Background material for Year 3 Semester 2 PPSD session on Tuesday 8th April 2008 by Professor Omar Hasan Kasule Sr.
RECRUITMENT, TRAINING and DEVELOPMENT
Human resource management (HRD) has 2 parts: placement and maintenance. Placement involves human resources planning, recruitment, selection, orientation, and training. Maintenance involves training and development, compensation, benefits/motivation, evaluation, control, transitions and change, and termination.
Job design is specification of contents, methods, relationships of jobs, and specific task assignment. Job description covers tasks, goals, and expected standards of performance. Job assignment must consider age, gender, education, job skills, perceptions, attitudes, and personality.
Specialization increases efficiency and productivity. Too much specialization is wasteful because workers cannot be rotated.
Job performance is measured by the output, worker behavior, and job satisfaction.
The main principles of good staffing are: hiring the right people, retaining good people, training workers to assume more responsibilities, rehabilitating those who are unproductive, and eliminating misfits.
The selection process involves: preliminary screening, review of applications, testing (job sample test, general intelligence, aptitude tests, personality), reference checks, interview, and physical examination.
Training is part of personnel management and involves: orienting new employees, sharpening skills, keeping skills current, and motivating. Training programs include: simulation, on the job training, outside courses/workshops, apprenticeship.
Development is general improvement in knowledge, understanding, and skills of the worker. Development is informal and is purely a product of staying for a long time in a stimulating and learning organization.
DELEGATION
Delegation is assigning a project or a task to a worker who is then responsible for its execution under varying amounts of supervision. The main elements of delegation are a task, a delegatee, a delegator, and responsibility/accountability. Delegation frees the leader's time for other activities such as thinking, strategic planning, control, and evaluation. It is a form of training and skill enhancement for the followers. Some tasks are delegatable and others are not.
A successful delegation process requires deciding what to delegate, making the assignment clear and specific, assigning an objective and not a procedure, allowing autonomy but monitoring performance, giving credit, avoiding blaming, and taking full responsibility for mistakes. The delegatee chosen for the task must have time, skills, and enthusiasm. He requires training, coaching, continuous motivation, follow-up, and evaluation. Delegation is sometimes avoided because of poor leadership, misunderstanding the delegation process, and follower unpreparedness.
WORKER APPRAISAL/EVALUATION & REWARDS
Appraisals are used for promotion, salary reviews, placement, motivation, and company planning. Trait appraisal looks at traits such as: appearance, self-confidence, ability of self-expression, alertness, ambition, initiative, energy, knowledge of organization, ability to learn, accuracy, meeting deadlines, health, enthusiasm, attitude, acceptance of responsibility, efficient use of time, finishing tasks, adaptability, maturity, delegation, judgment, volume of work output, and forward planning. Performance appraisal looks at productivity in terms of quality and quantity. Performance has two components: competence (knowledge, skills, level of education, and amount of training) and commitment (self confidence and motivation). Extrinsic rewards are salaries and benefits that may be monetary or non-monetary. Intrinsic rewards are intangibles like job satisfaction, respect, self-esteem.
PROBLEMS OR WORKERS AND MANAGERS
Problem workers are activists turned office workers, misfits, incompetents, and workers with poor attitude. Common attitude problems are ignoring instructions, chronic whining and complaining, an attitude of not caring, acting like knowing everything, a 9-to-5 attitude, burn-out, prejudice, difficulty of getting along, gossip, tension and hard feelings, too much sick leave, trying to be perfect and avoiding challenges, being a maverick loner and non-conformist, under-performing, egomania and autocracy, poor human relations, unrealistic objectives, trying to be irreplaceable, conflicting with others, and disloyalty. Attitude problems should be avoided preventively by discovering them during interview, trying to discover them at work while they are still below the surface, counseling after employment.
DISEASES OF MANAGERS
A bad manager leads to demotivation and loss of initiative. Among diseases of managers are intimidating and managing by fear, bad temper, indecisiveness, waffling, abdication of responsibility, being an authoritarian power clutcher, behaving as of the boss is always right, and dishonesty.
