Human Resource Management Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1250 words

Human Resource Management - Essay Example To achieve positive outcomes for both the organization and the individual employee, many an organization have resorted to the application of Employee Involvement (EI). Ulrich (1996, pp. 12) notes that EI has helped many organizations respond to business challenges besides improving their economic performances. Such organizations have adopted many strategies, ranging from customer satisfaction, quality circles, teamwork, participatory decision making, consultative committees, work life quality, total quality management, and many more. The most important pre-requisite in copping with these strategies is the employees’ and managers’ willingness to change the manner in which work in their organizations was traditionally done . EI has increased processes and practices that are being utilized by organizations. However, despite EI programs being available from a long time, their contributions in improving the performance of organizations has not yet been clearly recognized or understood. Employee Involvement and Participation Employee involvement involves exerting an upward and countervailing pressure on management by employees. Additionally, it is associated with the adversarial model of relations in a workplace. Employee participation can either be direct or indirect. Employee involvement engages the consideration of common interests between employees and management. The information communication, financial involvement, consultations, problem solving, worker directors, among others are all aimed at influencing the behavior of employees and changing organizational culture. Organizations mainly introduce EI for three main reasons: economic, moral and behavioral. Indirect employee participation and consultation makes use of employees’ potential benefits in the process of decision making. The major impediments to employee participation are attitudes of trade unions and management. EI is a participative process that makes use of the entire employee’s capacity. Legge (2004, pp 43) encourages org anizations to employ employee management because it increases employees’ commitment for the success of the business. In distinguishing EI from employee participation, Robins by observing that EI tends to be more encompassing as employees utilize all their capacity in the organizational success. This view is further supported by Wilkinson (1988, pp98) as he defines EI as the participative process that utilizes workers’ entire capacity, designed to encourage commitment among all employees. On the other hand, employee participation does not specifically seek that individual commitment degree and hence, it is only seen as a subset of employee involvement. For example, participation by employees can only be limited to their participation in the circles of quality and their outcomes. However, employee involvement links quality circles to organizational success and therefore is acts as a strategy to improve performance. Importance of Employee Involvement EI refers to the crea tion of an environment in which the employees have an impact on the actions and decisions that affect their work. EI is neither a tool nor a goal. As

Reinforcement Theory-Reinforcement Theory is one of the most Essay

Reinforcement Theory-Reinforcement Theory is one of the most misunderstood of the Decisional Process Theories - Essay Example Therefore, the goal of this essay is to enlighten the managers or trainers on the correct use of reinforcement theory on several decisional process theories that they can use reinforce their employees in occasion such as motivation. Reinforcement theory refers to a behavioral construction by controlling the consequences of behavior and is achieved through manipulation. A manager or trainer can be able to influence the behavior of employees in an organization by changing the consequence of their behavior. Reinforcement can be meant to correct, motivate, punish or extinct employee’s behavior an action known as behavior modification. For example, while correcting a behavior of an employee by removing unpleasant behavior in employee’s negative reinforcement is applied. Motivation is done to increase the frequency of pleasant behavior by following pleasurable consequence such as promotion to next higher grade. This is positive reinforcement. Moreover, extinction reinforcement is suitable to decrease the frequency of unpleasant behavior of employees by removing the consequence. Lastly, punishment by introducing instant consequence on the unpleasant behavior done by employees is advisable to decrease the frequency of such behaviors (Stephen 83).A manager has a very great influence to the behavior of the employees and by recognizing an individual’s physical and intellectual capacity for every employee to perform various mental and physical tasks in a specific job. For example, placing employees in accordance to their specialization during the division of labor. This will help to boost attitude of employees towards work hence providing the best for the organization. Moreover, manger should uphold personality of every worker in the organization is respecting their values and beliefs as it will help to achieve the goals of an organization (Bartlett 7-8). Reinforcement theory should portray how the organization and employees correlate to provide a healthy