WRITE AN ESSAY AND REACTION PAPER OF EACH OF THE FOLLOWING:

1. IN ALL FORMS OF ORGANIZATION, LEADERSHIP AND MANAGEMENT ARE BOTH MANIFESTED.

HOW ARE BOTH RELATED TO HUMAN RESOURCE AND MANAGEMENT?
2. HOW ARE BOTH STRATEGIC MANAGEMENT AND HUMAN RESOURCE MANAGEMENT RELATED
TO PERSONNEL ADMINISTRATION?
What Role Leadership
Management Plays In Human
Resource Management?
With the constant change in business world, HR’s role keeps
changing or can be said evolving. From a coach to a counselor,
sometimes employee advocate, an HR is now even seen as a
business strategist in some organizations. While fulfilling all the
organizational goals, HRM becomes quite challenging.

In a survey conducted by World Federation of Personnel

Management Associations (WFPMA), ten most challenging
tasks faced by various organizations were revealed. Around 35% of
the companies were facing leadership development challenges;
others being change management, staffing, retention
management, organizational effectiveness, compensation issues,
succession planning, benefits costing, learning and development.
Leadership Development has to be an important initiative if
thought strategically, as it is the second biggest challenge faced
in Human Resource Management.
Basically HR professionals are expected to select and help develop
the future leaders for an organization by carefully providing
imperative processes, proper means and their perspective in this
regard.
For an organization to flourish and survive, it is necessary that the
right employee is retained, the talent is identified and the
employee is equipped with all the necessary support so that he/she
becomes ready to take on leadership role in future for the benefit
of the organization.

In order to elect the best-fit employee, following attributes of a

good leader should be considered.

These aspects will definitely help the HR and managers to identify

the right talent at the right time.

Spotting a talent — Talent is not at all useful until it is

recognized. Thus it is extremely important that the flair in the
employees is noticed and flourished for the company’s benefit and
his/her own as well.

Mentoring — Mentoring new employees or help upgrading

existing employees is also a part of successful leadership. An ideal
employee is the one who is able to clearly interpret the ideas to the
fellow employees and make sure each and every one of them gets
the complete information about the same.

Providing a support system — Along with instructing

subordinates what is to be done, an optimal leader will also be a
support system so that his juniors can reach him whenever they
are stuck in any kind of problem without any hesitation.

Apart from these, basically there are four qualities that a budding
leader should possess — visionary (planning ahead keeping in
mind what might be required in future), coach (helping others in
meeting organizational goals), manager (taking on
responsibilities) and architect (shaping and diving teams
effectively). Although it is not possible for a single person to be a
master in all four, but still it is expected that the leader takes it as a
challenge and develop the qualities to a minimum required level
eventually.

Leadership vs. Management

Leadership and management are terms that are often used interchangeably to depict
someone who manages a team of people. In reality leadership vs. management are
very different in concept and characteristics.
Management
Management has been defined as the process of getting things done through and with
people. It is the planning and directing of effort and the organizing and employing of
resources (both human and material) to accomplish some predetermined
objective. One of the key characteristics of a manager is very basic in the sense that
they are someone who was given their authority by the nature of their role. They ensure
work gets done; focus on day to day tasks; and manage the activities of others.
Managers focus on tactical activities and often times have a more directive and
controlling approach. This is a skill set that is greatly needed in the University. Being
able to organize people to accomplish tasks can be a great asset.
Leadership
Leadership is a process by which a person influences others to accomplish an objective
and directs the organization in a way that makes it more cohesive and coherent. To
demonstrate characteristics of a leader you must be more strategically focused and
rather than directing employees through tasks, they inspire and motivate employees to
drive themselves. Leaders are also very focused on change. Recognizing that continual
improvement can be achieved in their people and their activities can be a great step
towards continued success. Being able to lead their teams through change, rather than
manage them through it has infinite rewards.

Leadership and Management -

Relationship & Differences
Leadership and management are the terms that are often considered synonymous. It is essential to
understand that leadership is an essential part of effective management. As a crucial component of
management, remarkable leadership behaviour stresses upon building an environment in which each and
every employee develops and excels. Leadership is defined as the potential to influence and drive the
group efforts towards the accomplishment of goals. This influence may originate from formal sources,
such as that provided by acquisition of managerial position in an organization.

A manager must have traits of a leader, i.e., he must possess leadership qualities. Leaders develop and
begin strategies that build and sustain competitive advantage. Organizations require robust leadership
and robust management for optimal organizational efficiency.

Differences between Leadership and Management

Leadership differs from management in a sense that:

1. While managers lay down the structure and delegates authority and responsibility, leaders
provides direction by developing the organizational vision and communicating it to the employees
and inspiring them to achieve it.
2. While management includes focus on planning, organizing, staffing, directing and controlling;
leadership is mainly a part of directing function of management. Leaders focus on listening,
building relationships, teamwork, inspiring, motivating and persuading the followers.
3. While a leader gets his authority from his followers, a manager gets his authority by virtue of his
position in the organization.
4. While managers follow the organization’s policies and procedure, the leaders follow their own
instinct.
5. Management is more of science as the managers are exact, planned, standard, logical and more
of mind. Leadership, on the other hand, is an art. In an organization, if the managers are required,
then leaders are a must/essential.
6. While management deals with the technical dimension in an organization or the job content;
leadership deals with the people aspect in an organization.
7. While management measures/evaluates people by their name, past records, present
performance; leadership sees and evaluates individuals as having potential for things that can’t
be measured, i.e., it deals with future and the performance of people if their potential is fully
extracted.
8. If management is reactive, leadership is proactive.
9. Management is based more on written communication, while leadership is based more on verbal
communication.

The organizations which are over managed and under-led do not perform upto the
benchmark. Leadership accompanied by management sets a new direction and makes efficient use
of resources to achieve it. Both leadership and management are essential for individual as well as
organizational success.
The Relationship Between
Human Resource Practices And
Business Strategy In A Business
Organization

T he relationship between human resource practices and a

company’s business strategy are aligned in many ways. The

ultimate goal of the alignment is to use human capital as
instrument to maximize the organization assets for the benefit of
the stakeholders. Below are some of the relationship between
human resource practices and business strategy.

STRATEGIC HUMAN RESOURCE MANAGEMENT

Human resource practices create the process for the development

of employees’ knowledge and the skill-set across the organization
to promote its core competencies that support and maintain its
competitive advantage in the industry. The term “strategic HRM”
is the new template in the management of modern organization
that is anchored on the concept that the most valuable asset an
organization provides itself is HR, since it is the tool that is
responsible for the coordination and implementation of other
factors of production that spurs corporate performance journals

The business strategy adopts by an organization is meant to

showcase how it intend to succeed by using the factors of
production at its disposal to build a competitive advantage,
strategy-business. Business strategy helps to identify the direction
that the organization wishes to go in relation to its environment.
Human resource strategies manage human resource so that the
goals set by the organization can be achieved. The focus is directed
on what the business intentions are as they relate to human
resource policies and practices. Therefore, how human resource is
spread across the organization’s units and departments,
motivated, managed and retained will affect the performance
outcome after the business strategy has been implemented. The
relationship between business strategy and human resource
practices also would determine the organization competitive and
performance outcome.

A glimpse into Oya Erdil & Ayse Gunsel’s ‘BUSINESS

STRATEGY AND HUMAN RESOURCE STRATEGY- THE
INTERACTION’ shows there is a relationship between human
resource management practices and an organization business
strategy, which also could be referred to as the business
environment and organizational development. Another defining
aspect of that relationship is the across the board acceptance that
an organization’s human resource management practices have a
link to the firm’s decision making process, in other words, the HR
practices be closely aligned with the strategy of the whole
business. While there is not much disagreement as pertaining to
the relationship between HR practices and business strategy, there
is a tendency not to acknowledge the deeper nature of the
relationship. The theory of human resource management opined
that should employees be considered and managed as a valued
strategic asset, the organization in practice would be able to
achieve a competitive advantage, and the outcome will be a
superior performance. This again, means managing human
resource in such a way that it will correspond to the business
strategy, being that the goals and process of each of the strategy
profiles are different.
According to Oya Erdil & Ayse Gunsel, this relationship is further
entrenched when you look at how human resource practices are
selected based on competitive strategy espoused by the
organization. An organization that coordinates its business
strategy and human resources policies and practices achieve a
superior performance outcome than those that do not.

ALIGNING PERFORMANCE MANAGEMENT TO

STRATEGY AND CULTURE

As explained by Rob Gray’s ‘Aligning performance management

with business strategy,’ some employers could be missing the key
factor that links performance management to strategy and culture.
For it is an organization’s prevailing culture and practices that will
determine the optimum use of its valuable asset (human beings)
when its business strategy is aligned with its human resource
practices. The right tools are needed if employers are to succeed in
aligning their human resource management to its business
strategy. The era of using performance review and appraisal as the
only tools for performance, management solutions have since been
replicated by a complete suite of competency measurement tools.
These tools are able to assist employees to understand the means
and learning resources through which they can effectively develop
their skills and talent. Technology is one of the enablers but needs
commitment from top down that is important for a high
performance culture.

TALENT MANAGEMENT

Edward E. Lawler lll’s, ‘What should HR Leaders Focus On In

2014’ gives a deep insight into how business entities could achieve
a superior outcome for their shareholders. While technology is a
valued enabler that spurs performance leading to superior
outcome for an organization, another thing that should be a thing
of focus for HR is the aspect of talent management that assesses
the necessary skills every organization needs to implement its
business strategy, the plan for recruitment and the management of
critical talent. Even though, talent has long been determined to be
important, it is of recent becoming more so given that many
businesses are performing knowledge based work that is more
complex, and with operations in the global markets. This has led
to the situation of performance talent having a great impact on the
organization’s bottom line. Google, Amazon, Apple, and other
techs and service organizations have done a tremendous job of
recruiting and managing people around the world that have the
needed critical knowledge based skills. Their talented workforce
have been able to perform well, differentiate their companies from
competitors across industries which have translated to a pattern of
communication that relays their type of employees and the jobs
they offer.

INNOVATION

Innovation is another standard of performance management,

Innovation.Tools.com, that when effectively coordinated with an
organization business objectives lead to a superior performance
outcome. When an organization devote a substantial amount of
time to innovation and business strategy, and both are valued
equally, promoted across the board, and well communicated, a
culture would exist naturally which will foster a relationship of the
two. The fostered culture creates a top down business objectives
that are communicated across the board in the organization, that
enable all units to focus in addressing the organization’s short and
long-term goals. From then, it becomes the innovators’ task to
forge an alignment of their activities in support of the
organization’s goals. The various ways to naturally coordinate both
camps is the joint development of technology/product, and
business road maps that encourage discussion and debate, forging
links that guides actions. Successful performance outcome are
highlighted through internal business and fairs, using the avenue
to raise visibility for long term opportunities.

DIVERSITY

Diversity in an organization plays a significant role in forging a

link between performance management and business strategy.
There is a business case for diversity in the organization based on
the evidence and arguments that both believe that when diversity
is leveraged in an organization, it can contribute to the
achievement of the company’s goals and priorities. To understand
the relevance of diversity to the attainment of business objectives,
the type of diversity under consideration has to be relevant to
business performance and innovation accaglobal.com.

Strategic management and human resource management

Every organisation is trying to become more efficient and more productive. The key to
an organisations success is to become more global and advance from a technological
prospective. In order to become more efficient and to make its goals achievable, an
organization should focus the most important assets of all other resources, which is the
human capital or the intellectual assets. After all, none other than a person or an
employee executes every achievement or any activity in an organization. Thus keeping
this particular asset in good terms and managing it up to a standard is quite a challenge
in terms of time and similarly finance. However, having a well organized and a well-
managed human resource brings more significance to an organizations’ wellbeing. This
essay will investigate how Strategic Management (SM) and Human Resource
Management (HRM) are related, and then evaluated the role they play in providing
organisations with a competitive advantage.

Strategic management deals with devising people interventions that help an

organization to develop the customer behaviour to promote the competitive advantage
(Saini, 2009). The strategic management process helps the organisation to react quickly
towards the new challenges. This dynamic method helps organizations find new and
more efficient ways to do business. Strategic formulation, which is the practice of
classifying a company’s’ goal and strength and strategic implementation which express
as the process of allocating resource and developing structures are the two components
of strategic management process (Kramar, Bartram and De Cieri, 2011)

Strategic management processes raise the organizations to discover new and more
capable ways to do business. Situation analysis, strategy implementation, strategy
formulation and strategy evaluation are the key elements of the strategic management
process (Kramar, Bartram, and De Cieri, 2011). By dealing with these elements of the SM
process in order listed, companies can assess and re-evaluate situations as they develop;
always making sure, the company has positioned itself optimally in the business
environment. Situation analysis engages with looking over the companys’ internal and
external environments and the context in which the company fits in to those
environments. As a way of implementing, observations are made about company’s
internal environment and investigations are carried out to find out how employees
interact with each other at all levels. In the completion of the situational analysis, a
strategy is formulated. (Kramar, Bartram and De Cieri, 2011). This involves determining
the company’s strengths to decide which strategies could be implemented. Operational
strategies involve routine operations, outlining the procedures and process by which the
company does business. Competitive strategies involve finding ways to compete with a
particular industry or business (Kramar, Bartram, and De Cieri, 2011). Strategy
implementation is the third step in the strategic management process. It involves the
implementation of the formulated strategy. The final step in the strategic management
process engages observing the results of an implemented strategy (Kramar, Bartram,
and De Cieri, 2011). As mentioned, these four elements and the process of building a
good strategy would be very significant to an organization, which presumes to manage
their intellectual resource with great efficiency. Using strategies would help HRM to be
more rapid and supervised in their decision making process and in achieving the
objectives and targets of the entity (Kramar, Bartram and De Cieri, 2011)

Human resource management described as a set of activities aimed at building an

organizational performance (Plumb, 2008). Also having a good HR management
department is identically important to an organisations’ strong financial. Any
organization is goal oriented and has targets to achieve, and the employees of the
organization perform them. The employees are the works force in the entity, thus
managing and maintaining them is very crucial and very vital to its’ top managers on
behalf of the organization. Managing the work force is also important as it gives the
foundation of a healthy entity; this happens only if an entity holds a strong work force
that is right for the job (Payne, 2010). Having a strong work force opens many
opportunities for the organization in terms of growing their day to day businesses, and
consequently by overcoming supplementary trades the company unwraps a pathway to
a successful and a most importantly a sustainable organization in today competitive
world.

Thus, using strategies and planning HR activities is quite important to a business entity
for the betterment of the employees, which consequently brings success to the
organization itself. HR strategies are laid down according to the overall objectives of the
organizations in the same way as investments or marketing strategies. However, HRM
strategies explained through quantifiable terms so that outcomes of them measured.
Also, HR strategic objectives go past the basic calculation and control of staff numbers
and minimization of costs (Barrett, 2009). The function of a Human Resource
Management strategy is when adopting their HR practices, organizations must take into
account the interest of the fit between these firm strategy and practices. As a result, the
main goals of strategic HRM is to make sure that HRM is aligned with the strategic
needs of organization (Saini, 2009).

Strategic management is important in all kind of organization activities to achieve their

long-term goal. Hence, most of the managers agreed that perceived strategic
management is the most important capability and information technology as the least
important competency for HR managers (Payne, 2010). Strategic management domain
contains visioning, analytical and leadership skills that managers viewed as important for
human resource (Payne, 2010). Thus HR leaders can make significant role to strategy
development and achievement as well as to improve the quality of decision related
strategy and talent. Overall, the relationship between HR and management is becoming
mutual. HR executives are trying to become a part at the management table and they
are concerned in everyday management activities. However, there is still a long way to
go if HR is to become a strategic partner at all levels. In order to do that, HR needs to
expand its internal competencies to deal with organizational issues and find ways to
suggest creative and innovative solutions to organisation wide issues (Kramar, Bartram
and De Cieri, 2011).

Meanwhile for harder strategic HR themes like cost cutting, rate of return productivity
measurement, performance measurement it has been noticed that the employees
volunteer reluctantly. Therefore, a clear dualism is apparent in HR intervention that
organisations have been adopting for their survival (Saini, 2009). In addition, strategic
management prescriptions are never comfortable when put together with pluralist
employment relations framework (Saini, 2009). Some organisations have a practice of
using strategies not only in HR but also in other aspects of their organisations to
achieve their target goals and objectives without any hassle. Practicing strategies in HR
would be beneficial not only to the employee but also it is the right way to do the right
job (Lawler, Boundreau, 2009)
Strategic Human Resource Management (SHRM) also identifies the long-term effects of
HR decisions on the employment and development and development on the bond
between management and staffs in the organisation as being significant (Barrett, 2009).
This is important if the company wants to gain competitive edge through its workforce.
As a result of, HR departments’ integration to the business, the personnel were re-
looked as a resource in the company.

On the other hand, SHRM system helps effectively by answering the requests of the
strategy and environment and assists strategic flexibility with the goal of achieving the
active fit (Pablos, Lytras, 2008). Strategic management can also help the organization to
identify their strength, weaknesses, and opportunity and threat. So, that the
organization can compete with their competitive firms and build their profit and achieve
their success. Strategic management as general and within HR, helps to organize how
HR systems and practices with the aim of developing a competitive advantage for the
firm (Pablos, Lytras, 2008)

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According to Porter, (1994) competitive advantage defined as an advantage that arises

from observing and realizing ways of competing that are unique and distinctive from
those of rivals, and that can be sustained over time. Some researches tell that human
resources can become the cause of competitive advantage for the organization is not
new. At the same time, the organization need to understand that competitive advantage
is not permanent (Pablos, Lytras, 2008). The speed with which competitors are able to
acquire the skills needed to duplicate the benefits of a firm’s value-creating strategy
determines how long the competitive advantage will last (Pablos, Lytras, 2008). In
addition, it has accepted that firms can generate a competitive advantage from their
management practices. Organizational resource leads to a constant competitive
advantage when the resources are valuable, rare and have no substitute (Pablos, Lytras,
2008). Human resource needs to create organizational values in order to be a source of
competitive advantage. Therefore, organizations offer jobs in which individual can show
their different skills (Pablos, Lytras, 2008).

When the firm choose a strategy, they make choices among competing alternatives.
Competitive advantages help to sketch the organizational procedure by analytically and
the emergent strategy help the rational decision making process by senior management
and enhance the firms’ competitiveness. In addition, the organizations can develop a
long-term competitive advantage. Strategic Human Resource Management (SHRM)
allows the adaptation of HR practices, the knowledge, and the behaviour of the
employees as regards the immediate needs of the organization. In brief, SHRM must
facilitate strategic flexibility with the goal of reaching an active fit (Pablos, Lytras, 2008).

In the past, organizations and their top managers assumed the status of managing the
most vital intellectual assets of an entity. Thus, they tried to bring in systems in which
they could be in track of workers and their actions, which is handling and regulating the
work force of an organization. However, as the world has evolved throughout the years
and due to many reasons, managers have understood the workforce is also kind of a
resource that is in common with other resources. As a result, they implemented the
process of strategic management.

Therefore, in conclusion this essay has expressed how strategy and planning are related
to HRM, the relationship between strategic management and HR management and how
strategic human resource management helps to develop the competitive advantage of
firm. As proved above, practicing of these strategies would absolutely assist an
organization in achieving their aims and objectives. Consequently, it is significant for HR
management to change from being primarily administrative and operational to
becoming a strategic contributor.