The History of HRM
The journey started when the Industrial Revolution took place in England in the late 19th century.
1st phase: Welfare Movement
This first phase in the evolution of HRM, is known as the 'welfare movement'. After the Industrial Revolution, some employers wanted to improve working conditions. In the 1890s, these employers started providing workplace and family amenities such as lunchrooms, medical care and housing. The impetus for some employers was humanitarian concern and religious principles, but, for others, it was more pragmatic as they began to recognize the link between the welfare of their employees and the level of production in their factories. This led to the creation of stand-alone employment offices where a 'welfare officer' dealt solely with employment issues.
2nd phase: Scientific Management Movement
The next phase in the development of HRM, known as the 'Scientific Management Movement', is credited to Frederick Taylor in the early part of the twentieth century. An American managing engineer in a steel factory, he became interested in finding the 'one best way' of working that would increase production. His work led to the development of a systematic approach to the design of jobs and to systems of employment and pay. Taylor identified a revolutionary solution
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Frederick Winslow Taylor (March 20, 1856 - March 21, 1915) American Mechanical Engineer. Father of Scientific Management. |
“The remedy for this inefficiency lies in systematic management, rather than in searching for some unusual or extraordinary man.”
He believed a worker should get “a fair day’s pay for a fair day’s work”—no more, no less. If the worker couldn’t work to the target, then the person shouldn’t be working at all. Taylor also believed that management and labour should cooperate and work together to meet goals. He was the first to suggest that the primary functions of managers should be planning and training.
Taylor proposed a “neat, understandable world in the factory, an organization of men whose acts would be planned, coordinated, and controlled under continuous expert direction. “Factory production was to become a matter of efficient and scientific management—the planning and administration of workers and machines alike as components of one big machine.
In 1909, Taylor published The Principles of Scientific Management. In this book, he suggested that productivity would increase if jobs were optimized and simplified. He also proposed matching a worker to a particular job that suited the person’s skill level and then training the worker to do that job in a specific way. Taylor first developed the idea of breaking down each job into parts and timing each part to determine the most efficient method of working. Although he’s known as the father of scientific management, Federick Taylor initially called his method “shop management.” He ended up adopting the term “scientific management” in 1911 after it was popularised in a court case by future Supreme Court justice Louis Brandeis with the help of mechanical engineer Henry L. Gantt.
One of Taylor’s most famous studies was from his time at the Bethlehem Steel Company in the early 1900s. He noticed that workers used the same shovel for all materials, even though the various materials differed in weight. By observing the movements of the workers and breaking the movements down into their component elements, Taylor determined that the most efficient shovel load was 21½ lb. Accordingly, he set about finding or designing different shovels to be used for each material that would scoop up that amount.
Taylorists aimed to increase productivity through greater efficiency in production practices, selection and training practices and, interestingly, incentivized pay for workers (also known as pay for performance). With the emergence of the production line and large factories in the 1920s, positions such as 'labour manager' and 'employment manager' emerged. Their work involved the centralization and standardization of certain employment-related functions, such as hiring, payroll, record keeping, and dealing with issues such as absences, recruitment and queries over bonuses.
While mechanical engineer Frederick Winslow Taylor devoted most of his work to time studies, efficiency and industrial engineering experts Frank and Lillian Gilbreth focused on motion studies. Taylor’s work focused mainly on reducing process time, while Gilbreths’ work optimized processes by reducing the amount of motions involved.
Time studies:
Taylor thought reducing the time to complete a task was the primary way to increase labour productivity. He advocated for conducting time studies wherein he would divide work into specific tasks, use a stopwatch to time each element of the task, and then reorder the elements into an optimal sequence. Taylor’s time studies emphasized maximizing profit.
Motion studies:
Rather than only using a stopwatch to time workers, the Gilbreths advocated for filming workers (using a 35mm hand-crank camera) to have a visual guide of how a task was completed. This way they could not only track the time it took to finish the task but also analyze areas for improvement. Additionally, the films could even be shown to workers so they could see firsthand how they could enhance their techniques. Gilbreth’s motion studies placed a much higher emphasis on worker well-being than did Taylor’s principles. After Taylor’s death, this key variation ended up causing many disputes between the Gilbreths and other Taylorist thinkers.
4 Principles of Scientific Management
Frederick Taylor devised the following four scientific management principles that are still relevant to this day:
Select methods based on science, not “rule of thumb.” Rather than allowing each worker the freedom to use their own “rule of thumb” method to complete a task, you should instead use the scientific method to determine the “one best way” to do the job.
Assign workers jobs based on their aptitudes. Instead of randomly assigning workers to any open job, assess which ones are most capable of each specific job and train them to work at peak efficiency.
Monitor worker performance. Assess your workers’ efficiency and provide additional instruction when necessary to guarantee they are working productively.
Properly divide the workload between managers and workers. Managers should plan and train, while workers should implement what they’ve been trained to do.
3rd phase: Behavioral Science Movement
The third phase in the evolution of HRM stems from around the time of the Second World War and the work of Elton Mayo (Psychologist) and his colleagues Roethlisberger and Whilehead (Sociologists), and William Dickson (company representative). in the USA, Known as the 'Hawthorne Effect', as they concerned employees in the Hawthorne plant of the Western Electrical Company in Cicero during the 1920s., these experiments observed employee performance under a range of different working conditions.
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George Elton Mayo
(26 December 1880 – 7 September 1949) an Australian-born psychologist, industrial researcher, and organizational theorist |
The results highlighted new areas of concern for employers and led to an emphasis on personal development, a better understanding of group work, and the importance of working conditions as a means of motivating employees.
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| Airplane View of Hawthorne Works, ca. 1925. Western Electric Company |
The 1960s and 70s saw the introduction of a large body of legislation, both in Europe and the USA, which provided rights for Studies employees around dismissals, equal pay, pension rights, and health and safety. In addition to managing the employment relationship through negotiations and interactions with trade unions, this development created additional work as those with responsibility for the employment relationship were now also charged with understanding and applying these pieces of legislation. The emergence of the job title 'personnel officer' and the business discipline of 'personnel management' (PM) can be traced to around this time. By the end of the 1970s, PM had become recognized as a critical process in organizations and a stand-alone theory in the study of management and organizations.
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Hawthorne studies were designed to explore avenues to increase worker productivity. The Hawthorne theory of management suggests that worker productivity is not only based on physical conditions but the notion that management cares about employee welfare and wages paid to them.
There are 4 separate experiments in Hawthorne Studies:
Illumination Experiments (1924-1927)
Relay Assembly Test Room Experiments (1927-1932)
Experiments in Interviewing Workers (1928- 1930)
Bank Wiring Room Experiments (1931-1932)
Illumination Experiment
The first and most influential of these studies is known as the “Illumination Experiment”, conducted between 1924 and 1927 (sponsored by the National Research Council). The company had sought to ascertain whether there was a relationship between productivity and the work environments (e.g., the level of lighting in a factory). During the first study, a group of workers who made electrical relays experienced several changes in lighting. Their performance was observed in response to the minutest alterations in illumination. What the original researchers found was that any change in a variable, such as lighting levels, led to an improvement in productivity. This was true even when the change was negative, such as a return to poor lighting. However, these gains in productivity disappeared when the attention faded (Roethlisberger & Dickson, 1939). The outcome implied that the increase in productivity was merely the result of a motivational effect on the company’s workers (Cox, 2000). Their awareness of being observed had led them to increase their output. It seemed that increased attention from supervisors could improve job performance.
Relay Assembly Test Room Experiment
Spurred by these initial findings, a series of experiments were conducted at the plant over the next eight years. From 1928 to 1932, Elton Mayo (1880–1949) and his colleagues began a series of studies examining changes in work structure (e.g., changes in rest periods, length of the working day, and other physical conditions.) in a group of five women. The results of the Elton Mayo studies reinforced the initial findings of the illumination experiment. Freedman (1981, p. 49) summarizes the results of the next round of experiments as follows:
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Women in the Relay Assembly Test Room, ca. 1930
Experiments in Interviewing Workers
Between 1928 and 1930, approximately 20,000 interviews were conducted during the experiments. The purpose of these interviews was to determine the employees’ attitudes towards the company, wages, supervision, promotions, etc. This interview experiment provided researchers with valuable information on the overall behaviour across the company.
Bank Wiring Observation Room Study
In a separate study conducted between 1927 and 1932, six women working together to assemble telephone relays were observed. Following the secret measuring of their output for two weeks, the women were moved to a special experiment room. The experiment room, which they would occupy for the rest of the study, had a supervisor who discussed various changes to their work. The subsequent alterations the women experienced included breaks varied in length and regularity, the provision (and the non-provision) of food, and changes to the length of the workday. For the most part, changes to these variables (including returns to the original state) were accompanied by an increase in productivity. The researchers concluded that the women’s awareness of being monitored, as well as the team spirit engendered by the close environment, improved their productivity.
Subsequently, a related study was conducted by W. Lloyd Warner and Elton Mayo, anthropologists from Harvard (Henslin, 2008). They carried out their experiment on 14 men who assembled telephone switching equipment. The men were placed in a room along with a full-time observer who would record all that transpired. The workers were to be paid for their productivity. However, the surprising outcome was a decrease in productivity. The researchers discovered that the men had become suspicious that an increase in productivity would lead the company to lower their base rate or find grounds to fire some of the workers. Additional observation unveiled the existence of smaller cliques within the main group. Moreover, these cliques seemed to have their own rules for conduct and distinct means to enforce them. The results of the study seemed to indicate that workers were likely to be influenced more by the social force of their peer groups than the incentives of their superiors. This outcome was construed not necessarily as challenging the previous findings but as accounting for the potentially stronger social effect of peer groups.
4th Phase: Human Resource Management
The most recent phase in the evolution is Human Resource Management, starting in the USA in the 1980s, when the concept as we know it today began to emerge. During the 1960s and 70s, personnel management and human resource management largely coexisted as terms and were used interchangeably. However, in the 1980s, there was a move to differentiate traditional PM from HRM. The 'personnel management' of the past was associated with the control and cost-effective operations of employees, and adherence to employee legislation, and was dominated by industrial relations and negotiations with trade unions. HRM of the future was becoming more focused on the employee as an asset rather than a cost, and employment relations were becoming increasingly more focused on relationships with the individual rather than the trade union.
However, the differences between PM and HRM are still being debated. For some, HRM is simply a 'relabelling' or 'repackaging' of PM with a new title (Gunnigle and Flood, 1990; Legge, 1995). In many organizations, employees are still considered a labour cost that must be efficiently managed like any other resource, albeit the HR practices through which they manage the employment relationship have become more complex.
On the other hand, for many other organizations, HRM represents a new paradigm, where employees are considered a unique strategic asset. Barney's dies VRIO model (1991) suggests that an organization's employees are its single most important strategic differentiator. They are valuable, rare, inimitable (not easily copied) and organized so, though competitors can copy your marketing or service strategy quite quickly, they cannot easily take all your employees and everything they have to offer. In reality, many organizations today engage in a range of HR practices to meet the different needs and roles of employee groups across the business. Some of these practices will be aligned more closely with a PM perspective while others, in the same organization, may reflect a more contemporary HRM approach (Lewin, 2001). In addition, different organizations will have different HR philosophies which might be more consistent with either a PM or HRM perspective. Sometimes this is due to the personal values of the CEO and the style of the senior leadership team. However, the nature and demands of the organization's business context are always significant factors influencing the approach taken to HRM. Given the global landscape in which businesses have to compete today - the fast pace of technological developments, changing consumer needs and the impact of global economies on local businesses the focus on HRM as a strategic contributor to the organization is increasing.
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