practices in the organization. This function is very crucial as it determines the kind of employees the organization will have. Giving HR managers the right to recruit employees and, at the same time, elaborate on a system motivating them is a positive step in any organization.
HR will likely cherry-pick the employees who are not only best qualified but also the ones who will comply with their systems. More so, when the selection and recruitment decision is done by the central management, the odds are they will use poor staffing ratio standards, thus resulting in poor service requirements. Such workers will have a negative attitude towards work and won’t be motivated enough (Gratton, 1999). Management of outcomes and the issues related to work conditions is better handled by HR than the central management – this is one of the greatest policy making challenges in any organization. Obviously, HR interact more with the employees than the central management.
Basic issues such as salaries directly affect the performances of the workers as thhere is a direct relationship between the rewards the employees receive and their performance. Nonetheless, the HR position in the organization is in a way inferior to that of the central management in that the former always have to justify their existence in front of the latter by making the best of their assigned functions and responsibilities (Sisson and Storey, 2000). The traditional standpoint taken by HR in determining the wages and employment conditions in the organization assumes an administrative role of HR in policing and implementation of strategies. The HR profession encourages managers to positively contribute to their organization; thus, HR pursue several initiatives. Among those initiatives, there are the strategies and approaches ensuring the employees are motivated and their attitude towards work is positive.
This indicates that HR are successful in their role. HR thus have to emphasize on the importance of such strategies and approaches in the organization. These approaches have to be strategic and operational so that they could bring benefit to the organization. In an example of their selection and recruitment role, they have to conduct it in a timely and accurate manner so as to ensure credibility (Sisson and Storey, 2000).HR in most organizations have undergone reforms in their processes of implementing strategies and plans to better their operations. Those strategies are directed towards the workforce and ensure that the commitment and competence are maintained.
However, HR are faced with the challenge of ascertaining that such strategies are realistic and applicable in their respective organizations, and not just the strategies borrowed from competing firms. Though a lot has been done by the HR theorists regarding workers motivation, they still have a long way to go in finding even more sophisticated strategies and plans to meet the challenges before them. The commitment of HRM has to be appreciated as there have been mutable expectations to their services making substantial shifts in the workforce management and effectiveness in the organizations. Nonetheless, no matter the measures in place, the outcome could be more effective if HR based them on sound evidence, which critically appraises its failures and successes of the recent efforts to make the HR capacity stronger. So far, the HR systems and policies have positively impacted the employees’ motivation towards work and changed their attitudes to more positive ones.
