HRM's Emerging Role as Cultural Steward in Organizations

Introduction: Defining HRM and Organizational Culture

Human Resource Management can be described as "the comprehensive set of managerial activities and tasks concerned with developing and maintaining a qualified workforce — human resources — in ways that contribute to organizational effectiveness" (DeNisi & Griffin, 2004).

Organizational culture consists of shared beliefs and values established by leaders and then communicated and reinforced through various methods, ultimately shaping employee perceptions, behaviors, and understanding. Simply put, a company's structure and design can be viewed as its body, and its culture as its soul (Neal, Cossack, & Collis, 2008, p. 34).

The Historical Role of HRM: Past and Present

The history of HRM in the United States may be said to have started when the NCR Corporation established a separate personnel office in the 1890s. This occurred, in part, because the corporation had reached such a size that specialization was the rational course of action. American values and American life in that period also played a role. The values of individualism and free-enterprise capitalism were strong. The workforce was mobile and contained many immigrants. All of these factors led to an impersonal, task-oriented relationship little colored by the values of paternalism and obligation that are more common in societies with a feudal heritage. Apprentice systems and labor unions had not spread into the new-style corporations, so employers had few constraints on hiring and firing decisions. The hiring of new employees could be done objectively, based on criteria relevant to the job to be accomplished. Employees were a factor of production whose costs were to be managed as rationally as any other input. The task of those pioneer personnel managers at NCR was to establish a method by which they could best discern, among a large and diverse applicant pool, the individuals who would make efficient and cost-effective employees (Pieper, 1990).

Scientific management, which Frederick Winslow Taylor introduced in 1912, was clearly attuned to the needs and values of the American industrial revolution. Taylorism met the demand of employers to efficiently utilize a larger labor pool containing many immigrants. Employees could be easily trained and as easily replaced for the routine, repetitive tasks prescribed by Taylor. The theory was immensely successful during the period when industry was straining to meet the production demands of World War I. By the 1920s, Taylorism began to lose its preeminence as a theory, though remnants of the practice still exist in some American organizations. Job analysis, which is very much a part of modern HRM, is one of its lasting legacies. Perhaps the most important legacy of Taylorism is that it made science the hallmark of HRM in that early stage of its development (Pieper, 1990).

In the decades that followed, through all the schools of HRM that have come and gone, one consistent factor remained: the belief that the selection and motivation of a workforce is an endeavor amenable to objective, rational, and testable criteria. This belief permeates the field of HRM today and traces directly back to its roots in the needs and values of American society a century ago.

The second key hallmark of American HRM is the linking of personnel management theory and practice with the field of psychology. The relevance of psychological tools was demonstrated by the famous Hawthorne experiments conducted by Elton Mayo of the Harvard School of Business Administration between 1927 and 1932. In the 1950s, the term "human resource management" began to be used to designate the expansion of traditional personnel management to include modern psychology (Pieper, 1990).

The development of HRM has been influenced predominantly by two schools of psychology. Behaviorism is a uniquely American branch of psychology that traces to the work of John B. Watson, a contemporary of Taylor. Watson believed that the study of human behavior could be objective and scientific. The work of behaviorists led to the development of tests and evaluation methods that are so much a part of modern HRM. Humanistic psychology is the other school that has influenced American HRM. It began in the 1930s, when Abraham Maslow broke with behaviorism and launched a "third force" in American psychology (Pieper, 1990).

Maslow was extremely influential in shaping the human relations theory of HRM, which gained popularity in the 1950s. Maslow's hierarchy of human needs is known by every HRM practitioner, and its relevance for the profession is unmatched. Humanistic psychology holds that employees can no longer be regarded as replaceable parts of the production process. Employees have needs for security, self-expression, communication, and recognition that employers must meet in order to achieve a stable and productive workforce. Goble (1971) notes that a 1969 survey of 302 companies found that 80% acknowledged the importance of psychology to productivity and profitability (Pieper, 1990).

By the 1970s, the human resource approach emerged as the latest development, combining elements of earlier theories. Employees were now perceived as a resource whose needs are compatible with the needs of the organization. HRM came to be defined as "that area of organization life that focuses on the effective management and utilization of people" (Walters, 1985, p. 4).

HRM today is a far more scientific and broader field than it was at NCR a hundred years ago. HRM has moved into a central role in modern organizations, placing tremendous pressure on its practitioners. Recruitment, job analysis, training and development, human resource planning, management succession planning, designing cost-effective benefit packages, managing employee harassment programs, and dealing with employee privacy rights — to name but a few — are all tasks the modern HRM department must undertake (Pieper, 1990).