1]Human resource management (HRM, HR) is the management of an organization's

employees.[1] This includes employment and arbitration in accord with the law, and with a
company's directives.

Contents
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 1 Features
 2 Academic theory
 3 Business practice
o 3.1 HRM strategy
 4 Careers and education
 5 Professional organizations
 6 Functions
 7 See also
 8 References

[edit] Features
Its features include:

 Organizational management
 Personnel administration
 Manpower management
 Industrial management[2][3]

But these traditional expressions are becoming less common for the theoretical discipline.
Sometimes even employee and industrial relations are confusingly listed as synonyms,[4]
although these normally refer to the relationship between management and workers and the
behavior of workers in companies.

The theoretical discipline is based primarily on the assumption that employees are individuals
with varying goals and needs, and as such should not be thought of as basic business resources,
such as trucks and filing cabinets. The field takes a positive view of workers, assuming that
virtually all wish to contribute to the enterprise productively, and that the main obstacles to their
endeavors are lack of knowledge, insufficient training, and failures of process.

Human Resource Management(HRM) is seen by practitioners in the field as a more innovative

view of workplace management than the traditional approach. Its techniques force the managers
of an enterprise to express their goals with specificity so that they can be understood and
undertaken by the workforce, and to provide the resources needed for them to successfully
accomplish their assignments. As such, HRM techniques, when properly practiced, are
expressive of the goals and operating practices of the enterprise overall. HRM is also seen by
many to have a key role in risk reduction within organisations.[5]

Synonyms such as personnel management are often used in a more restricted sense to describe
activities that are necessary in the recruiting of a workforce, providing its members with payroll
and benefits, and administrating their work-life needs. So if we move to actual definitions,
Torrington and Hall (1987) define personnel management as being:

“a series of activities which: first enable working people and their employing organisations to
agree about the objectives and nature of their working relationship and, secondly, ensures that
the agreement is fulfilled" (p. 49).

While Miller (1987) suggests that HRM relates to:

".......those decisions and actions which concern the management of employees at all levels in the
business and which are related to the implementation of strategies directed towards creating
and sustaining competitive advantage" (p. 352).

[edit] Academic theory

Research in the area of HRM has much to contribute to the organisational practice of HRM. For
the last 20 years, empirical work has paid particular attention to the link between the practice of
HRM and organisational performance, evident in improved employee commitment, lower levels
of absenteeism and turnover, higher levels of skills and therefore higher productivity, enhanced
quality and efficiency.[6] This area of work is sometimes referred to as 'Strategic HRM' or SHRM
(.[7]

Within SHRM three strands of work can be observed[8]: Best practice, Best Fit and the Resource
Based View (RBV).

The notion of best practice - sometimes called 'high commitment' HRM - proposes that the
adoption of certain best practices in HRM will result in better organisational performance.
Perhaps the most popular work in this area is that of Pfeffer [9] who argued that there were seven
best practices for achieving competitive advantage through people and 'building profits by
putting people first'. These practices included: providing employment security, selective hiring,
extensive training, sharing information, self-managed teams, high pay based on company
performance and the reduction of status differentials. However, there is a huge number of studies
which provide evidence of best practices, usually implemented in coherent bundles, and
therefore it is difficult to draw generalised conclusions about which is the 'best' way (For a
comparison of different sets of best practices see Becker and Gerhart, 1996 [10]

Best fit, or the contingency approach to HRM, argues that HRM improves performance where
there is a close vertical fit between the HRM practices and the company's strategy. This link
ensures close coherence between the HR people processes and policies and the external market
or business strategy. There are a range of theories about the nature of this vertical integration.
For example, a set of 'lifecycle' models argue that HR policies and practices can be mapped onto
the stage of an organisation's development or lifecycle.[11] Competitive advantage models take
Porter's (1985) ideas about strategic choice and map a range of HR practices onto the
organisation's choice of competitive strategy. Finally 'configurational models' [12] provide a more
sophisticated approach which advocates a close examination of the organisation's strategy in
order to determine the appropriate HR policies and practices. However, this approach assumes
that the strategy of the organisation can be identified - many organisations exist in a state of flux
and development.

The Resource Based View (RBV), argued by some to be at the foundation of modern HRM,[13]
focusses on the internal resources of the organisation and how they contribute to competitive
advantage. The uniqueness of these resources is preferred to homogeneity and HRM has a
central role in developing human resources that are valuable, rare, difficult to copy or substitute
and that are effectively organised.

Overall, the theory of HRM argues that the goal of human resource management is to help an
organization to meet strategic goals by attracting, and maintaining employees and also to manage
them effectively. The key word here perhaps is "fit", i.e. a HRM approach seeks to ensure a fit
between the management of an organisation's employees, and the overall strategic direction of
the company (Miller, 1989).

The basic premise of the academic theory of HRM is that humans are not machines, therefore we
need to have an interdisciplinary examination of people in the workplace. Fields such as
psychology, industrial relations, industrial engineering, sociology, economics, and critical
theories: postmodernism, post-structuralism play a major role. Many colleges and universities
offer bachelor and master degrees in Human Resources Management or in Human Resources and
Industrial Relations.

One widely used scheme to describe the role of HRM, developed by Dave Ulrich, defines 4
fields for the HRM function:[14]

 Strategic business partner

 Change Agent
 Employee champion
 Administration Expert

[edit] Business practice

Human resources management involves several processes. Together they are supposed to achieve
the above mentioned goal. These processes can be performed in an HR department, but some
tasks can also be outsourced or performed by line-managers or other departments. When
effectively integrated they provide significant economic benefit to the company.[15]

 Workforce planning
 Recruitment (sometimes separated into attraction and selection)
 Induction, Orientation and Onboarding
  Skills management
 Training and development
 Personnel administration
 Compensation in wage or salary
 Time management
 Travel management (sometimes assigned to accounting rather than HRM)
 Payroll (sometimes assigned to accounting rather than HRM)
 Employee benefits administration
 Personnel cost planning
 Performance appraisal
 Labor relations

[edit] HRM strategy

An HRM strategy pertains to the means as to how to implement the specific functions of Human
Resource Management. An organization's HR function may possess recruitment and selection
policies, disciplinary procedures, reward/recognition policies, an HR plan, or learning and
development policies, however all of these functional areas of HRM need to be aligned and
correlated, in order to correspond with the overall business strategy. An HRM strategy thus is an
overall plan, concerning the implementation of specific HRM functional areas.

An HRM strategy typically consists of the following factors:-

 "Best fit" and "best practice" - meaning that there is correlation between the HRM
strategy and the overall corporate strategy. As HRM as a field seeks to manage human
resources in order to achieve properly organizational goals, an organization's HRM
strategy seeks to accomplish such management by applying a firm's personnel needs with
the goals/objectives of the organisation. As an example, a firm selling cars could have a
corporate strategy of increasing car sales by 10% over a five year period. Accordingly,
the HRM strategy would seek to facilitate how exactly to manage personnel in order to
achieve the 10% figure. Specific HRM functions, such as recruitment and selection,
reward/recognition, an HR plan, or learning and development policies, would be tailored
to achieve the corporate objectives.

 Close co-operation (at least in theory) between HR and the top/senior management, in the
development of the corporate strategy. Theoretically, a senior HR representative should
be present when an organization's corporate objectives are devised. This is so, since it is a
firm's personnel who actually construct a good, or provide a service. The personnel's
proper management is vital in the firm being successful, or even existing as a going
concern. Thus, HR can be seen as one of the critical departments within the functional
area of an organization.

 Continual monitoring of the strategy, via employee feedback, surveys, etc.

The implementation of an HR strategy is not always required, and may depend on a number of
factors, namely the size of the firm, the organizational culture within the firm or the industry that
the firm operates in and also the people in the firm.

An HRM strategy can be divided, in general, into two facets - the people strategy and the HR
functional strategy. The people strategy pertains to the point listed in the first paragraph, namely
the careful correlation of HRM policies/actions to attain the goals laid down in the corporate
strategy. The HR functional strategy relates to the policies employed within the HR functional
area itself, regarding the management of persons internal to it, to ensure its own departmental
goals are met.

[edit] Careers and education

Further information: Graduate degree programs in human resources management

Cornell University's School of Industrial and Labor Relations was the world's first school for
college-level study in HRM

Several universities offer programs of study pertaining to HRM and broader fields. Cornell
University created the world's first school for college-level study in HRM (ILR School).[16]
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign also now has a school dedicated to the study of
HRM, while several business schools also house a center or department dedicated to such
studies; e.g., University of Wisconsin-Madison, University of Minnesota, Michigan State
University, Ohio State University, Roosevelt University,and Purdue University.

There are both generalist and specialist HRM jobs. There are careers involved with employment,
recruitment and placement and these are usually conducted by interviewers, EEO (Equal
Employment Opportunity) specialists or college recruiters. Training and development specialism
is often conducted by trainers and orientation specialists. Compensation and benefits tasks are
handled by compensation analysts, salary administrators, and benefits administrators.

[edit] Professional organizations

Professional organizations in HRM include the Society for Human Resource Management, the
Australian Human Resources Institute (AHRI), the Chartered Institute of Personnel and
Development (CIPD), the International Public Management Association for HR (IPMA-HR),
Management Association of Nepal (MAN) and the International Personnel Management
Association of Canada (IPMA-Canada), Human Capital Institute. National Human Resource
Development Network in India.

[edit] Functions
The Human Resources Management (HRM) function includes a variety of activities, and key
among them is deciding the staffing needs of an organization and whether to use independent
contractors or hire employees to fill these needs, recruiting and training the best employees,
ensuring they are high performers, dealing with performance issues, and ensuring your personnel
and management practices conform to various regulations. Activities also include managing your
approach to employee benefits and compensation, employee records and personnel policies.
Usually small businesses (for-profit or nonprofit) have to carry out these activities themselves
because they can't yet afford part- or full-time help. However, they should always ensure that
employees have—and are aware of—personnel policies which conform to current regulations.
These policies are often in the form of employee manuals, which all employees have.

Note that some people distinguish a difference between HRM (a major management activity) and
HRD (Human Resource Development, a profession). Those people might include HRM in HRD,
explaining that HRD includes the broader range of activities to develop personnel inside of
organizations, including, e.g., career development, training, organization development, etc.

There is a long-standing argument about where HR-related functions should be organized into
large organizations, e.g., "should HR be in the Organization Development department or the
other way around?"

The HRM function and HRD profession have undergone major changes over the past 20–30
years. Many years ago, large organizations looked to the "Personnel Department," mostly to
manage the paperwork around hiring and paying people. More recently, organizations consider
the "HR Department" as playing an important role in staffing, training and helping to manage
people so that people and the organization are performing at maximum capability in a highly
fulfilling manner.