History of Human Resources Management Development

1. HR comes of age Howin Chan, PHR 2-16-2009

2. Master Craftspeople and their apprentices...

3. Industrial Age The introduction of the assembly line brought a need for low-skilled employees capable of performing repetitive tasks.

4. The Personnel Administration Movement In the late 1800s and early 1900s, the personnel profession that grew out of concerns about employee absenteeism and high turnover attempted to solve worker problems with such basic personnel management functions as employee selection, training and compensation. Scientific management approaches based on the work of Frederick W. Taylor and other experts whose goal was to get people to perform as efficiently as machines.

5. The Human Relations Movement The human relations movement provided new insights derived from studies that linked improved productivity to management philosophies emphasizing employee communications, cooperation and involvemnet. This new thinking about employee cooperation grew fromt he works of Elton Mayo -- known as the Father of Human Relations -- and from the Hawthorne Studies, an important series of illumination experiments conducted between 1924 and 1932.

6. The Human Resources Movement After the Korean War, a new class of college-educated managers emerged with a greater sense of social responsibility than their predecessors. Throughout the second half of the 20th century, social well-being coupled with social upheaval -- best exemplified by the struggle for desegregation -- changed the thinking of employees in the United States.

7. The HR Technology and Decision Support Movement While maintaining the special body of HR knowledge, professionals in human resource management must also be generalists who understand economics, politics, social and cultural trends, technological innovations, changing work values, skill shortages, government mandates in labor laws, affirmative action, health care management, privacy concerns, international trands, and myriad other issues.

8. The HR Technology and Decision Support Movement (Con't) For HR professionals, the challenge of today's business environment is to understand and manage the important interaction of technology, work, flow, organizational stragtegies and, most important, people. In our new age of technology and rapid product innovation, unleashing the minds and creative souls of tomorrow's workforce is the factor most likely to propel businesses and the HR profession into the future.