Employment Relations in Human Resource Management

2143 Words9 Pages
Business Studies 1 Human Resource Management – A Critique B020117 Yan Zhang 07 March 2013 3. Employment Relations What concerns might be raised about endorsing Human Resource Management (HRM) as the ‘best-practice’ approach to managing employment relations? What is Human Resource Management? Human Resource Management has been key to the globalized economy since the world transitioned from an industrial to a knowledge-based economy. Currently, the success of an organization or firm is based on its employees. As such, these organizations exist on the basis of their employees cutting-edge technological knowledge and other dynamic up-to-date skills. However, organizations also face the threat of their employees resigning and/or transferring their skills to a rival company. Hence, Human Resource Management (HRM) is applied to effectively manage an organization’s workforce in accordance to labor laws and also to attract employees to the firm and rewarding current employees to entice them to stay. According to Dr. Nick Wylie’s 2009 research essay on HRM, “HRM was defined as a discourse that constructs what is natural and self evident within the management of employment and so acts as a form of power/knowledge to discipline an individuals understanding of work and employment” (Wylie 2009: 2). What firms are trying to do here is to extract desirable behavior from their employees through a series of benefits like rewards, paid leave and so on. The theory is simple; better HRM, better firm performance level. It is a win-win situation. The ‘Best Practice’ Approach The ‘best practice’ approach is the ‘one size fits all’ approach. It hypothesizes that one set of policies can improve all the employees’ performances, and at large, the firm’s performance. It assumes that HR policies will be implemented similarly to each employee and as such, affect employees

More about Employment Relations in Human Resource Management

Open Document