Text 2 Human Resource Management

Raw materials, capital, employees, and information are the resources of an effective organization. Those who manage the human resources work in the personnel area. Human-resource management is the process of hiring, developing, motivating, and evaluating people in order to achieve organizational goals. Various policies, procedures, and programs are designed to bring about a proper match between jobs and individuals.

The human-resource function has several goals. The first is to provide competent, well-trained employees for the company. The second is to make employees as effective as possible. The third is to satisfy employees’ needs by helping them achieve successful careers. A human-resource department can achieve these goals only if its managers clearly understand the objectives and strategies of the whole organization.

The main activities in human-resource management are planning and forecasting the need for people, recruiting and selecting employees, training and developing them, appraising their performance, helping develop their career, compensating them, providing fringe benefits, processing promotions, transfers, and separations, and dealing with labour unions.

Text 3 Managing for Quality

The ability to produce high-quality goods and services is more important today than ever. Many U.S. industries – such as automobiles, steel, and home electronics – have lost customers to foreign companies. Their loss is largely their own fault: a lack of attention to quality.

To a consumer, quality is how well a product serves its purpose (called “fitness for use”). From the company’s viewpoint, quality is the degree to which the product conforms to a set of standards. Quality control is creating quality standards and measuring finished goods or services against those standards. Once quality control was simply a matter of inspecting products, before they went out the door. Today it’s a company-wide commitment that supports other business goals.

One of the first to say that quality control should be a company-wide goal was an American, Dr. W. Edwards Deming. His ideas were adopted by the Japanese in the 1950s but ignored in the United States until the 1970s. Deming helped Japanese firms set up the quality-control programs that made them so successful. He believed that quality control must start with top management. They let everyone in the company know that defects are unacceptable and encourage the workers to report problems.

In this country, Armand Feigenbaum expanded the concept to total quality control (TQC). TQC says that quality is the responsibility of the entire company. All employees involved with the product – marketing, purchasing, accounting, shipping, and everyone else – can contribute to quality.

Text 4 Management of Corporate Culture

Corporate culture is the set of attitudes, values, and standards of accepted behaviour that distinguishes one organization from another. Corporate culture is greatly influenced by top management and can change when a new CEO (Chief Executive Officer) takes command. There are four main types of corporate culture: academies, clubs, fortresses, and baseball teams.

An academy is a company that provides excellent management and skills training. It expects its employees to use this training to move steadily through the ranks of management. The culture stresses long-term career advancement. New employees are typically young college graduates who are shaped to the company mold. A classic academy is International Business Machines (IBM). Every manager spends at least forty hours each year in management training school.

In clubs, everyone strives to fit into the group. Commitment to the company, doing things for the good of the group, is emphasized over personal achievement. A typical club is United Parcel Service. Chief executive John W. Rogers and his management committee began as clerks, drivers, and management trainees. Instead of learning more about these specialties, they learned a little of everything. “When decisions have to be made, we get everyone’s opinion, and the company feels like a family to a lot of us,” says John Tranfo, a staff vice president of the company.

Baseball teams seek out talent of all ages and experience. They reward people on the basis of what they produce. The emphasis is on short-term results rather than long-term commitment. Baseball teams don’t spend resources on training. Many accounting and law firms and consulting companies could be classified as free agents, much like professional athletes. If one company doesn’t give them the freedom or rewards they think they deserve, they leave for another one – or form their own.

Fortresses are companies that are struggling to keep afloat. Many are academies, clubs, or baseball teams that have failed and are trying to come back. Fortresses cannot promise job security or reward employees on the basis how well they perform. Good employees may lose their job when the company is sold or restructured.

Of course, many companies can’t be neatly classified in any one way. Many have a blend of corporate structures.