August 11, 2003	Monday	Jumadi-us-Sani 12, 1424

The theme of this article is to establish the nature and importance of human resource management (HRM) and how it emerged, to provide some evidence of its context, to discuss its potential and future development. This paper is not intended to be a solely about human resource management but includes a comparison and analysis about its parent discipline as well. It will also examine some of the alleged differences and similarities between both subjects and terms.

Human recourse requires more attention and careful management then any other resource of an organization. In the 1980’s and early 1990’s the term HRM came into academic horizons and gradually used by the practitioners and researchers worldwide. The last two decades have seen a marked change in HRM particularly in those activities, which involve acquiring, developing motivating and utilizing human resources actively in the business.

The major purpose of HRM is to increase and improve the productive contribution of personnel to the organization in more ethical, social, and administratively responsible way. This purpose emerged from commonly called industrial relations, personnel administration, industrial psychology and personal management. HRM is not just another personnel management fad. Research shows that its aim is to create a whole organizational culture that binds workers to the company’s objectives with full professional commitment, integration, and quality work.

The 21st century will bring with it enormous opportunities but also enormous pressure, if the companies will not improve the productivity of the people and treat them “human being’ which are the vital objects of all the economic activities leading towards industrial development. Now there is worldwide consensus on human resource being one of the major means of increasing efficiency, productivity and prosperity of the firm.

The present scenario of HRM did not suddenly appear. A review of this evolution shows how the effort of early pioneer led today’s more sophisticated and more proactive method of utilization 6Ms i.e. man, money, material, machine, method and market.

Indeed, the human resources planning have been a function of management since the origin of modern organization.

However the term HRM challenged frequently replaced the previous popular term/discipline personnel management and industrial relation (IRs). Moreover students in universities appeared to respond more positively for the enrolment of the new course HRM, whereas, the courses concerned personnel management/industrial relations also exist in academic circles with comparative less popularity.

The major four stages of growth and evolution of the HRM function as follows:

Reactive function: Here the main purpose is seen as maintaining harmony and avoiding disruption through strikes etc and exists generally where organizations are operating in near monopoly situations with assured growth - the interactions between HR and operating managers being assured under normal situations at this stage of reactive HRM.

Independent function: This function is recognized as an independent entity. In this stage, while HR is survived in setting up industrial systems and procedures for operating managers, but is not fully responsible for the monitoring or correcting the problems in the systems - only being marginally involved in various processes and other functions or results. Other functions would mostly seek HR’s help in administrative or on few specific issues, and Line managers do not see HR as a repository of expertise.

Supportive function: This has its own direction with distinct status within the organization, and actively contributes to the efforts of other functions in producing results. Organizations requiring product or technology changes rapidly in a competitive scenario generally need such HR involvement with high demands for qualified and competent manpower, often in a high turnover or mobility situation. Emphasis on people development and motivation generation comes from such HR, but their understanding or involvement in total business perspective remains limited or inadequate, even with higher functional participation.

Integrative function: This is the stage when the competitive success of the organization involves HRM significantly in an integrated manner, and demands such capabilities from the HR specialists. Their roles shift from a facilitator to a functional peer with competencies in other functions, and are recognized as an equal partner by the others. The typical HRM in this case is geared to contribute to organizational objectives of profitability for monitoring employees’ satisfaction, since it is seen as surrogate to customer satisfaction.

Challenges: As the time moves on steadily and relentlessly in the new millennium we need to review the challenges for the HR function and its responsibilities in organizations to cope with the new trends. In the start of the century it is very convenient to know how far and in what direction we are progressing, but also give the distance to our destination, and are often excellent anchors to take time off to re-examine the future course of action for the organization and resource management.

It can now be said that we have moved to the era of not just change, but an accelerated rate of change. As compared to the past, the twenty-first century corporations are getting to be globally market driven ones with ‘invest anywhere and share everywhere’ concept.

At a practical level, we must anticipate and prepare for the likely HR challenges in general that exists, or may be expected in the coming future - the main purpose and theme of this article. They are consequent to the vastly increased competition for many, and likely in future, due to rapid development of technology, especially, the impact of IT, and internal necessities, and/or resulting from above stated causes. With technology upgradations, much greater use of it and forthcoming e-commerce etc. new breed of ‘knowledge workers’ in ‘learning organizations’ will make the differentiation. This intellectual capital will demand much nurturing from the enterprise, in order to give back in the shape of superior results.

Considerable work will be essential in building a positive organizational climate, within which improving performance level is not only appreciated and rewarded, but becomes a way of life. The HR team will be only one of the important pillars, and the other functions will certainly and equally have to do a lot of upgrading for improving the organizational results. Team work, will therefore, be a key driver in any organization, that will demand and result in high performance both at all individual levels and also across functions and teams continuously and consistently.

It goes without saying that the effective management of Industrial relations will continue to demand a very high priority - not just to ‘do well’, but now for the very survival of both the organization as well as employee jobs. They will need far greater support and involvement from the top management and other functions towards maintaining and ensuring the future success of the 21st century organizations.

In short, the early practices of jobs forecasting succession planning has broadened into a concern with establishing a more explicit linkage between human resource planning and the larger organization strategy and business planning of the organization. Moreover the idea of selection, training, performance appraisal and compensation decisions being heavenly-centred on the role of individual employee, with their details of job description, has guided that effective team working and participative decisions are playing important roles to achieve the effective performance in business organization.

In conclusion, still there is a strong contention and race of struggle to take the lead in the academic and professional field but obviously only time will fill which of these and other possible rival scenarios will offer more accurate description of the reality in future. The new technological change, downsizing, right sizing and privatization management can also play role for future developments/trends and accepts the challenges of the future.