UNIT 5 CORPORATE RELATIONS MANAGEMENT ABILITY: Developing & managing Human Relations & Public Relations

Since World War II, calling it “ 1.human relations,” 2.“personnel management,” 3.“labor relations,” and 4.now “management of human resources,” business has spent millions to make employees productive, loyal, and motivated. resources

First, academics, with minds opened by the Hawthorne experiments, led the movement to effectively manage people. Now, eager consultants and zealous staff experts nurture it. Fortune writes of personnel directors as the “new corporate heroes.” Library shelves overflow with people management books, and a hundred new ones appear every year. Two hundred documented attempts are going on to improve the quality of work life (QWL), and three nationally known institutions have charters to improve productivity and QWL.

In some desperation, managers have steadily invested in 1.supervisory training, 2. organizational behavior, 3. interpersonal behavior, 4. T-groups, 5.sensitivity training, 6.employee attitude surveys, 7. job enrichment, 8.flexible benefits, and 9. expanded fringe benefits—bigger pensions, subsidized insurance, more holidays, shorter work days, four-day weeks, —and now companies are attempting to revive the “work ethic” with human resources departments. Big programs, but where are the payoffs?

Human resources management seems to be mostly good intentions and whistling in the dark And the results of the 1970s suggest that we may not even be holding our own. The poor management of the work force in this country is damaging the nation and our standard of living. It is making us uncompetitive with the Japanese and some other Asians, the West Germans, the Swiss, and many others.

Few managers need much convincing about the importance of people All the managers I’ve talked to say, “People are our greatest asset.” But they also report:- 1.“We don’t know how to motivate them.” 2.“People are getting harder to manage.” 3.“Personnel departments don’t give us the leadership we need.” 4. “We’re just hanging in there trying to cope.”

What’s Been Wrong? Managers have had difficulty managing human resources for four reasons:

1. Achieving wholehearted cooperation, energy, and commitment from large numbers of employees is difficult, so managers are often unrealistic in their hopes. 1

2. Concepts concerning the management of large numbers of people often convey contradictory messages to managers.

3. Critical problems in the corporate management of personnel, 1.such as the place of human resources management (HRM) in corporate decision making, 2.the role of personnel staff, and 3.a lack of sufficient human resources management 4.know-how at top management levels, remain largely unresolved.

4. Some management assumptions concerning HRM undermine the efforts of many managers, no matter how well intentioned they may be.

Achieving employee commitment Capturing the loyalty of hundreds or thousands of individuals in one business enterprise so that they direct their energies toward the goals of the company is enormously difficult. But employees usually focus on short time horizons to 1.meet their needs in wages, 2.salaries, 3.working conditions, 4.fair treatment, and promotion. Drawing a connection between these sets of goals is not easy.

1. Human relations. Theories of group behavior deal with social interaction and interpersonal relationships through such tools as theories X and Y and sensitivity training. The school’s precept is that because group behavior is critical to collaboration and success, groups must bestow authority and control upward. The individual behavior school of human relations focuses on individual psychology, leadership, power, authority, responsibility, and the subconscious. Its main concern is the individual’s feelings and drives and, how they affect the workplace.