This document discusses personnel administration and its key functions. It defines personnel administration as concerned with managing an organization's human resources from recruitment to retirement. The main objectives of personnel administration are to effectively utilize human resources and maximize individual and group development within the organization. Some key functions discussed are recruitment, selection, performance appraisal, training, and management development. It emphasizes balancing values like merit, leadership, accountability and flexibility in personnel management.

1. Senor-Subordinate Relations and
Personnel Administration
Syed Asghar Shah

2. What is Personnel Administration
• Personnel administration is concerned with people at work and
their relationships within an organization.
• It refers to the entire spectrum of an organization's interaction with
its human resources from recruitment activity to retirement
process.
• It involves personnel training and forecasting ,appraising human
performance , selection and staffing , training and development and
maintenance and improvement of performance and productivity. It
is closely related to an organization's overall effectiveness.
• Personnel administration is systematized ,specialized knowledge
and technique , which can help the organizations in administering
their personnel for achieving their optimum performance.

3. Definitions :
• According to Dimock and Dimock, “ Public personnel
administration is the staff function which advises and
facilitates the work of the programme manager in
matters relating to the recruitment , deployment,
motivation and training of employees , so as to
improve the morale and the effectiveness of the
service”.
• According to Felix Negro, “Public personnel
administration is the art of selecting new employees
and making use of old ones in such a manner that the
maximum quality and quantity of output and service
are obtained from the working force”.

4. • According to Thomas G.Spates, “Personnel administration is a code
of the ways of organizing and treating individual at work so that
they will each get the greatest possible realisation of their intrinsic
abilities, thus attaining maximum efficiency for themselves and
their group and thereby giving to the enterprise of which they are a
part, its determining competitive advantage and optimum results”.
• The Institute of Personnel Management in U.K defined Personnel
Management as , “That part of the management function which is
concerned with people at work and with their relationship within
an enterprise. Its aim is to bring together and develop into an
effective organization the men and women who make up an
enterprise and having regard to the well being of an individual and
of working groups, to enable them to make their best contribution
to its success.

5. Objectives of Personnel
Administration:
• To utilize human resources effectively.
• To establish and maintain a productive and self respecting relationship
among all the members of the organization.
• To enable each person to make his maximum personal contribution to the
effective working of the organization.
• To ensure maximum individual development of the personnel.
• To achieve an effective utilization of human resources ( besides material
resources) for the attainment of organizational goals.
• To establish and maintain an adequate organizational structure and a
desirable working relationship among all the members of the organization
by dividing organizational tasks into functions , positions job ,authority
and responsibility.
• To generate maximum group and individual development within the
organization by offering opportunities for advancement to employees or
by training and job education; by effecting transfers or by offering
retraining facilities.

6. Significance of Personnel
Administration
• Success of any administrative system depends on how effectively it handles its personnel
functions.
• Out of three ‘M’s i.e Men ,Money and Material, men is the most important factor that
determines the quantity and quality of the performance and output. With their requisite
skills ,aptitude, integrity and organizing capacity, they can build the image of their
organizations or effective institutions in the nation building process.
• Personnel administration reduces the chasm between organizational objectives and the
individual to the desirable extent by treating individuals at work in such a way that they will
realise their maximum possible intrinsic abilities ,to create an effective organization
• Now organizations perform a large number of varied and complex tasks which requires
efficient, effective, able and, competent personnel with the right aptitude and attitude.
• Investment in developing human resources through training, career development, planning,
counseling, selection, job enrichment programs and designing suitable performance
appraisals and reward system can go a long way in maintaining the morale and motivation of
people at a high level.
• The role of personnel administration is witnessed in the form of various policies and
programs adopted for these purposes.

7. SUPERVISOR’S CHECKLIST
• Talk to employees with the same frequency.
• Pay as much attention to employees whose interests are
different from yours as those with whom you have more in
common.
• Find something to appreciate about each employee.
• Rotate less desirable tasks.
• When assigning new tasks, follow criteria clearly defined
and known to your employees.
• When assigning new tasks, keep in mind opportunities for
cross training and skill building.
• Communicate your expectations of what is a fair workload
for all employees

8. BUILDING SOUND RELATIONSHIPS
• See the relationship first and the employee
second.
• Don’t play games with relationships
• Keep all relationships on a business basis
• Don’t build one relationship at the expense of
another
• Build your relationship with a new employee
quickly and carefully
• Relationships require daily maintenance
• Repair damage quickly

9. FIVE IRREPLACEABLE FOUNDATIONS
• Supervisors can employ many relationship-building techniques,
depending on their styles and environments, such as the following:
• Good listening skills. Only through listening can supervisors discover
the special rewards their employees seek as part of the bargain
under the Mutual Reward Theory (MRT), or identify problems and
their solutions before they grow into major conflicts.
• Flexibility. Supervisors should remain flexible enough to
accommodate harmless personal requests (like leaving early to take
care of important personal business) when productivity is
maintained and problems with other employees can be avoided.
• Consistency in style. Employees do not respond well to supervisors
who are unpredictable in their behavior or in their expectations of
others.
• Being a good one-on-one counselor. Without playing psychologist,
providing timely support and understand

10. The Personnel Function
• The key problem for personnel management is the
balancing of several contradictory values.
– Merit or neutral competence, executive leadership,
political accountability, managerial flexibility,
representativeness.
• Maximizing some of these values requires
arrangements poorly suited for other values.
• These matters are further complicated by the rise of
public-sector collective bargaining, which emphasizes
employer-employee codetermination of personnel
policy.

11. Recruitment.
• Recruitment is the process of advertising job
openings and encouraging candidates to apply.
• Designed to provide organizations with an adequate
number of viable candidates to make a selection.
• The main objective: the generation of an adequate
number of qualified candidates.
• Not all positions are open to entry-level applicants.

12. Merit selection.
• Selection is the oldest function of public personnel
administration.
• Pendleton Act mandated that all examinations for
merit be practical in character.
• Primacy of practicality often breached in practice but
reaffirmed in Griggs v. Duke Power Company (1971).
“Test must measure the person for the job, not the
job for the person.”
• Extended to public sector in Equal Employment
Opportunity Act of 1972.

13. Performance Appraisal
• Performance appraisal is the title usually given
to the formal method by which an
organization documents the work
performance of its employees.
• Most performance evaluation systems fail
because of inherent subjectivity.

14. Performance Appraisal
• Five functions.
– Changing or modifying dysfunctional work behavior;
– Communicating to employees managerial perceptions of
the quality and quantity of their work;
– Assessing the future potential of an employee to
recommend appropriate training or developmental
assignments;
– Assessing whether the present duties of an employee’s
position have an appropriate compensation level; and
– Providing a documented record for disciplinary and
separation actions.

15. Training
• All forms of training are limited by the
availability of funding.
• Remember, no statement of training
accomplishment in an annual report can
honestly be made unless it is supported by a
sophisticated measure of evaluation.

16. Management Development
• Management development is a hybrid of
training and selection.
• Any conscious effort on the part of an
organization to provide a manager with the
skills needed for future duties such as
rotational assignments or formal education
experiences constitute management
development.

17. Management Development
• The secondary focus of management
development is selection.
• The range of experiences, both on or off the
job, that managers are expose to over the
years leaves records in terms of specific scores
or subjective evaluations upon which future
advancements may be based.

18. QnA