Human Resources Employment - A study by Artur Victoria

Employment is clearly an economic affair. Except for the occasional professional athlete who claims she would pay to play the game, or the starving artist driven by his muse to create without tangible reward, people work in substantial measure for the economic rewards they earn. Even more so, most employers hire their employees primarily for economic reasons. This is not to say that wages (or other economic benefits) are the be-all-and-end-all of employment from either the employee's or employer's perspective; personal and social fulfillment play important parts. But it would be hard to deny that economic factors play a huge part. The economic view of employment that we will adopt involves a sequence of ideas and observations. We will provide an outline of the basic framework in this section. When this is done-when the "big picture" is all laid out-we will elaborate and analyze the individual steps in the sequence. leia todo o artigo

Evaluation Strategy In Human Resources - A study by Artur Victoria

Performance evaluation systems should be congruent with the strategy of the firm, helping to communicate that strategy clearly and forcefully to individuals and putting positive value on behaviors that reinforce the strategy. For example, a manufacturing firm whose strategy involves providing high levels of quality and after-sale service to customers should not reduce performance evaluation of salesmen to levels of Euros sold or new customers developed. Looking at reorder levels or surveyed measures of customer satisfaction may be much better. In the same context, a firm that emphasizes after-sale service may wish to slow down the pace of performance evaluation, so that a greater amount of relevant information can be brought to bear. Although the need for congruence between strategy and performance evaluation is obvious, it is not hard to find examples of organizations that fail to satisfy this simple desideratum.

When an organization changes its strategy, using performance evaluation to communicate the nature, importance, and the change to employees can be very effective. Technology and work organization enter in several ways. For guardian jobs, to differentiate between acceptable and unacceptably low performance, but fine distinctions should not be made among those whose performance is acceptable; Companies don't want to stimulate employees to gamble on getting slightly better performance if there is a risk that this will lead to a disaster. leia todo o artigo

Effective Human Resource Management - A study by Artur Victoria

A number of prominent theories in economics and psychology imply that it is invaluable (even essential) to differentiate rewards based on effort and performance, and that informing employees about those reward differences is a prerequisite for an organization to have an effective motivational system. Yet when we look at the data, we often see both substantial pay compression and strenuous attempts by firms to conceal whatever differentiation exists in compensation levels. Why? The answer lies in the ways in which people perceive their situation, how they evaluate specific types of treatment and rewards, and what arrangements they view as legitimate.

Relevant concepts from cognitive psychology, social psychology, and sociology are not intended to be anything like comprehensive or exhaustive. Rather, we focus selectively on a few key cognitive and social-psychological processes and benchmarks that influence how people form expectations and make evaluations, which must be understood to craft effective human resources policies.

Cognitive psychologists have demonstrated that individuals attend to many cues and sources of information in forming judgments and making sense of social life (including the employment relationship). Recognizing the benchmarks that employees use in making assessments and forming work-related attitudes is critical to understanding employee satisfaction. leia todo o artigo

Achieving Efficient Employment Relations - A study by Artur Victoria

In the best of all possible worlds, what would lead to economically efficient employment relations? We focus on three basic categories:

1. Efficient adaptation and coordination. The circumstances facing a firm change. Old opportunities go away and new opportunities appear. Employees discover both talents and shortcomings. Clearly, it benefits the firm (in the sense of producing value) if employees can be deployed and redeployed in ways that take advantage of these changing circumstances and new information. Moreover, because production is often interdependent, the actions of employees have to be coordinated. (When we write "have to be coordinated," it sounds as if we implicitly mean by the bosses. But we don't mean that; employees can, in some cases, do a very good job of coordinating themselves.)

2. Investing in productive human capital. Employer and employee can and sometimes do take actions that improve their ability to work productively together. For instance, the employee may take time and effort to build up a network of useful contacts in the organization, or he may try to acquire skills that are particularly useful in his current job. The employer can subsidize the employee's training, and she can provide opportunities for network building.leia todo o artigo

Balance Of Power And Reputation In Human Resources - A study by Artur Victoria

Employers who maintain a simple hierarchy sometimes have terrible reputations which leave their employees defensive and aggressive in turn. When workers form a collective - a union - and decision-making authority is shared, union-management relations can and sometimes do lead to constant, grinding confrontation.

The problem is one of reciprocity and expectations. Each side to the transaction is willing to trust the other, to give a little today, to refrain from taking maximum immediate advantage of the other side; if each side anticipates that the other side will reciprocate good for good and bad for bad. But when one side expects that any attempt at trust, any proffer of cooperation, or any restraint in exploiting the other side will be met with a sneer and subsequent attempts by the other side to take maximum immediate advantage, then the first party will behave accordingly. Those expectations, in turn, are driven by the history of relations between the two parties themselves; their (possibly diverse, and partially vicarious) experiences in other, similar situations; and general local norms and customs concerning "appropriate" relations between employers and employees.

Identifying a better way of doing things is generally a lot easier than implementing it, especially when the better way depends, as it often does in human resources management, on joint and cooperative efforts between labor and management or even simply on changing the expectations of employees. So as we talk about change, we'll spend a lot of time worrying about how to unfreeze expectations and beliefs that impede efficient employment relationships and how to create helpful expectations and beliefs. leia todo o artigo