Extent To Which Human Resource Managers Influence Organization Performance (Essay Sample)

Extent to which Human Resource (HR) managers influence organization performanceNameInstructorInstitutionDate
Extent to which HR managers influence organization performance
Introduction
The business environment is rapidly changing and organizations are required to quickly adjust to the new trends in order to meet customer demands. Modern businesses have to contend with the 21st technologically-based changes that include globalization, exponentially increasing product market competition, and rapidly changing investors and customer demands (Pascu 2015). Therefore, in order for organization to remain competitive, they should continually improving their performance through various strategies such as improving speed to market, reducing costs of production, investing in innovative processes and products, and improving quality and productivity (Becker & Gerhart 1996). In order to achieve all these, it is important to understand the role of human resource managers in creating, maintaining, and improving overall organizational performance.
Relationship between Human Resource Management and performance
Byremo (2015) stated that human resource management can be traced back to Fredric Taylor’s Scientific Management experimentation which aimed at explaining ways of ensuring and increasing effectiveness of employees through management practices such as employee selection, training, and motivation through remuneration. Scientific Management became the foundation of studies such as the Hawthorne studies of the 1930s which delved deeper into how to achieve workplace motivation and increasing employee motivation. Byremo (2015) argued that the era of industrial relations was very important in revolutionizing management of human resources because it prioritized activities that influenced people’s motivation and grouped employees together under Personal Administration (PA), where every activity had a clear objective or solving a particular problem based on a specific theoretical model. Nevertheless, later PA evolved into human resource management (HRM), which was aimed at improving overall organizational effectiveness as opposed to individual job performance.
The shift from PA to HRM resulted to a new perception of employees as significant resources in an organization, hence needs to be managed better and jointly with other organizational resources to improve organizational performance (Byremo 2015). This led to the need to create strategic practices aimed at impacting overall objective of human resources to increase organizational effectiveness. For instance, as opposed to PA-based activities that were aimed at tackling specific problems like job satisfaction, turnover, and absenteeism, the shift to human resource management focused attention to overall organizational outcomes (Byremo 2015). This means that human resource managers focused on translating traditional human resource measures like training effectiveness, turnover, and job performance into cost and profit, which are more relevant to overall organizational performance.
There are various perspectives and theories regarding the role of human resource managers in improving overall organizational performance. These perspectives include universalistic, contingency, and configuration points of views or perspectives (Byremo 2015). Universalistic perspective of human resource management is based on the assumption that there is a universal association between HRM and performance characterized by some HR practices which influence organizational performance across an organization’s population, and under all circumstances. For instance, selective hiring, decentralization of decision-making, employment security, and self-managed teams, extensive training, extensive sharing of information, high contingency pay, and reducing barriers and status distinction are presumed to have a positive influence on organizational performance (Pfeffer 1998). Nevertheless, scientist and proponents of universalistic point of view believe that human managers do not need to adapt the HR practices with respect to any specific strategy or organizational context (Lengnick-Hall et al. 2009).
On the other hand, scientists who believe in the contingency perspective claim that the association between relevant independent and dependent variables is likely to change with different degrees of contingency variables (Byremo 2015). Unlike in the universalistic perspective, the contingency perspective considers an organization’s business strategy because it is presumed to be the most crucial factor influencing employee performance. Therefore, all the HR activities that an organization engages in must be aligned with the organization’s strategy among other contingencies to influence performance (Delery & Doty 1996)
The configuration perspective of human resource management is based on the argument that team synergy impacts HR practices that are grouped together and deployed coherently (Byremo 2015). The rationale for this argument is that the total impact that HR practices can achieve when grouped together and deployed coherently is far more greater than when deployed independently. Ichniowski and colleagues (1997) supported this view of human management by arguing that systems of innovative HR practices substantially affects production worker’s performance but changes in individual practices only achieves insignificant effects. These perspectives lay the foundation for human management theories that explain the link between human management and its impact in overall organizational performance.
Wright, Gardner, and Moynihan (2003) argued that Human Resource (HR) directly impact on employee motivation, skills, work structures, and job design. This means that HR plays a fundamental role in influencing overall organizational performance because the above variables elicit employees’ creativity, discretionary effort, and productivity, which directly impacts operating performance. This cause and effect relationship between HR practices and operating performance impacts not only an organization’s profitability, but also its growth and a firm’s market valuation.
Job performance theory
It could be argued that performance is as a result of behavior; such that employee’s actions determine the organization’s capability to achieve its goals. Wright, Gardner, and Moynihan (2003) study on the correlation between task elements and the significance of behavior in an organization have concluded that there are three job behaviors that impact affect organizational performance. The first category of job behavior is known as in-role behavior, which is defined as the behavior expected of employees. It is derived from often accepted norms and job requirements. This implies that in-role behavior could also be described as employees’ core task proficiency because it requires employee to do what they were hired to do. Another job behavior is known as extra-role behavior, which requires employees to go outside the scope or requirements of their assigned jobs or tasks to achieve organizational goals. It could be presumed that extra-role behavior has a positive influence on organizational performance because it suggests that employees are always motivated to achieve to go beyond doing minimum requirement to achieve organizational goals. For instance, employee can decide to help another team member in completing a task or deviate from an organization’s standard procedure when necessary to pursue an activity that is likely to result to good customer service. The third job behavior is called counter-productive behavior, which is mainly constitute of either in-role or extra-role behaviors which are purposely aimed at harming the organization (Sackett & DeVore 2000). For instance, employees might decide to engage in sabotage or insider threat activities such as stealing of sensitive information hence harming an organization’s performance.
Wright, Gardner, and Moynihan (2003) theorized that the employees’ attitude towards each other and management substantially influences the categories of job behaviors described above in an organization. Since attitude comprises of cognitive and affective components of behavior, they influence the participation of employees in fulfilling their roles. Therefore, human resource management has a critical role of shaping employee attitude to influence individual employee commitment to their duties. Wright, Gardner. And Moynihan (2003) argued that there are a number of ways that HR practices can improve employee commitment and overall performance. For instance selection and staffing is the prerequisite HR practices that cause immediate impact to employee commitment. Investing in the most highly skilled employee and continuously improving their skills through training and presenting them with more development opportunities besides ensuring that their workplace is filled with well-qualified co-workers is essential to inspiring employee commitment and improving performance because it creates a positive working environment. Therefore, proper employee selection and staffing is important because it helps employees to work at their full potential in serving customers as opposed to concentrating in both doing their jobs and cleaning after the mess created by less qualified co-workers. In addition, HR practices might include use of monetary incentives and valid performance management systems to not only elicit high performance among employees, but also help them balance behavior and individual development.
Discussion
There is a wide array of ways in which human resource managers can influence organizational performance. As highlighted above, employee behavior plays a significant role in promoting organizational performance. Therefore, human resource managers use relevant HR practices t...