Are People our Greatest Assets?
31 Oct 03

Managing people has always been one of the most challenging aspects of the manager's role. In recent years it has indeed become one of the most crucial, as organisations - faced with increasing competition - seek to make more effective use of the productive energies embodied in their staff.

The problem facing both managers and workers is: how can this best be achieved? On the one hand it has been claimed that people are an organisation's most important asset, and as such should be valued, nurtured and empowered. On the other hand, the growing pressure to reduce costs has led senior managers to cut jobs, offer fewer long-term career opportunities, and demand longer hours and more intense effort from the workforce. Even an organisation such as IBM, highly regarded as a leading example of progressive Human Resource Management, decided that when it lost market share to competitors many of its employees were surplus to requirements.

All this therefore means that managers are left facing a real dilemma: how can they encourage employees to give more of themselves to the organisation when the organisation is increasingly prepared to give them less and less in return? This fundamentally calls into question many of the assertions made by the more optimistic and uncritical advocates of Human Resource Management.

Human Resource Management: A Contemporary Perspective, edited by Ian Beardwell, Len Holden and Tim Claydon, aims to meet the needs of students who are studying HRM at undergraduate, postgraduate and professional levels. It takes a critically evaluative and comprehensive look at contemporary developments in the management of people at work, using the results of the latest research in the subject. It explores the historical development of HRM as a body of theoretical ideas and prescriptions for practice and examines how different ways of thinking about management, organisations and wider society influence our thinking about the employment relationship and its regulation. It discusses how HRM links to wider business strategy and policy and provides critical explanations and analyses of contemporary thinking and practice in key areas such as recruitment and selection, employee development, management development, managing equality and diversity, performance management and reward, employee involvement, employee relations and international HRM. It also explores how organisational characteristics, features of the external environment and different national business systems influence the practice of HRM in national and multinational organisations.

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