MGMT 44301 Exam 1

Increasing responsibility: Voice

Provide employees with access to formal channels within their company to express concerns about their work situation.

What is internal fit?

Refers to how the three primary HR activities align with each other.

What is external fit?

Refers to the alignment between the three primary HR activities and the HR challenges.

Relation between workforce planning and strategy

Required speed to deal with shortages and surpluses, criticality of employee groups

8 stakeholder groups for ethical behavior

Shareholders, community, governance, diversity, employees, environment, human rights, and product.

Relation between workforce planning and company characteristics

Smaller companies cannot transfer, promote, or demote people. Additionally, they often don't have an HR department

Job design and company characteristics: Formalization of Jobs

Smaller organizations have more fluidly designed jobs. Large organizations have rigid job designs

Workforce planning and corporate culture

Some companies aren't willing to sacrifice bottom line for employees or vice versa. Additionally, you must consider how employees will react to a certain conflicting workforce planning tactic

What are the various organizational demands?

Strategy, company characteristics, organizational culture, and employee concerns

Relation between HR and Culture

The culture of a company affects managerial decisions about which specific practices to use with regard to work design and workforce planning, building of competencies, and management of attitudes. The culture of a company also influences the effectiveness of different HR practices. The strength of the culture further influences the effectiveness of employee management practices.

External factors influencing workforce planning

local labor market, economic conditions, industry trends

What is competitive advantage?

A company's ability to create more economic value than its competitors

Job Characteristics Model

A model of job design that considers core job dimensions, individuals' critical psychological states, and employee growth-need strength.

ADA

Americans with Disabilities Act

How do you build a high-performing organization?

Customize your HR scorecard, be consistent, be specific, follow up on the implementation of a redesign.

How do you determine who is an employee vs. an independent contractor?

Determined based on behavioral control, financial control, and relationship of the parties

Labor shortage tactics

Employee overtime, contingent labor, employee retention, promotions, transfers, demotions, and new hires

Workforce planning and employee concerns

Employee stress and work/life balance issues, perceptions of if they believe a decision was made fairly

Job design and company characteristics: Breadth and depth of tasks

Employees need to perform multiple tasks given limited resources in a small organization.

EEOC

Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.

What are the pressures to compromise ethics?

Following the boss, meeting overly aggressive objectives, helping the organization to survive, meeting scheduling pressures, wanting to be a team player.

Job Analysis Techniques

Functional job analysis, position analysis questionnaire, critical incidents, task inventory, job element

Why is employee cost typically the largest cost for organizations?

In addition to compensation costs, employers incur costs as a result of the time and effort needed for recruiting, hiring, training, evaluating, mentoring, coaching, and disciplining employees.

What are the various environmental influences?

Labor force trends, technological advances, globalization, and ethics and social responsibility

Job design and employee concerns: Perception of fairness of job duties

Must take into consider role overload, role underload, role ambiguity, and role conflict

Job design and globalization

Need to address cross-cultural issues and different cultures. Relevant Labor Market

What are the 3 axioms to keep in mind when managing employees?

No two companies are the same, there is no best way to manage employees, and using the wrong practice, or using the right practice poorly, can cause more harm than good.

Methods of collecting job information

Observation (repetitive jobs), diary/log (most jobs), interview (most jobs), questionnaire (all jobs, note: literacy constraints), ONET (all jobs)

OSHA

Occupational Safety and Health Administration

What are the 3 main HR challenges?

Organizational demand (strategy, company characteristics), environmental influences (labor force trends, globalization), and regulatory issues (federal, state, local legislation)

Increasing responsibility: Participation

Permits employees to participate in decisions that may affect them in their job

What is uniqueness?

The extent to which the contributions employees make, and the necessary competencies to realize those contributions, are specialized or unique to a company and not readily available in the open labor market.

What is strategic value?

The extent to which the contributions of employees help their organization achieve competitive advantage

What is HR alignment?

The extent to which the three primary HR activities are designed to achieve the goals of the organization.

What are Human Resource practices?

The practices that a company has put in place to manage employees.

Job design and strategy

The type of strategy that a company pursues has two direct implications for job design: how jobs are structured and what tasks, duties, and responsibilities employees need to perform.

Internal factors that influence workforce planning

Turnover, employee movements, employee productivity, company performance, strategic direction.

What are the primary HR activities?

Workforce design and workforce planning, managing employee competencies, managing employee attitudes and behaviors

Relation between HR and labor force trends

Workforce is becoming older which means companies face increasing costs of health care and other benefits and they need to retrain older workers to ensure their skills are compatible with company needs. Additionally, the workforce is becoming more diverse, fastest growing groups are Hispanics and Asians. Companies must take into consideration the ability to attract future employees, manage diversity.

job description

a written description of the basic tasks, duties, and responsibilities required of an employee holding a particular job

Changing job tasks: Job enlargement

assignment of additional tasks to employees

Autonomy

job permits substantial freedom and discretion to the individual

Labor surplus tactics

layoffs, attrition, hiring freezes, early retirement, promotions, transfers, demotions

Job specification

describes the minimum qualifications a person must have to perform the job successfully

Job design

determining the tasks and responsibilities that employees in a particular job are expected to perform as well as how they need to interact with coworkers

Relation between HR and strategy: differentiation strategy

emphasizes achieving competitive advantage over competing firms by providing something unique

Job based employees

employees employed internally who do not contribute in a unique manner. (high strategic value, low uniqueness). Productivity based HR system

Core employees

employees who are most likely to contribute directly to a firm's core competencies (high strategic value, high uniqueness). Commitment based HR system.

Alliance partners

external employees who make unique contributions but whose contributions are limited in terms of strategic value. (low strategic value, high uniqueness). Collaborative-based HR system.

Contract Workers

external employees whose contributions are not unique and limited in strategic value. (Low strategic value, low uniqueness). Compliance based HR system

Relation between HR and employee concerns: distributive justice

fairness of what individuals receive from companies in return for their efforts

Relationship between HR and strategy: cost leadership strategy

focuses on outperforming competing firms by maintaining the ability to offer the lowest costs for products or services.

Relation between HR and employee concerns: interactional justice

how employees feel they are treated by their managers and supervisors.

Increasing responsibility: Job enrichment

increase level of responsibility and control regarding tasks performed in a job.

Feedback

individual receives direct and clear information about the effectiveness of their performance

Changing job tasks: Job rotation

moving workers from one job to another

Relation between HR and employee concerns: psychological contract

perceived obligations that employees believe they owe their company and their company owes them. Governs how employees evaluate company decisions regarding how they are managed

Job analysis

process of systematically identifying the tasks, duties, and responsibilities expected to be performed as well as the KSAs employees must possess.

Relational relationships

relationships that involve a social or emotional commitment to the individual by the company and vice versa

Transactional relationships

relationships that tend to focus narrowly on the performance of the necessary tasks, duties, and responsibilities that must be performed during a predetermined time period

5 core job dimensions

skill variety, task identity, task significance, autonomy, feedback

WARN Act

the Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act of 1989; this law requires employers to give notice of plant closings and mass layoffs. Covers companies with over 100 employees

Task significance

the degree to which a job has a substantial impact on the lives or work of other people

Task identity

the degree to which a job requires completion of a whole and identifiable piece of work

Skill variety

the different tasks and activities that challenge an employees skills and abilities

What are efficiency approaches to job design?

time and motion studies (reducing wasteful movement), job specialization (breaking down jobs into core elements), job simplification (removing authority)

Relation between HR and employee concerns: procedural justice

whether the processes that are used to make decisions, allocate awards, or resolve disputes are fair