Staffing and Human Resource Management

 

A synergistic relationship exists between individuals and their employing organizations. But students have strong concerns about their future organ�izational life, especially about the quality of supervision they will experi�ence. Apart from the formal employment contract, an informal and often unspoken psychological contract exists between employee and employer. Serious dissatisfaction can set in when the terms of an individual's psycho�logical contract are not met. According to Argyris's incongruency thesis, the principles of formal organization tend to encourage psychological immaturity in the average employee. He believes that the demands of the typical organization are incongruent with the psychological needs of the individual, and individuals naturally strive to be mature but the organizations that employ them often encourage immature behavior.

Within the context of strategic human resource management, staffing encompasses human resource planning, acquisition, and development aimed at providing the talent necessary for organizational success. Four key staffing activities necessarily linked to organizational strategy and structure are: (1) human resource planning, (2) selection, (3) perform�ance appraisal, and (4) training. A systems approach to human resource planning will help management devise staffing strategies for future hu�man resource needs. As the organization's gatekeeper for vital human resources, employee selection should be more than a haphazard process of looking around for people to fill vacancies. There are relative advantages to promoting an insider as opposed to transferring in or hiring an outsider. Federal Equal Employment Opportunity laws require managers to make hiring and other personnel decisions on the basis of ability to perform rather than personal prejudice. Because interviews are the most popular employee screening device, experts recommend structured rather than traditional, informal interviews. A structured interview may be defined as a series of job-related questions with predetermined answers that are constantly applied across all interviews for a particular job.

Legally defensible performance appraisals (the process of evaluating individual job performance) enable managers to make objective personnel decisions. Of the three general approaches to performance appraisal � trait, behavior, and outcome � the behavior-oriented approach is the most strongly recommended. The rationale is that behavior, not personal traits or abilities, is ultimately responsible for job success or failure. Listed in declining order of popularity, six common performance appraisal techniques are goal setting, written essays, critical incidents (specific instances of inferior and superior performance are documented by the supervisor when they occur), graphic rating scales, weighted checklists (evaluators check appropriate adjectives or behavioral descriptions that have predetermined weight), and ranking/comparisons. Managers are challenged both to evaluate performance and to develop human potential during the performance appraisal process. This dilemma can be partially resolved by encouraging subordinates to engage in self-evaluation before offering constructive feedback on performance.