HUMAN RESOURCE MANAGEMENT PHILOSOPHY

Human resource management relates to strategic and coherent approach to the management of human resources of an organization. It involves a set of interrelated policies with ideological and philosophical orientation and forms a business – focused approach to manage people for competitive advantages. The starting point for HRM is to define philosophical orientation which helps in defining visionary long – term concept of organization. Philosophy in the context of management of an organization consiste of an integrated set of assumptions and beliefs about the way the things are, the purpose of the activities and the way these should be. These assumptions and beliefs of those who create an organization (owners) and those who manage it (managers, specially the key decision makers) become base for defining vision of the organization. These assumptions and beliefs are sometimes explicit, and occasionally implicit, in the minds of the decision makers. The philosophy of a person has its origin in two premises – fact premises and value premises. Fact premises represent out descriptive view of how the world behaves. They are drawn from research findings and our experiences value premises represent our view of the desirability of certain goals and activities. HR philosophy revolves around management's beliefs and assumptions about people – their nature, needs, value and their approach to work. These beliefs and assumptions, then determine how people should be treated. There are three approaches for treating people: Commodity approach, Machine approach and Humanistic approach in commodity approach, a person is treated like a commodity who can be brought or sold at a price as was the practice in old slavery system. In machine approach, a person is treated as a part of the machine who can be fitted like any other part. Both these approaches treat a person as physiological human being. In humanistic approach, a person is treated as human being having physiological..