An Asian Perspective
E-Book, Englisch, 469 Seiten
ISBN: 978-1-78063-245-2
Verlag: Elsevier Reference Monographs
Format: PDF
Kopierschutz: Adobe DRM (»Systemvoraussetzungen)
Considers the influences on HRM, including the political, economic and social contexts and expectationsDiscusses organisational behaviour impacts on HRMReview of HRM in Asia with topics and practices organised thematically and integrated, rather than by country
Dr Chris Rowley is the Director of the Centre for Research on Asian Management and Professor of Human Resource Management at City University. He is Editor of the leading journal Asia Pacific Business Review, Series Editor of the Working in Asia and Asian Studies book series and Technical Advisor (Research and Publications) for the HEAD Foundation, Singapore. He has given a range of talks and lectures to universities and companies internationally with research and consultancy experience with unions, business and government; his previous employment includes varied work in both the public and private sectors.
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2 Employee resourcing
2.1 Introduction
We have so far looked at HRM in terms of its common aspects, broad coverage, development and links to strategy and tensions within it. This has given both an overview and framework for the rest of the book. We now shift our focus towards the key initial area in HRM – employee resourcing. How do organisations staff and make operational their business strategies? This concerns the utilisation of HR planning (HRP). A second key aspect of this is employee recruitment and selection. Once strategic and business plans are formulated, how are they ‘resourced’ with HR? In considering this, we will draw attention to the major differences in resourcing in Asia compared to Western models. 2.2 Overview
HRP is concerned with the acquisition, use, improvement and preservation of an organisation’s employees to match its business plans. It attempts to reconcile HR ‘demand’ (forecast from extrapolating corporate plans) and ‘supply’ (forecast by working out the availability of HR and calculating likely shortfalls and surpluses). In short, HRP identifies the key characteristics and behaviour of the HR ‘stock’ and ‘sources’. This identification includes the individual’s length of service, general statistics on turnover, absenteeism, skills, and so on. Also, part of this HRP involves so-called ‘environmental scanning’. HRP aims to control costs by helping to anticipate, or correct, HR shortages or surpluses before they become unmanageable and expensive – as the maxim goes, to ‘employ the right number of people with the right skills at the right time’. In parts of Asia, as a result of the prevalence of low added-value work, the emphasis has been on the ‘right number’ and ‘right time’ and the ‘right skills’ has often been ignored. In the West, especially between the 1950s and 1980s, HRP was seen to have a crucial role, particularly in large organisations operating in stable operating environments. In the West today, however, even in the largest organisations HRP is sometimes seen as less useful, just as it has been viewed in small firms and in more volatile contexts. In parts of Asia small firms are an important part of the economy and some Asian work environments are volatile, so HRP is less practised – with damaging consequences for the population as well as for the resources of the Asian countries. The idea of the so-called ‘flexible firm’ is one response to this volatility. As was outlined in the previous chapter, in this model the business has a stable ‘core’ of employees who are flexible functionally in terms of jobs and skills. This is surrounded by a ‘periphery’ of other workers who are flexible numerically in terms of their numbers and which can quickly and easily be expanded or reduced in size to reflect business requirements. This second group are seen to act as the ‘shock absorbers’ of the business, there to ‘soak up’ variations in demand, and so on. Another version operates between firms, whereby Asian small-and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) are often treated as shock absorbers by governments and by larger organisations, although some SMEs have long-term, stable and close relationships with these organisations, as is common in Japan. The HR resourcing of organisations is sometimes treated in a manner that has been labelled a ‘downstream’ or ‘third-order’ activity (by Purcell; see Thornhill et al., 2000: 98–100) – that is, an activity which follows in the wake of the business strategy and which HRM practitioners implement in a somewhat mechanical fashion. In other words, at times HR resourcing is not considered in strategic decisions until late on, or it is considered to be neither that important nor very difficult to achieve. Furthermore, some actions and decisions in the area of employee resourcing may not be internally integrated or ‘joined up’. There may well be the management (even political) will to ‘do something’, but the implications are not always thought through. In parts of Asia, HR resourcing, except for the most senior or influential jobs, is definitely ‘third order’. We consider what might be the problems with this view that HR resourcing is not very important or not very difficult and what are the influences on resourcing an organisation with employees to deliver and fulfil its business strategy? We will explore these issues here and develop models to look more coherently at employee resourcing. We will see that in some rapidly modernising economies of Asia, HR are considered to be so freely available that the potential contribution of HRM is overlooked. This neglect of the application of systematic HRM techniques is damaging to organisational success because, although HR may be plentiful, they are generally of the wrong type and are often selected on the basis of factors other than capability. Following this first main section of the chapter we move on to the subsequent substantive part of employee resourcing – that is, recruitment and selection. This topic has been summarised by some as meeting HR requirements by defining vacancies, attracting applicants, assessing candidates and making the final decisions. The area is one of the key activities to achieve important HR and organisational outcomes in some HRM models. We will see that in parts of Asia, HR resourcing is sometimes handled very differently from Western standard methods. Once the HR plan has been developed, how is it to be implemented? This can be achieved by using a wide variety of quick and simple to long and complex recruitment and selection techniques. Yet, why should organisations invest in sophisticated, but often costly, recruitment and selection? Indeed, there is evidence that some organisations often fail to take this process seriously, while others believe that it is crucial to future success. In parts of Asia some organisations do not take recruitment and selection seriously nor use the processes effectively, as they prefer more non-objective and less systematic methods, as we will see. While there are many recruitment and selection techniques, much research indicates that most organisations have often relied on the ‘classic trio’ of methods – application forms, references and interviews. This common use of the trio is despite evidence of problems with these methods in themselves, along with their poor reliability as predictors of job performance. There is also some interesting variability in the use of recruitment and selection methods between businesses across different countries in the West as well as in Asia. Some of the implications of contemporary developments in employee resourcing in Asia can be seen in reports in the mass media, such as The Financial Times. For example, Nakamoto (2006), Lucas (2008) and Whipp (2008) cover some of these in relation to Japan, as does McGregor (2009) in relation to China. 2.3 HRP
HRP is seen as providing organisations with the possibility of reaching the ultimate goal of employing the ‘correct’ number of people with the requisite skills at the right time. In theory this sounds eminently desirable and achievable and not too difficult, only requiring HRM departments and managers simply to take into account relevant organisational plans and circumstances and then organise the commensurate HR and actions accordingly. We consider later how this might be achieved. We can see HRP issues in the example of China given in Text Box 2.1. Text Box 2.1 HRP in China Under the planned economy, China had a centrally established personnel planning system carried out at the government level, not that of the enterprise (Warner, 1992). Conceptually, under central planning the national economic system was run as a large enterprise. The central government set the rules regulating enterprise personnel activities and determined the staffing levels of Chinese enterprises. Each year the government calculated the employment quota and assigned it to SOEs and COEs via local labour bureaux. Production, sales, salary and welfare were all decided by the central government and the enterprises exercised none of the selection, payment or workforce size functions that are standard practice in Western enterprises (Zhu and Warner, 2005). The senior management and personnel departments did not have to worry about the number of employees as this had no financial implications. They implemented solely the quota assigned by the government. As Child (1994) noted, social and political discipline was used as an effective method for controlling the Chinese people. This approach to personnel management often resulted in a mismatch of skills with enterprise needs and meant that enterprises could not use their workforce in order to obtain a strategic or competitive advantage (Child, 1994; Chen, 1995; Warner, 2004). This created low morale for the professionally qualified, and for many years labour mobility remained virtually non-existent (Granick, 1991). Since the economic reform, the responsibility for utilising the workforce has shifted from a centralised planning authority to forecasting and...
