童宏保教育经济与管理工作室

Summary of chapter 1 The Strategic Role of HRM
1. There are basic function s all managers perform: planning, organizing, staffing, leading, and controlling. These represent what is often called the management process.
2. Staffing, personnel management, or human resource management is the function focused on in this book. It includes activities like recruiting, selecting, training, compensating, appraising, and developing.
3. HR management is very much a part of every line manager’s responsibilities. These HR responsibilities include placing the right person in the right job, orienting, training, and compensating to improve his or her job performance.
4. The HR manager and his or her department carry out three main functions. First, the manager exerts line authority in his or her unit and implied authority elsewhere in the organization. He or she exerts a coordinative function to ensure that the organization’s HR objectives and policies are coordinated and implemented. And he or she provides various staff services to line management; for example, the HR manager or department assists in the hiring, training, evaluating, rewarding, promoting, and disciplining of employees at all levels.
5. Changes in the environment of HR management are requiring HR to play a more major role in organizations. These trends include growing work fore diversity, rapid technological change, globalization, and changes in the nature of work such as the movement toward a service society and a growing emphasis on education and human capital.
6. Trends like globalization and technological innovation are changing the way firms are managed. For example, the traditional pyramid-shaped organization is giving way to new organizational forms; employees are being empowered to make more decisions; flatter organizations are the norms; work is increasingly organized around teams and processes; the bases of power are changing; managers in the future will not “manage”ean that organizations must depend more on self-disciplined and highly committed employees.
7. One consequence is that HR management must be involved in both the formulation and the implementation of a company’s strategies, given the need for the firm to galvanize employees into a competitive advantage.
8.We defined strategic human resource management as “…the linking of HRM with strategic goals and objectives in order to improve business performance and develop organizational cultures that foster innovation and flexibility…”We view HR as a strategic partner in that in that HRM works with other top manages to formulate the company’s strategy as well as to execute it.
Summary of Chapter 2 Job Analysis
1.Developing an organization structure results in jobs that have to be staffed. Job analysis is the procedure through which you find out(1) what the job entails and (2) what kinds of people should be hired for the job. It involves six steps:（1）determine the use of the job analysis information ,(2)collect background information, (3)select the positions to be analyzed, (4)collect job analysis data, (5)review information with participants, and (6)develop a description and job specification.
2.There are five basic techniques one can use to gather job analysis data: interviews, direct observation, questionnaires, participant logs, and the U. S. civil service procedure. These are good for developing job descriptions and specifications. The Department of Labor, functional job analysis, and PAQ approaches result in quantitative ratings of each job and are therefore useful for classifying jobs for pay purposes.
3.The job description should portray the work of the position so well that the duties are clear without reference to other job descriptions. Always ask, will the new employee understand the job if he or she reads the job description?”
4. The job specification takes the job description and answers the question, “what human traits and experience are necessary to do this job well?” it tells what kind of person to recruit and for what qualities that person should be tested.
5.Job analysis is in many ways the first personnel activity that affects commitment. Most people can’t perform a job when they don’t have ability and skills to do the job. It is through job analysis that you determine what the job entails and what skills and abilities you should look for in job candidates.
6. Use the Dictionary of Occupational Titles to help write job descriptions. Find and reproduce the DOT descriptions that relate to the job you’re describing. Then use those descriptions to “anchor” your own description and particularly to suggest duties to be included.
7.De-jobbingis ultimately a product of the rapid changes taking place in business today. As firms try to speed decision making by taking steps like reengineering, individual jobs are becoming broader and much less specialized. Increasing, firms don’t want employees to limited by a specific set of responsibilities like those listed descriptions, often substituting brief job summaries, perhaps combined with summaries of the skills required for the position.
Summary of Chapter 3 Personnel Planning and Recruiting
1. developing personnel plans requires three forecasts: one for personnel requirements, one for the supply of outside candidates, and one for the supply of inside candidates. To predict the need for personnel, first project the demand for the product or service. Next project the volume of production required to meet these estimates; finally, relate personnel needs to these production estimates.
2. once personnel needs are projected, the next step is to build up a pool of qualified applicants. We discussed several sources of candidates, including internal sources (or promotion from within ), advertising, employment agencies, executive recruiters, college recruiting, the internet, and referrals and walking-ins. Remember that it is unlawful to discriminate against any individual with respect to employment because of race, color, religion, sex, national origin, or age (unless religion, sex , or origin are bona fide occupational qualifications).
3．The initial selection screening in most organizations begins with an application form. Most managers use these just to obtain background data. However, you can use application form data to make predictions about the applicant’s future performance. For example, application forms have been used to predict job tenure, job success, and employee theft.
4. personnel planning and recruiting directly affect employee commitment because commitment depends on hiring employees who have the potential to develop. And the more qualified applicants you have, the higher your selection standards can be. Selection usually begins with effective testing and interviewing, to which we now turn.
Summary of chapter 4 Training and Development
1. In this chapter we focused on technical skills training for new employees and for present employees whose performance is deficient. For either, uncovering training requirements begins with analyzing the cause of the problem and determining the training that may be needed. Remember to ask whether it is a training problem or a more deep-rooted problem like poor selection or low wages.
2. The training process consists of five steps: needs analysis; instructional design; validation; implementation; evaluation.
3.Some principles of learning theory include: make the material meaningful (by providing a bird’s –eye view and familiar examples, organizing the material, splitting it into meaningful chunks, and using familiar terms and visual aids); make provision for transfer of training; and try to motivate your trainee.
4. Job instruction training is useful for training on jobs that consist of a logical sequence of steps. Vestibule training combines the advantages of on-and off-the-job training.
5. On-the-job training is a third basic training technique. It might take the form of the understudy method, job rotation, or special assignments and committees. In any case, it should have four steps: preparing the learner, presenting the operation (or nature of the job ),doing performance tryouts, and following up. Other training methods include audiovisual techniques, lectures, and computer-assisted instruction.
6. In gauging the effectiveness of a training program there are four categories of outcomes you can measure: reaction, learning, behavior, and results. In some cases where training seems to have failed , it may be because training was not appropriate solution.
Summary of chapter 5 Appraising Performance
1. People want and need feedback regarding how they are doing, and appraisal provides an opportunity for you to give them that feedback..
2.Before the appraisal, make sure to clarify the performance you expect so that the employee knows what he or she should be shooting for. Ask “What do I really expect this person to do?”
3.Performance appraisal tools include the graphic rating scale, alternation ranking method, forced distribution method, BARS, MBO, and critical incident method.
4.Appraisal problems to beware of unclear standards, halo effect, central tendency, lerniency or strictness problem, and bias.
5.most subordinates probably want a specific explanation or examples regarding why they were appraised high or low, and for this, compiling a record of positive and negative critical incidents can be useful. Even if your firm requires that you summarize the appraisal in a form like a graphic rating scale, a list of critical incidents can be useful when the time comes to discuss the appraisal with your subordinate.
6.The subordinate should view the appraisal as a fair one, and in this regard there are four things to do: Evaluate his or her performance frequently; make sure you are familiar with the person’s performance; make sure there is an agreement between you and your subordinate concerning his or her job duties; and finally, solicit the person’s help when you formulate plans for eliminating performance weaknesses.
7.There are three types of appraisal interviews. When performance is unsatisfactory but correctable the objective is to lay out an action plan for correcting performance. For employees whose performance is satisfactory but for whom promotion is not possible the objective is to maintain satisfactory performance. Finally, the satisfactory— promotable interview has the main objective to discuss the person’s career plans and to develop a specific action plan for the education and professional development the person needs to move on to the next job.
8. To prepare for the appraisal interview, assemble the data, prepare the employee, and choose the time and place.
9. To bring about constructive change in your subordinate’s behavior, get the person to talk in the interview. Try silence, use open-ended questions, state questions in terms of a problem, use a command question, use choice questions to try to understand the feelings underlying what the person is saying, and restate the person’s last point as a question. On the other hand, don’t do all the talking, don’t use restrictive questions, don’t be judgmental, don’t give free advice, and don’t get involved with name calling, ridicule, or sarcasm.
10.The best way to handle a defensive subordinate is to proceed very carefully. Specifically, recognize that defensive behavior is normal, never attack a person’s defenses, postpone actions, and recognize your own limitations.
11. The most important thing you should aim to accomplish is to clear up job-related problems and set improvement goals and a schedule for achieving them.
12.Appraisals should also ideally serve a managing performance role by providing a concrete basis for an analysis of an employee’s work-related performance. Creating more effective appraisals as described in this chapter is one way to accomplish this. Others suggest also taking a TQM-based approach. Characteristics of such an approach include: making the appraisal scale as broadly descriptive as possible so that it contains relatively few performance categories and avoids a forced distribution; measures results objectively; specifically identifies if the performance deficiency is a result of motivation, training, or factors outside the employee’s control; use 360 degree feedback; includes adequate samples of work behavior; addresses problems in an atmosphere of partnership and constructive advice; and bases performance standards on an analysis of key external and internal customers’ needs and expectations.
Summary of chapter6 compensation
1. There are two bases on which to pay employees compensation: increments of time and volume of production. The former includes hourly or daily wages and salaries. Basing pay on volume of production ties compensation directly to the amount of production ( or number of “pieces” the worker produces).
2. Establishing pay rates involves five steps: conduct salary survey, evaluate jobs, develop pay grades, use wage curves, and fine tune pay rates.
3. Job evaluation is aimed at determining the relative worth of a job. It compares jobs to one another based on their content, which is usually defined in terms of compensable factors like skills, effort, responsibility, and working conditions.
4. The ranking method of job evaluation has five steps: (a) obtain job information, (b) select clusters of jobs to be rated, (c) select compensable factors, (d) rank jobs, and (e) combine ratings(of several raters). This is a simple method to use, but there is a tendency to rely too heavily on guesstimates. The classification (or grading ) method is a second qualitative approach that categorizes jobs based on a class description or classification rules for each class.
5. the point method of job evaluation requires identifying a number of compensable factors and then determining the degree to which each of these factors is present in the job.
6. The wage curve (or line ) shows the average for each pay grade (or job ). It can help show you what the average for each grade should be , and whether any present wages or salaries are out of line. Developing a wage curve involves four steps: (a) find the average pay for each pay grade, (b) plot these wage rates for each pay grade, (c) draw the wage line, and (d) price jobs after plotting present wage rates.
7. Piecework is the oldest type of incentive plan. Here a worker is paid a piece rate for each unit he or she produces. With a straight piecework plan, workers are paid on the basis of the number of units produced. With a guaranteed piecework plan, each worker receives his or her base rate (such as the minimum wage ) regardless of how many units he or she produces.
8. Other useful incentive plans for plant personnel include the standard hour plan and group incentive plans. The former rewards workers by a percent premium that equals the percent by which their performance is above standard. Group incentive plans are useful where the workers’ jobs are highly interrelated.
9. The financial incentives we discussed are usually paid to specific employees whose work is above standard. Employee benefits, on the other hand, are available to all employees based on their membership in the organization. We discussed four types of benefit plans: pay supplement, insurance, retirement benefits, and services.
10. Supplement pay benefits provide pay for time not worked. They include unemployment insurance, vacation and holiday pay, severance pay, and supplemental unemployment benefits.
11. Insurance benefits are another type of employee benefit. Worker’s compensation ,for example, is aimed at ensuring prompt income and medical benefits to work accident victims or their dependents regardless of fault. Most employers also provide group life insurance and group hospitalization, accident, and disability insurance.
12. Two types of retirement benefits are Social Security and pensions. Social Security does not just cover retirement benefits but survivor’s and disability benefits as well. There are three basic types of pension plans: group, deferred profit sharing, and savings plans.
13. most employers also provide benefits in the form of employee services. These include food services, recreational opportunities, legal advice, credit unions, and counseling.