Week 1 - Assignment: Assess Personnel Management Approaches in Public Administration and Week 2 - Assignment: Generate Best Practices for Recruitment and Selection

2/1/22, 9:31 AM

https://www.proquest.com/printviewfile?accountid=28180 1/6

Find a copy

document 1 of 1 Full Text | Scholarly Journal

Continuous improvement in the history of human resource management

Mitchell Langbert.Management Decision; London Vol. 40, Iss. 10, (2002): 932-937. DOI:10.1108/00251740210452791

Click here to request the full-text article. https://5598.account.worldcat.org/account/route/openurl?ctx_ver=Z39.88-2004&ctx_enc=info:ofi/enc:UTF- 8&rfr_id=info:sid/ProQ%3Aabiglobal&rft_val_fmt=info:ofi/fmt:kev:mtx:journal&rft.genre=article&rft.jtitle=Management+Decision&rft.atitle=Continuous+improvement+in+the+his 11-30&rft.volume=40&rft.issue=10&rft.spage=932&rft.title=Management+Decision&rft.issn=00251747

Abstract

Human resource management's challenge is to improve the balance among three competing quality targets: equity, flexibility, and alignment. Management of these targets has improved through four historical periods: the pre-industrial, paternalist, bureaucratic, and high performance. There always have been trade-offs among the three quality targets, but the balance among them has improved through history.

Full Text

Headnote Keywords

Headnote Human resource management,

History, Total quality management

Values

Headnote Abstract

Headnote Human resource management's challenge is to improve the balance among three competing quality targets: equity, flexibility, and alignment. Management of these targets has improved through four historical periods: the pre-industrial, paternalist, bureaucratic, and high performance. There always have been trade-offs among the three quality targets, but the balance among them has improved through history.

Only a decade ago, at the end of the cold war, there was considerable pessimism about the future. Management theorists like Grayson and O'Dell (1988) and Dertouzos et aL (1989) warned US business about losing its productive edge in the face of Asian competition. Historians like Robert Nisbet (1980) and Paul Kennedy (1987) also warned of decline in light of, respectively, a dampening in the spirit of progress and excessive military spending. Yet the last decade has seen a renewal of optimism. The optimism is attributable not only to economic and technological forces, but also to a twocentury old quality improvement process in human resource management (HRM).

Theoretical background

Despite Sanford Jacoby's (1985) excellent historical analysis of the human resource (HR) function, in recent years the HR literature has been ahistorically defensive about HRM's strategic role. Managers and professors have forgotten that HRM has stabilized the workplace and, over many decades, better aligned it and made it more flexible by introducing equitable, responsive systems. This improvement process has reflected the purposeful choices of top HR and line managers, who have tended to more effectively balance competing values over time. That is, the evolution of HRM has amounted to a succession of purposeful experiments aimed at developing balancing systems that integrate three sets of competing values: those of:

1 external constituencies;

2 managements; and

3 employees.

2/1/22, 9:31 AM

https://www.proquest.com/printviewfile?accountid=28180 2/6

Improvement has enabled firms to become more effective in satisfying the goals of each through productivity growth and more equitable institutions.

HRM and competing values

Quinn and Rohrbaugh (1983) and Ulrich (1997) have developed models of organizational effectiveness in light of competing values. Quinn and Rohrbaugh (1983) find that there are four competing models of effectiveness:

1 human relations;

2 internal process;

3 rational goal; and

4 open system.

Ulrich (1997) finds that there are four HR deliverables:

1 employees;

2 efficiency;

3 strategy execution; and

4 capacity for change.

My claim is that Ulrich's (1997) four HR deliverables capture the competing values that HR departments have targeted in improving HRM over time. Furthermore, each reflects the interests of one of HR's three competing classes of constituencies:

1 management;

2 employees; and

3 external constituencies.

Progress has meant that HR managers have successfully designed systems that have achieved better balance in targeting and exceeding all constituents' expectations[l].

Competing values and continuous

improvement

HRM's balancing of competing values over time can be viewed as a process of continuous improvement. Deming (1986) and Taguchi (1986) argue that continuous improvement depends on managements' and employees' better meeting customers' expectations and systematically reducing variability in doing so. Since HR's effectiveness depends on multiple sources of quality gain arising from multiple constituencies, the quality challenge with respect to HRM involves the management of interactions among the competing constituencies. As Deming expresses it, the balancing of the HR quality targets requires profound knowledge about HR systems' effects on employees, managers, customers and the public.

History as continuous improvement

I claim that there have been four broad periods of HR history:

1 pre-inustrial;

2 paternalist;

3 bureaucratic; and

4 high performance.

In each, firms have responded to constituents' demands, trading among the three quality goals in ways that the environment has compelled them. Because of improving productivity and sophistication of HRM, each period has seen a net improvement over the prior one.

History of HRM

In the following four sections I trace the historical process of quality improvement in HRM. In comparison with subsequent periods, the highest degree of inequity and inflexibility characterized the pre-industrial period, which lasted in the USA until the late eighteenth century. Subsequent periods saw continuously decreasing levels of quality loss and increasing levels of quality in HRM. HRM in today's world has the least variability and highest quality in history.

Pre-industrial period

The pre-industrial period[2], which ended with the Revolutionary War, saw a level of HRM loss due to inequity, inflexibility and misalignment that would be unimaginable today. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the medieval Statute of Laborers, restated in the Tudor Industrial Code's Statute of Artificers, was the regulatory backdrop for HRM. It contained the principles of compulsory labor and physical punishment for idleness. Indentured servants and slaves were employed throughout the colonies. Apprenticeship, itself a form of bound labor, was the only way to procure training in a craft. Laws restricting freedom of employment were routinely passed.

The pre-industrial system certainly took some equity targets into account. The requirement that three months' notice be given before an employee was discharged was widely observed. At the same time, workers were aligned to owners' goals through state-enforced power and privilege. Since compulsion implies little motivation above compliance, it is unlikely that broad categories of workers were well motivated. If it is not too much of a stretch to call the pre-industrial period's practices "HRM," the quality of HRM in this period was low across all three quality targets.

Paternalist period

The paternalist period lasted from the late eighteenth century until the early twentieth century. During this period, expansion of markets and industrialization shattered the rigid legal mandates that had previously aligned servant and master (Commons et al., 1946; Morris, 1981). Their doing so enabled firms to dramatically improve labor productivity,

2/1/22, 9:31 AM

https://www.proquest.com/printviewfile?accountid=28180 3/6

life expectancies and standards of living. Flexibility was enhanced through the evolution of employment-at-will, the abolition of slavery, and the early development of modern management practices such as incentive plans. The changes during the paternalist era were needed to accommodate industry's increasing scale. But flexibility came at a steep cost in equity and alignment.

There were ideological as well as economic reasons supporting flexibility. The Civil War was in large part caused by what might be called the most inequitable and inflexible HR practice: slavery. The Republican ideology of free labor evolved from northern distaste for the slave power's (sic) pro-slavery arguments. The Republican advocates of the free labor ideology held that there is alignment of interests between labor and management, in part because laborers are often future entrepreneurs (Foner, 1995). Abraham Lincoln, for example, once remarked that:

The man who labored for another last year this year labors for himself and next year he will hire others to labor for him (Foner, 1995, p. 30).

The free labor ideology's emphasis on flexibility and alignment thus had some unfortunate effects on equity. For example, the creation of the employment-at-will doctrine during the paternalist period both freed employees from compulsion and created the "right" to be terminated at will. In fact, capricious treatment of workers characterized the late nineteenth century's employment relationship. Employers would often pay wages in devalued paper money or arbitrarily cut pay. The drive system often led to bribery of foremen to obtain jobs and physical abuse of workers (Jacoby, 1985). These practices implied levels of HR quality loss that would be unimaginable in the USA today. Such losses included violent strikes (Brecher, 1972).

In sum, there were both quality improvements and losses in the paternalist period. In contrast with the pre-industrial period, the improvements outweighed the losses. The improvements in flexibility and equity included the abolition of slavery and other forms of compulsory labor. These improvements outweighed the alignment and equity losses from violent strikes, unpredictable pay practices and arbitrary paternalism. Nevertheless, quality losses from HRM in the nineteenth century were unpalatably large in comparison with today's management practices.

Bureaucratic period

Leading up to and after the First World War, management experts, trade unions, institutional economists and reformers applied pressure on firms to reform the paternalist period's low quality practices. Such pressure amounted to a systems response to poor alignment and inequity. The improvements came along four lines:

1 management practice;

2 bureaucratization;

3 protective legislation; and

4 unionization.

But these improvements in equity and alignment came at the expense of flexibility.

The earliest inspiration for quality improvement through better alignment came from late nineteenth and early twentieth century industrial engineers, most famously Frederick Taylor's scientific management school (Taylor, 1972). Taylor advocated a rational goal-setting model that focused on fractionalization of jobs, tight control of workers and improved methods of employee selection, training and incentives. These practices met with resistance from unionists as well as shop foremen, but offered a paradigm for rationalization and control of the workplace.

Another set of management ideas that supported bureaucratization and rational goal setting was the welfare capitalism that executives like Gerard Swope of General Electric and John D. Rockefeller Jr advocated. From 1919 to 1928, membership in employer-initiated representation schemes grew from 400,000 to 1.5 million (Brody, 1993; Freeman and Rogers, 1993).

Bureaucratization also proceeded along the lines of the early evolution of the modern personnel department that was derived from social work and other reform movements (and was connected with the growth in scientific management and welfare capitalism). Job analysis, job evaluation, job classification, training and development and employee selection techniques evolved as bureaucratic systems responses to arbitrary, high-variance practices of foremen (Jacoby, 1985).

Even with improvements in management practice, including scientific management, welfare capitalism and personnel departments, there was still considerable public support for protective legislation aimed at enhancing equity. Thus, in the early twentieth century, states passed Workers' Compensation and other protective statutes. This trend continued through the late twentieth century, when Congress focused on individual rights and passed Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, the Occupational Safety and Health Act, the Employee Retirement Income Security Act and the Americans with Disabilities Act.

Unionization represented the most potent and controversial balancing force with respect to employers' high-variance practices during the paternalist period. Trade unions had existed at least since the late eighteenth century. Their leaders advocated bureaucratization of the workplace through collective bargaining, protective legislation, and mutual insurance (Commons et al., 1946; Webb and Webb, 1926; Hoxie, 1936).

Indeed, Freeman and Medoff (1984) provide considerable empirical evidence that unions have reduced variability in treatment of employees and so enhanced quality with respect to the equity target. They show that unions reduce variability in treatment of employees by forcing managers to discard authoritarian practices in favor of explicit rules; by raising blue-collar wages relative to white-collar, particularly with respect to benefits; and by instituting procedures for appealing against supervisors' decisions. According to Freeman and Medoff (1984), in the American manufacturing sector the standard deviation of earnings is about 50 per cent lower in union that in non-union plants, and quits are lower by 31 per cent. This lowering of variability is consistent with Deming's (1986) and Taguchi's (1986) concept of quality improvement as the reduction in variability around a customer's (in this case employee's) expectations.

At the same time, Freeman and Medoff's (1984) analysis, as well as Kochan et al.'s (1986), unduly discount the importance of managers' alignment concerns about business unions. Flexibility and organizational learning require trust. They also require that executives retain a certain degree of power with respect to their workforce. Many executives remain convinced that labor unions create impediments to trust and alignment. Every observer of bureaucratic labor institutions has noted that, although unions improve equity, they have done so in spite of managers' alignment and flexibility concerns, although there is debate as to whether managers' concerns are justified.

Therefore, just as the flexibility of the paternalist period came at the expense of equity, so the stability and equity of the bureaucratic period came at the expense of alignment and flexibility. Other factors also played a role in flagging productivity. By the 1970s, the baby boomers' entry into the labor force coincided with expanding labor force participation and possibly contributed to reduced productivity improvement rates[3]. Furthermore, technological shifts involving computers and telecommunications began to create the need to experiment with new work methods.

High performance period

By the late 1970s there were popular as well as managerial balancing responses to declining competitiveness. First, there was a renewal of public support for free market ideology. Important industries like transportation were deregulated. Monetary policy was stabilized. In some ways, the election of President Ronald Reagan may be interpreted as a popular reassertion of the Republicans' nineteenth century free labor doctrine. For example, there was widespread reassertion of belief in the importance of small business and entrepreneurship to the economy.

2/1/22, 9:31 AM

https://www.proquest.com/printviewfile?accountid=28180 4/6

There were numerous avenues for experimentation as firms sought organizational citizenship behavior (Morrison, 1996), an empowered workforce (Bowen and Lawler, 1992), customer focus (Zemke and Schaaf, 1989), commitment (Walton, 1985), psychological motivation (Quinn, 1992) and even personal mastery (Senge, 1990). Most recently, executives and management theorists have debated ways to develop learning organizations, that is, flexible organizations capable of change and progress. In such learning organizations, alignment as well as flexibility become key quality challenges.

Many of these efforts are reminiscent of Abraham Lincoln's view of the worker as a potential entrepreneur. They contrast with the view of the US worker as "scarcity conscious" and "risk averse" that was prevalent during the bureaucratic period (Perlman, 1928; Knight, 1933).

A wide range of HR techniques has been developed to meet these flexibility and alignment goals. For example, a number of authors have emphasized the efficacy of a systemic approach to HR strategy. Lawler et al. (1995) find that in 1993 30 per cent of firms covered employees with individual incentives and about 14 per cent of firms covered employees with team incentives. They also find that 42 per cent of firms use at least one power-sharing approach, to include job enrichment, self-managing work teams and minibusiness units.

Perhaps the late twentieth century can be best characterized as a period of learning through experimentation. Some of the experiments have failed and some have been successful. Overall, the flattening of productivity during the late 1970s has been remedied. Thus, the high performance period has been one of improvement in the flexibility and alignment targets.

But the problems HR faces continue to be problems of balance. Just as in the nineteenth century, in the twentieth century enhanced flexibility has been associated with some equity losses, although the losses are much smaller than before. Real median money income and real compensation per hour have remained flat between 1980 and 1997 despite productivity gains (US Bureau of the Census, 1998). At the same time, the real median income of females with less than a ninth grade education fell by more than 40 per cent during the period (Office of the President, 1999). While these trends need to be addressed, perhaps through improved recruiting, selection and training, they are of small magnitude in comparison with the equity losses from earlier periods. The share of income going to the low fifth decreased by about 13 percent from 1980 to 1997 (while the share going to the high fifth increased by 26 percent, yielding a decrease in the ratio of low to high of 45 percent). In contrast, nineteenth century railroads sometimes reduced their workers' pay by 10 percent in a single day (Brecher, 1972).

Conclusion

Ever since the industrial revolution began, HRM's challenge has been that of balance. In the paternalist period, flexibility came at the expense of equity. In the bureaucratic period, equity was improved at the expense of flexibility. In the high performance period again there have been flexibility and alignment gains at the expense of equity. But late twentieth century losses in equity are small by historical standards. The result is that the stagnation in productivity growth that characterized the late bureaucratic period has been ameliorated. Current HR practice provides the best balance in history.

HRM has reduced losses from the interaction of the equity, flexibility and alignment goals of management, workers and society at large. It has helped to improve workplace quality along all three dimensions. But the process has involved an ebb and flow. Over the long term, it is realistic to expect continued gains in equity, flexibility and alignment to come at the expense of ever-smaller short-term quality losses.

Sidebar The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available. at http://www.emeraldinsight.cont/0025-1747.htm

Footnote Notes

Footnote 1 This model of progress contrasts with the macro-economic views of industrial relations pluralists like Dunlop (1958) and Kerr (1983), the micro-economic views of Austrian economists like von Mises (1966) and Hayek (1960) and the reformist views of institutionalists like Commons et al. (1946) and Webb and Webb (1926).

Dunlop (1958) and Kerr (1983) argue that a nation's industrial relations system results from bargaining and collaboration among three bargaining agents: labor, management, and government. Technology, market processes and the locus of power influence the bargaining and collaboration. The outcome is a web of rules. Furthermore, the rules tend to converge toward a mixed economy, which they see as optimal.

In contrast, von Mises (1966) and Hayek (1960) see progress as the outcome of individual purposefulness. Equilibrium is reached when the purposes of each actor are satisfied. An "evenly rotating economy," where each actor's purposes are fully satisfied, is possible only with minimal state involvement, according to the Austrians.

The institutionalists' view is that institutions evolve in light of powerful interests whose power derives from preexisting habits, institutions and distribution of wealth. Progress is possible through reform of state institutions to accord with equitable standards. However, from a normative standpoint the institutionalists tend to emphasize improvement in equity at the expense of flexibility and alignment.

2 This section on the pre-industrial period relies on Morris (1981).

3 The labor force participation rate has increased from under 60 percent in 1950 to 67.1 percent in 1998, putting downward pressure on wages and productivity (US Bureau of the Census, 1998).

References References

References Bowen, D.E. and Lawler, E.E. (1992), "The empowerment of service workers: what, why, how and when", Sloan Management Review, Vol. 33 No. 3, pp. 31-9.

References Brecher, J. (1972), Strike!, South End Press, Boston, MA.

Brody, D. (1993), Workers in Industrial America, Oxford University Press, New York, NY. Commons, J.R., Saposs, D.L., Summer, H.L.,

Mittelman, E.B., Hoagland, H.E., Andrew, J.B. and Perlman, S. (1946), History of Labor in the United States, Macmillan, New York, NY.

Deming, W.E. (1986), Out of the Crisis, MIT Center for Advanced Engineering, Cambridge, MA.

Dertouzos, M.T., Lester, R.K. and Solow, R.M. (1989), Made in America: Regaining the Productive Edge, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA.

Dunlop, J.T. (1958), Industrial Relations Systems, Holt, Rheinhart & Winston, New York, NY.

Foner, E. (1995), Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party before the Civil War, Oxford University Press, Oxford.

2/1/22, 9:31 AM

https://www.proquest.com/printviewfile?accountid=28180 5/6

Details

Subject History; Manual workers; Human resource management; Total quality; Employees; Equity; Incentive plans; Employment; Productivity; Ideology; Evolution; Abolition of slavery;

Freeman, R.B. and Medoff, J.L. (1984), What Do Unions Do?, Basic Books, New York, NY.

Freeman, R.B. and Rogers, J. (1993), "Who speaks for us? Employee representation in a nonunion labor market", in Kaufman, B.E. and Kleiner, M. (Eds), Employee Representation: Alternatives and Future Direction, Industrial Relations Research Association, pp. 13-81.

Grayson, C.J. and O'Dell, C. (1988), American Business: A Two-Minute Warning, The Free Press, New York, NY.

Hayek, F.A. (1960), The Constitution of Liberty, The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL.

Hoxie, R.F. (1936), Trade Unionism in the United States, D. Appleton-Century, New York, NY.

Jacoby, S. (1985), Employing Bureaucracy, Columbia University Press, New York, NY.

Kennedy, P. (1987), The Rise and Fall of Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict from 1500 to 2000, Vintage Books, New York, NY.

References Kerr, C. (1983), The Future of Industrial Societies, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA.

Knight, F.H. (1933), Risk, Uncertainty and Profit, London School of Economics and Political Science, London.

Kochan, T.A., Katz, H.C. and McKersie, R.B. (1986), The Transformation of American Industrial Relations, Basic Books, New York, NY.

Lawler, E.E., Mohrman, S.A. and Ledford, G.E. (1995), Creating High Performance Organizations, Jossey-Bass Publishers, San Francisco, CA.

Morris, R.B. (1981), Government and Labor in Early America, Northeastern University Press, Boston, MA.

Morrison, E.W. (1996), "Organizational citizenship behavior as a critical link between HRM practice and service quality", Human Resource Management, Vol. 35 No. 4, pp. 493- 512.

Nisbet, R. (1980), History of the Idea of Progress, Basic Books, New York, NY.

Office of the President (1999), Economic Report of the President: Transmitted to Congress

References February 1999, US Government Printing Office, Washington, DC.

Perlman, S. (1928), A Theory of the Labor Movement, Macmillan, New York, NY.

Quinn, J.B. (1992), Intelligent Enterprise, The Free Press, New York, NY.

Quinn, R.E. and Rohrbaugh, J. (1983), "A spatial model of effectiveness criteria: towards a competing values approach to organizational analysis", Management Science, Vol. 29 No. 3, pp. 363-78.

Senge, P. (1990), The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization, Currency Doubleday, New York, NY.

Taguchi, G. (1986), Introduction to Quality Engineering: Designing Quality into Products and Processes, Asian Productivity Organization, Tokyo.

References Taylor, F.W. (1972), Scientific Management, Greenwood Press, Tokyo.

Ulrich, D. (1997), Human Resource Champions, Harvard Business School Press, Boston, MA.

US Bureau of the Census (1998), Current Population Reports, P60-203, Measuring 50 Years of Economic Change Using the March Current Population Survey, US Government Printing Office, Washington, DC.

von Mises, L. (1966), Human Action, Contemporary Books Inc., Chicago, IL.

Walton, R.E. (1985), "From control to commitment in the workplace", Harvard Business Review, Vol. 85 No. 2, pp. 76-84.

Webb. S. and Webb, B. (1926), Industrial Democracy, Longman, Green, London.

Zemke, R. and Schaaf, D. (1989), The Service Edge: 101 Companies That Profit from Customer Care, American Library, New York, NY.

AuthorAffiliation Mitchell Langbert

AuthorAffiliation City University of New York, Brooklyn College, New York, New York, USA

Copyright MCB UP Limited (MCB) 2002

2/1/22, 9:31 AM

https://www.proquest.com/printviewfile?accountid=28180 6/6

Forced labor; Flexibility; 18th century; 19th century; 20th century Subject:Business indexing term Manual workers;

Human resource management; Total quality; Employees; Equity; Incentive plans; Employment; Productivity

Location United States--US Classification 9190: United States

6100: Human resource planning Title Continuous improvement in the history of human resource management Author Mitchell Langbert Publication title Management Decision; London Volume 40 Issue 10 Pages 932-937 Number of pages 6 Publication year 2002 Publication date 2002 Publisher Emerald Group Publishing Limited Place of publication London Country of publication United Kingdom, London Publication subject Business And Economics--Management ISSN 00251747 e-ISSN 17586070 CODEN MANDA4 Source type Scholarly Journal Language of publication English Document type Feature DOI http://dx.doi.org/10.1108/00251740210452791 ProQuest document ID 212076726 Document URL https://www.proquest.com/scholarly-journals/continuous-improvement-history-human-resource/docview/212076726/se-2?

accountid=28180 Copyright Copyright MCB UP Limited (MCB) 2002 Last updated 2021-09-09 Database ProQuest One Academic

Database copyright © 2022 ProQuest LLC. All rights reserved. Terms and Conditions