UGC NET/JRF EXAM, June-2019* Labour and Social Welfare

The idea of a 'Human Relations' approach to the organisation of work originated from research by Elton Mayo ànd his colleagues into industrial relations and productivity at the Hawthorne plant of the Western Electric Company in Chicago during the period 1927 to 1932.

The dominant theory of industrial relations at this time was that of scientific management, the key idea of F.W. Taylor. Taylor's theory of industrial productivity was based on two important premises:

• that workers' primary motivation for working is economic need and financial reward;
• that men work primarily as individuals rather than as part of a team or social group.

Scientific management theory therefore argued that the main way to raising productivity is by offering workers financial incentives and encouraging every individual to work harder. Elton Mayo's researches contradicted such assumptions and led to a whole new school of thought, a human relations approach to industrial relations.

In his seminal work, Perlmutter (1969) identified three different international orientations (ethnocentric, polycentric and geocentric) that have become the standard way to describe MNC staffing policies.

MNCs following an ethnocentric staffing policy would appoint mostly parent country nationals to top positions at their subsidiaries, while MNCs following a polycentric staffing policy would prefer to appoint host country nationals.

Firms with a geocentric staffing policy would simply appoint the best person, regardless of his/her nationality and that could include third country nalionals, nationals of a country other than the MNC's home country and the country of the subsidiary.

In a later publication, Heenan and Perlmutter (1979) defined a fourth approach, which they called regiocentric. In this approach, managers are transferred on a regional basis, such as Europe, and it often forms a mid-way station between a pure polycentric/ethnocentric approach and a truly geocentric approach.

It is important to note that these staffing policies apply to key positions in MNC subsidiaries only.

Performance appraisal means evaluating an employee's current and/or past perfomance relative to his or her performance standards.

Performance appraisal requires setting performance standards and assumes that the employee receives the training, feedback, and incentives required to eliminate performance deficiencies.

Stripped to its essentials, performance appraisal always involves the three-step performance appraisal process:

(1) setting work standards;
(2) assessing the employee's actual performance relative to those standards (this often involves some rating form); and
(3) providing feedback to the employee with the aim of helping him or her to eliminate performance deficiencies or to continue to perform above par.

Effective appraisals actually begin before the actual appraisal, with the manager defining the employee's job and performance criteria.

Defining the job means making sure that you and your subordinate agree on his or her duties and job standards and on the appraisal method you will use.

Conditions as to when and how the following types of deductions can be made:
Deductions for Fines (Sec. 8)

1. Employer cannot impose any fine on any employee except for acts or omissions committed by him and which the employer must have specified in notices approved by the appropriate Government or by any other prescribed authority.

2. A notice specifying such acts or omissions shall be exhibited in the prescribed manner on the premises in which the employment is carried on or in the case of persons employed upon a railway at the prescribed places.

3. No fine can be imposed on an employee until he has been given an opportunity of showing cause against the fine, or otherwise, than in accordance with such procedure as may be prescribed for the imposition of fines.

4. The total amount of fines which may be imposed in any one wage period on any employee shall not exceed an amount equal to three per cent of the wages payable to him in respect of that wage period.

5. No fine can be imposed on any employed person who is under the age of 15 years.

6. Any fine imposed on any employee cannot be recovered from him by instalments or after the expiry of ninety days from the day on which it was imposed.

7. Every fine shall be deemed to have been imposed on the day of the act or omission in respect of which it was imposed.

8. All fines and all realisations thereof must be recorded in a register to be kept by the person responsible for the payment of wages in such form as may be prescribed. Fines collected must be credited to a Fines Fund.

9. All realisations from fines can be applied only to such purposes beneficial to the employees of the undertaking as are approved by the prescribed authority.

One precondition for personal effectiveness is better self-awareness. But only understanding one's self does not make a person effective. One simple model for self-awareness, which is widely used, is the Johari Window, developed by Luft and Ingham.

In this model, there are two main dimensions for understanding the self-the aspects of a person's behaviour and style that are known to him (self) and those that are known to people with whom he interacts (others).

A combination of these two dimensions reveals four areas of knowledge about the self (Figure). The upper left-hand square is the arena or the public self-a part of an individual's behaviour known both to himself and to others.

The arena includes information such as name, age, physical appearance and familial or organisational affiliation. The blind area contains the aspects of the person's behaviour and style that are known to others but the person himself does not know about.

A person may have mannerisms of which he is unaware but which are perceived by others as funny, annoying or pleasing.

For example, an individual might be surprised to hear that his method of asking questions annoys others who may interpret them as cross-examination rather than curiosity or a request for information.

The closed area involves the behavioural traits known to the person but not revealed to others; things in this area are secret. For example, a subordinate may be annoyed if his supervisor does not ask him to sit down during a meeting, but he will remain standing without letting the supervisor know that he is annoyed.

The supervisor may think that the subordinate does not mind standing and may accept his behaviour as part of their hierarchical relationship. Most of us have many such feelings in our closed areas that we are unwilling to reveal to the persons concerned.

The fourth area is the dark area, inaccessible to both the self and others. Some psychologists believe that this is a very large area indeed, and that certain circumstances (for example, an accident), a particular stage of one's life or special techniques such as psychoanalysis or psychodynamics may suddenly make a person realise some hidden aspects of himself.

Because the dark area cannot be consciously controlled or changed, this discussion will be limited to the arena, the blind and the closed areas. In the Johari Window model, the size of the arena or open space is critical for personal effectiveness. Arena increases in proportion to the decrease in the blind and the closed areas.

Professor Jay Barney of Ohio State University and Professor Patrick Wright of Cornell University developed a comprehensive model in 1997 to establish HR as a competitive advantage of the firm.

This model was built on the framework of VRIO (value, rareness, imitability and organization).

In other words, the premise of the model is that it is the value, rareness, non-imitability and scientific organiasation of HR that provide sustainable competitive advantage to the firm to be precise, the model presents three elements of HRM that provide the competitive advantage as indicated in the following:

1. Sustainable competitive advantage stems from firm-specific more than general skills. All the firms possess general skills and they provide equal value to them. Thus, to seek sustained competitive advantage through general skills would be futile.

On the other hand, this does not imply that these skills are not important. In contrast, specific skills provide value only to a particular firm that posess them.

2. Sustainable competitive advantage comes from teams more than from individuals. Individuals though quite valuable, it is the teamwork and teams that provide competitive advantage, because most of the tasks in organizations are interdependent.

Further, team working promotes trust and bonds among employees. This team environment will be firm-specific, rare, valuable and difficult for the competitors to imitate or pirate them unlike a single individual or group of individuals.

3. Sustainable competitive advantage stems from HRM systems more than single HRM practices. The essence of it is no individual HRM practice like training, selection, reward etc., or a few HR practices however best they may be, can become source of competitive advantage.

It is rather a well-integrated HRM system that produces a synergetic effect among all the HRM practices that would offer the competive advantage.

Vroom's expectancy theory: This theory of motivation was advanced by the psychologist Victor H. Vroom. According to him people will be motivated to do things to reach a goal if they believe in the worth of that goal and if they can see that what they do will help them in achieving it.

This theory states that individual's motivation toward doing anything will be determined by the value they place on the outcome of their effort (whether positive or negative), multiplied by the confidence they have that their efforts will help in achieving a goal.

Algebraically, Vroom's theory may be stated as:

Force = Valence × Expectancy

Where, Force is the strength of a person's motivation, Valence is the strength of an individual's preference for a particular outcome. Expectancy is the probability that a particular action will lead to a desired outcome.

Personality has been assessed in a variety of ways. One of the more popular assessments is the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI)..The MBTI is predicated upon 16 personality types.

Each type is created by a person's status on four bipolar dimensions: Extraversion-Intraversion, Sensing-Intuition, Thinking-Feeling, and Judgment-Perception.

Questions are asked that require individuals to state their personal preference for how they direct their energies, process information, make decisions, and organize their lives.

When scored, the MBTI yields a profile of the individual in terms of these four bipolar dimensions-for example, as IntraversionSensing-Feeling-Perception. This particular profile is classified as the ISFP personality type.

According to the MyersBriggs theory of personality, each of 16 personality types can be characterized in terms of job or role preferences that best match their personality.

Among the strengths of the MBTI are its case of understanding, high face validity, and appeal among a wide population of users.

Critics of the MBTI question whether it is useful to conceptualize personality into "types," the validity of the four dimensions (the strongest support is for IntraversionExtraversion), and the lack of differentiation in interpretation between a high score and low score on a given dimension.

For example, a person who is a strong extravert and another person who is mildly extraverted both are classified as the same type (E).

Despite criticisms of the test and its underlying theory, the MBTI is widely used to make personnel selection decisions and to help people understand their own personality.