Human resource management principles and practices

Human Resource Management: Ethics and Employment (Pinnington, Macklin & Campbell, 2007) covers those ethical issues that often come up in regards to employer-employee relationships, such as the rights and duties owed between employer and employee. The book is broken down into three parts. The first part is Situating Human Resource Management. The contributors in this part talk about the potential for conflict in the end relationships between employees and employers. One side of the argument says that focus should be on good moral treatment of employees and, on the other side, the achievement of demanding political and economic goals is top priority. In the second part, Analyzing Human Resource Management, the contributors consider how the implementation of HRM in organizations may augment the moral awareness, behaviors, and outcomes of employers and employees. In the third part, Progressing Human Resource Management, the authors focus more on the opportunities for promoting collective ethics in HRM and for encouraging high standards of individual moral behavior.

Human Resource Management is a business function that is concerned with managing relations between groups of people in their capacity as employees, employers and managers. Inevitably, this process may raise questions about what the respective responsibilities and rights of each party are in this relationship, and about what constitutes fair treatment (Rose, 2007). An ethical practice is the foundation of long-term success. For lawyers, the ethical fundamental principles are: Integrity, Objectivity, Professional competence and due care, Confidentiality and Professional behavior. Ethics involves knowing when to say "no" and when to sever client, staff, or even partner relationships. It is suggested that partners make it a practice to be aware of other partners' activities regarding the firm and its clients. Regular contact during the workday, including regularly scheduled partner meetings, and a clear policy on consultation for risky or contentious issues, help ensure that each partner is, in fact, aware of other partners' activities. Written partnership agreements normally address dispute resolution and partnership dissolution when disagreement proves too difficult to settle reasonably. Whether or not an ethical problem arises with a partner or staff member, it is suggested that a process be established to deal with instances of non-compliance (Guide to Quality Control for Small- and Medium-Sized Practices, 2009).

In the book the author argues that people are a key source of competitive advantage for organizations and, as such, should be properly managed. Organizations can gain a powerful competitive advantage by tapping into their talent and learning how to effectively organize and lead it. Companies that are truly competing on the performance of their people need to adopt a Human Capital or HC-centric approach to organizing -- simply doing better talent management is not sufficient. Rather, special attention needs to be given to implementing organizational structures; processes and systems that will help manage and support the performance of an organization's human capital (Lawler, 2003).

Human capital is not just one an organization's intangible assets; it is basically all of the competencies of the people within an organization. These competencies are various skills, education, and experience, potential and capacity. It is believed that if a company know how its human capital contributes to their success, it than can be measured and managed effectively. Developing human capital in the organisation is the major challenge for the leaders for formulating future competitive strategies. It has been found that organizations with good human resources practices and performance had higher levels of annual profits, growth and overall performance than those with less sound practices (Memon, Mangi, R.A. & Rohra, C.L. (2009).

The performance of human capital is mostly influenced by the ability of the strategic leadership in formulating and implementing the human capital policies. The leadership that generates, vision, motivates, inspire and fascinate peoples they transform them to achieve long-term objective. The leadership of the organisation should be able to create, unity, pride and ownership in the people, so that they may be able to give maximum performance. Human capital, if managed properly, can create value for the firm in the shape of increased revenue, improved customer satisfaction, enhance quality of the product and services, increase productivity and reduce cost. This statement suggests that the human factor can increase the value of the firm and value produce competitive advantage (Memon, Mangi, R.A. & Rohra, C.L. (2009).

It is necessary for the strategic leadership to obtain knowledge about the situation of the human capital in or out of the organisation. This helps them to make successful and competitive decisions regarding hiring, development and retaining the human capital. The leaders may conduct SWOT analysis for the determination and assessment of the human capital. The analysis of human capital policies and practices should be scrutinized regularly for the any modification to match the competitive environment. The changes in the procedure and application of human capital policies should be evaluated to measure their effect on the performance of the organisation. The strategic options regarding the human capital can be planed considering the above mentioned steps (Memon, Mangi, R.A. & Rohra, C.L. (2009).

Human capital may be the most significant and vital for competitive advantage because it is the most difficult to emulate. However, human capital is more portable than other intangible resources and consequently may seem an improbable source of sustained competitive advantage. Yet the mobility of human capital is less a threat to competitive advantage than it would first seem to be for the reason that once an organization incorporates human capital with other balancing resources and uses this incorporation to create organizational capabilities, losing one or a few people may not lead to a loss of competitive advantage. This means that it is not sufficient to obtain people who have skills, knowledge and abilities; it is also essential to develop these abilities further and use them to expand structures, systems, procedures and reputation, which will allow a company to make use of the resources and gain competitive advantage. This concept of intellectual capital indicates that while it is people, who generate, retain and use knowledge; this knowledge is improved by the social interactions and networks in order to generate the institutionalized knowledge possessed by an organization (Njuguna, 2009).

I think that this book would be very useful evaluate the book regarding whether you think it would be useful tool for a law office supervisor to read and utilize. The book does a very good job at defining what ethics are and how they play a big part in the success of any organization. Having leaders within a company that are ethical in nature and set an ethical example for the rest of the employees is the best environment that a company can have. This is particularly true in a law office setting. Lawyers, who are supposed to be upholding the law, should be very ethical in nature. The expectations that are set for them from government agencies as well as clients are very high.