Chapter 1 Introduction to the Practice of Human Resource Management

The Approach of This Book

We approach HRM in two complementary ways. First, we explain the major techniques used to manage workers in organizations. Then we consider how sometimes conflicting employer and worker interests can affect how HR practitioners apply these techniques. For example, HR practitioners often manage and deliver employee training and orientation. This usually requires them to develop a learning objective for a training session. The objective shapes what they teach, helps them to decide how to teach it, and guides how they evaluate whether the training was successful. In Chapter 7, you will learn about the three components of a learning objective and practice how to write one. This information is the kind of technical knowledge that HR practitioners must know and apply on a daily basis.

How this information is applied, however, is affected by the conflicting interests (sometimes called the “politics”) found in employment relations. One of the most surprising things that new HR practitioners find is that workers might not be all that interested in the training offered. For example, an organization might wish to cross-train a group of workers so that they can do the others’ jobs. That sounds great to most bosses because there’s always someone around to cover sick leaves and such. Workers, however, might resist learning how to do more work because they fear that, once they are capable of doing more work, they will be compelled to do that work, possibly during what otherwise would be a period of rest.

Similarly, new HR practitioners often struggle with the conflicted nature of their job. On the one hand, they often assist workers to integrate into and operate within an organization. This can include advocating that a worker receive modified work duties following an injury or that the employer adopt name-blind hiring practices in order to reduce discrimination. In this way, HR practitioners sometimes appear to be there to help workers. On the other hand, though, practitioners are agents of employers. And they are expected to carry out the bosses’ orders. This can include acting in ways that might be harmful to workers’ interests or violate their rights. Bosses might not want to accommodate a disability because of the cost of doing so. And they might not want to adopt name-blind hiring because they want to hire their buddies’ kids.

These conflicting interests play out across the various domains of human resource management. It is often a source of stress for HR practitioners as they navigate conflicting demands, often in high-pressure situations. Understanding, predicting, and managing such conflicts is a requirement of an effective HR practitioner. For this reason, in this book we pair a technical explanation of HRM with a political analysis. Incorporating this second approach means that you will be better able to understand the interests of different actors, acknowledge that these interests sometimes conflict, and devise solutions that accommodate (or at least anticipate) these conflicts.

To develop both your technical and your political understanding of HRM, we offer in this book a broader scope than that in most other HR textbooks. Where necessary, we step back from the “how-to” view of HR to consider the broader social context in which work and HRM take place. In the next few sections of this chapter, for example, we talk about the nature of employment and employment relationships before we turn to a more conventional discussion of how such relationships are managed. In other places, the narrative will interrupt an explanation of how some aspect of HR works to consider the degree to which commonly accepted ideas about HR are really true or useful. We think that this approach makes for a more interesting read and will make you a more effective HR practitioner. But it also requires some patience from you. If it is not clear why we are talking about a topic or how a point relates to the practice of HRM in Canada, just file your question for the time being. It will all come together in the end.

Human Resource Management

Human resource management comprises the practices and systems ensuring that an organization has the right number and mix of workers necessary to achieve its goals and, subsequently, that the workers achieve those goals. It is often useful to think of HRM as a continuum of activities designed to support an organization’s strategy (see Figure 1.1). This includes analyzing work and designing jobs, determining how many workers are required, recruiting and selecting workers, setting their rates of compensation, orienting and training those workers, managing them, and then facilitating their departure from the organization. These HR activities are performed in a complex legal environment and a fluid labour market.

This textbook will introduce you to each of the major domains of HR practice set out in Figure 1.1. Each domain requires you to develop and use certain knowledge, skills, and abilities (KSAs). The application of these KSAs to achieve specific organizational outcomes reflects that HRM is a technical undertaking. As noted above, we will also introduce you to the idea that HRM is also a political undertaking. Recall that the purpose of HRM is to achieve organizational outcomes. These outcomes and how an organization pursues them might not always match up perfectly with the interests of an organization’s workers. Using organizational power to require action that runs contrary to the wishes of other organizational actors (e.g., workers) is a political act.

For example, a company might wish to increase its profitability by lowering its labour costs. One option is to move staff to home-based offices. Doing so lowers costs because the employer no longer needs to rent workspace or provide office furnishings. The workers, who must now find their own desks and use parts of their homes for work, might be upset by this change. After all, it means that they are now subsidizing the employer’s operating costs from their own pockets. Although the workers might be upset, the employer is likely to get its way because, as described below, it normally possesses greater legal and labour market power than do workers.

Understanding HRM as both a technical and a political function is often necessary to achieve organizational goals. For example, workers might be trained and required to report injuries so that supervisors can take actions to control workplace hazards (see Chapter 2). But, in practice, workers might be reluctant to report injuries. An HR practitioner might well diagnose non-reporting as worker irresponsibility or laziness. This diagnosis suggests that the issue should be treated as a disciplinary one, with penalties being applied to change workers’ behaviour. But non-reporting might be more usefully understood when examined through a political lens that considers how workers’ interests can drive their behaviour. Non-reporting might reflect, for example, workers’ belief (perhaps well founded) that they will be punished for reporting injuries and that, even if they do report them, the employer will not control the hazards that caused them. Workers who believe this to be true will not report injuries because doing so is not in their interests. This political analysis of the problem can suggest non-disciplinary ways to improve reporting and thus make the workplace safer.

HR practitioners who can anticipate, recognize, and respond to worker interests tend to be more effective in achieving their goals. To do so, they must have an understanding of the complex and nuanced nature of employment relations. For this reason, we will focus on the impacts of power, profit, and intersecting identities on the practice of HRM.

Power, Profit, and Intersecting Identities

Power is the ability to get someone else to do or accept something that they do not want to do or accept. HR activities and techniques comprise an important way that employers exercise power over workers. Employers typically use their power to capture the profits generated by organizational work. Narrowly defined, profit is the excess of revenue after paying all expenses. Another way to understand profit is to see it as the allocation of the surplus value generated by workers’ labour to employers. Surplus value is the additional price that can be charged for a product or service because of the efforts of workers. For example, a furniture company can sell an assembled bookshelf for more than the unassembled parts because a worker spent time and energy putting it together. By seeing profit in this way, it becomes possible to recognize that workers contribute to the value of a product or service through their labour and that who reaps the benefit of that extra value is a point of conflict between workers and employers.

Workers typically prefer to see the surplus value of their labour used to improve their salaries and working conditions. In contrast, employers want to keep that surplus value for themselves as profit. The struggle over who benefits from this surplus value drives much of the contestation in the workplace. HR practitioners must manage the resulting tensions. Public sector and non-profit organizations do not earn profits (although they might accumulate operating surpluses). Nevertheless, even in those workplaces, tension exists over how the surplus value is allocated (i.e., to workers or the organization), meaning that the same dynamic is at play.

Although it is convenient to talk about workers and their interests in generic ways, workers are not a monolithic group. Different workers might have different interests. For example, a cook and the manager at a fast-food restaurant are both workers because they trade their labour for compensation. But the manager might have an interest in pushing the cook to work faster, for example to secure a management bonus. The cook, whose salary is fixed, might not want to work faster and, indeed, might have a higher risk of being injured by working faster around grills and slicers.

Workers’ experiences of work and the world can also shape their interests. These experiences, in turn, often differ significantly depending on workers’ identity factors. For example, men and women often experience the world differently, and this can affect the employment benefits that they value. The compounding effect of our intersecting identity factors is often called intersectionality (see Feature Box 1.1).

Employment Relationships in Capitalist Economies

Employers hire workers because they require help (in the form of labour) to achieve an organizational goal. Paying someone to do a job is the most common way for employers to access labour. Some organizations also utilize unpaid labour (e.g., interns, volunteers, prisoners), but such arrangements are beyond the scope of this book. Broadly speaking, employers can either pay an employee or pay a contractor to have work completed.

Employees work for someone else rather than for themselves. They trade their labour for wages and other forms of remuneration. By entering into a contract of employment, employees agree to do what the employer tells them to do. Typically, the employer directs how work is done and provides any required tools or equipment. A worker who agrees to such a contract of service generally has no opportunity to hire someone else to do the work (i.e., subcontract). The rights and obligations of employees are examined in detail in Chapter 2.

In contrast, contractors work for themselves. They can enter into a commercial relationship with an organization in which they agree to provide certain goods or services to that organization. With a contract for service, contractors retain the right to perform the work in the ways that they think best, typically supply their own equipment and tools, and can hire others to perform the work. A contractor also typically has the opportunity to make a profit but also risks taking a loss on the work.3

Both employees and contractors are subordinate to the organization that hires them. Although in this book we focus on the relationships between employees and employers, it is useful to remember that the world is more complex. There are different types (or classes) of workers and bosses. Feature Box 1.2 provides a more nuanced introduction to social class in Canada.

Although most workers are employees, many employers use contractors as well. Hiring a contractor might be a cost-effective way to meet short-term staffing needs, such as covering a parental leave or increasing staff to deal with a sudden surge in demand. Large employers can also contract out entire areas of work (e.g., payroll functions) in order to save money and/or focus on work that they consider to be their core business. Employers can also hire contractors to externalize (i.e., transfer) certain costs to contractors. For example, employers that operate almost entirely using independent contractors in sectors such as transportation (e.g., Uber) and food delivery (e.g., Skip the Dishes) might be able, in some jurisdictions, to avoid the costs associated with meeting statutory deductions for employment insurance, paying benefits, or providing tools (e.g., vehicles and gas).

The use of contractors is an example of employers that structure work to minimize the cost of labour. Private sector employers seek to minimize labour costs to increase the profitability of their organizations. Unprofitable organizations go out of business, so the profit imperative is a powerful influence on organizational behaviour. The need for public sector and non-profit organizations to work within budgets creates a similar dynamic regarding labour costs. The profit imperative reflects that work in Canada occurs in a capitalist economy. A capitalist economy is a system of production and exchange characterized by the private ownership of capital. Capitalists combine their capital with the efforts of workers (often called labour) to produce goods and services sold in a marketplace both to cover the cost of production and to generate a profit for the capitalists.5

In a capitalist economy, those who own the means of production (i.e., equipment, land, and money) are generally allowed to operate their businesses as they see fit, including directing how work will be performed. The rationale for giving capitalists such authority is that they are risking their capital, so they must be able to operate as they think best. Over time, governments (sometimes called the state) have imposed some limits on employers’ discretion. Important limits include statutory and common law rights and obligations (presented in Chapter 2). The rules to which employers are subject still give them significant power and, importantly, much more power than workers.

HRM typically focuses on how best to deploy labour to achieve organizational goals. Not surprisingly, the majority of an HR practitioner’s work entails hiring and managing workers. That said, workers do not just magically appear, resumés in hand. Rather, the workforce is created and continually recreated through complex social processes. These processes are often referred to as social reproduction (see Feature Box 1.3). The nature of these processes means that HR practitioners often must grapple with their demands, such as child care and elder care.

Labour Market Power and Dynamics

Employment relationships are formed in a labour market. Historically, labour markets were physical places where employers inspected workers and haggled with them over wages. Wages were set based on the supply of and demand for labour. If there was a tight labour market (i.e., greater demand for workers than supply), then wages would go up as employers competed for workers. If there was a loose labour market (i.e., greater supply of workers than demand), then wages would decline as workers underbid one another to secure scarce jobs.

A contemporary labour market is a metaphorical place where employers and workers negotiate the price of labour.7 There are actually many labour markets, often segmented by both geography and skill. For example, although many people could probably perform the work of a cashier or barista, the pool of workers available to take these low-wage jobs is likely to be limited geographically. Only those workers who live within a reasonable commuting distance will be interested in such a job, and no one is going to uproot their family and move to take such a job. The labour market for jobs for which specific credentials are required (e.g., nursing, gas fitting) is limited by skill. Only adequately qualified workers are able to perform these jobs. However, if jobs also entail high-enough wages, then workers might well move or commute to another locale to perform the work.

Typically, there are more workers seeking work than there are jobs available. Exceptions to this general rule typically occur in highly skilled occupations or during periods of significant economic growth, when the demand for workers can temporarily exceed the supply. This routine oversupply of workers means that employers can easily replace workers whom they find unacceptable or troublesome. This gives employers labour market power, which bolsters the greater power that they already possess because of their control over the workplace. Furthermore, workers need jobs to purchase the necessities of life for themselves and their families. In contrast, employers do not face any significant repercussions if they are short an employee or two. The threat of unemployment (sometimes called the whip of hunger) weighs heavily on workers and further buttresses employers’ labour market power. Over time, employers have used their power to increase the precarity of employment for some workers (see Feature Box 1.4).

When workers and employers enter into a contract of service, typically two bargains are being struck. Most obviously, the parties are striking a wage-rate bargain. It sets out the compensation that workers will receive while employed. In exchange, workers agree to make themselves available for work. Whether any work actually gets done is up to the employer, which has to convert the workers’ capacity to work into productive work. As discussed later, employers convert workers’ capacity to work into actual work primarily through job design (Chapter 3) and performance management (Chapter 9).

The less obvious bargain being struck by workers and employers is the wage-effort bargain. It is hard to see because it is often based on an implicit understanding of how hard and in what ways workers are prepared to work given what they are being paid. Employers might be highly motivated to alter the wage-effort bargain (e.g., getting workers to work faster or harder). But altering that bargain can trigger significant worker resistance. In this way, the wage-effort bargain can act as a limiting factor on the ability of employers to increase their profitability through intensifying work.

For example, an employer might notice that individual workers have a certain amount of down time in their jobs (i.e., time when they are not performing productive tasks). An employer might seek to increase the tempo of work or add tasks to fill up the time. Employers often frame such efforts as multi-tasking or job enrichment (see Chapter 3). Although some workers might welcome greater diversity in their jobs or the chance to learn new skills, others might be concerned about the increase in work or the loss of recovery time between tasks. For this reason, workers might cooperate informally to work at a fixed pace and be reluctant to provide their employers with a clear understanding of how hard they could work if absolutely necessary in order to avoid the employers making such changes.

Human Resource Management and Strategy

Modern human resource management has its roots in 19th-century factories. Concentrating workers in large numbers required (and allowed for) the development of centralized personnel management functions to address hiring, pay, discipline, and worker welfare. In the late 19th century, employers sought to increase their control over production in order to increase profitability via scientific management (see Chapter 3). By the 1930s, employers also began to explore more deeply how the behaviour of people in groups, working conditions, and compensation could be leveraged to increase productivity further.

Over time, human resource management has replaced personnel management as the general term for the task of ensuring that an organization has the right number and mix of workers necessary to achieve its goals. Organizations carry out HR functions in many different ways. In a small organization, a manager or an owner can perform some or all of these functions, possibly in addition to directing the operation of the business. A large organization can have a dedicated HR practitioner or department. Organizations can also contract out certain HR functions, such as payroll administration.

Many HR practitioners continue to perform the routine administrative tasks that were the purview of personnel administration, such as recruiting and terminating staff or administering payroll and benefits. But in HRM these tasks are intended to be performed with a greater degree of integration among HR functions. For example, annual performance assessments occurred historically in isolation from other functions. In modern HRM, performance assessments are often linked to the training and compensation that workers subsequently receive. The expected result is a more systematic administration of workers that better meets employers’ needs. When thinking about the operation of HR systems, it is important to remain mindful of possible gaps between prescription (i.e., what should happen) and description (i.e., what does happen).

Although it can be useful to discuss human resource management as if it is a widely accepted and understood practice, it is operationalized differently in every organization. These differences can sometimes reflect different organizational strategies. A strategy is a plan designed to achieve organizational goals. Organizational strategies often differ in their depth and sophistication. It can be useful to distinguish among three levels of strategy.

1. 1. Corporate: A corporate strategy sets out the purpose and approach of the entire organization. It answers questions such as “which business(es) should this organization be in?” and “how can one aspect of our business help another?”
2. 2. Business: A business strategy identifies how a specific activity or area of business will be carried out. It answers questions such as “how should this organization compete in this specific business area?”
3. 3. Functional: A functional strategy identifies how each department (e.g., human resources, finance) supports the overall business strategy and tends to be most detailed.

Broadly speaking, there are three main business strategies that organizations can adopt.

1. 1. Cost leader: Organizations can emphasize minimizing the costs of their products or services by standardizing their products, developing economies of scale, and/or attaining control over all steps in production and distribution.
2. 2. Differentiation: Organizations can emphasize unique aspects of their products or services (e.g., quality or expertise) and customer loyalty, thereby reducing the impact of price competition.
3. 3. Focus: Organizations can provide a specific service targeted at a selected (i.e., niche) audience ideally in a market with few or no competitors.10

HR strategies are functional strategies designed to ensure the success of an organization’s business strategy. Not surprisingly, organizational HR strategies differ depending on an organization’s business strategy as well as other factors, such as organizational size and labour market. For example, a meat-processing plant might adopt a cost-leader business strategy reflecting that meat processing is a crowded marketplace, meat is a fungible (i.e., easily interchangeable) commodity, and therefore retailers buy meat based largely on price. Furthermore, the nature of meat packing is that jobs can be designed to require little pre-existing skill. Consequently, the company might adopt an HR strategy based on paying low wages for difficult work and accepting that there will be a high level of worker turnover. The viability of this functional strategy turns on the availability of an adequate labour force, and the meat-packing plant will need to have a plan to address this. For example, the plant might rely heavily on migrant workers from other countries whose work visas make it difficult for them to quit their jobs at the plant.

In contrast, an organization that operates five high-priced artisanal charcuterie shops might adopt a business strategy of differentiation. It would emphasize the quality of its products and the expertise of its staff, thereby avoiding competing on prices. Furthermore, it requires highly qualified workers and a stable workforce able to develop personal relationships with customers. This organization’s human resource strategy will likely emphasize more careful staff recruitment and selection, pay higher wages, and seek to retain staff for as long as possible. The viability of this business strategy turns on the continued demand for fancy meats with high-end service and, to a lesser degree, the absence of a similar competitor.

Both of these organizations will likely perform the full range of HR functions. But the emphasis and tone of each will be different (see Feature Box 1.5). Consider their likely approaches to employee training. The meat-packing plant will be required to train workers frequently how to do basic job functions (e.g., killing, dismembering, and packaging a chicken). Because of high staff turnover, there will likely be little emphasis on further worker development. In contrast, the charcuterie shop might choose to hire trained staff because doing so will be less costly than training new workers to butcher and prepare the meats. Additional staff development might focus on deepening the workers’ skills and be used as part of a worker-retention strategy.

Sometimes people unconsciously conflate human resource management with strategic human resource management (SHRM). As noted above, human resource management is a general term for the practices and systems that ensure an organization has the right number and mix of workers necessary to achieve its goals and, subsequently, that the workers achieve these goals. Strategic human resource management is a specific approach to (or perspective on) HRM asserting that organizational performance can be improved by linking human resource management with an organization’s business strategies (see Feature Box 1.6). This approach heightens the organizational importance of human resource management, but the degree to which SHRM delivers on its promise of improved performance is unclear.

Social Construction of Human Resource Management

It is axiomatic that different people view the world and work differently. Individuals’ views reflect their personal experiences of work as well as the experiences of their friends and family members. Their views also reflect information received in school, from the media, and from their employers. Social construction is the process by which an individual combines personal experiences with the information provided by institutions to develop an understanding of how the world works and what certain objects, behaviours, and events mean.

Social construction is based on the belief that there is effectively an infinite amount of stimulus in the world and that what certain things mean is open to interpretation. In deciding what stimulus to pay attention to and how to interpret it, individuals draw from their existing knowledge, beliefs, and values. The understandings that they develop through this process can be shared by others in similar circumstances but not necessarily by those in different circumstances. For example, one’s lived experience (which can be affected by one’s gender and ethno-racial background) can influence one’s view about whether it is safe to walk down a particular street at a particular time. Or whether contacting a police officer is an effective way to resolve an issue or even a safe thing to do.

Workers use the understandings that they develop to guide their behaviour in the workplace. For example, on the one hand, if workers’ experience is that a 15-minute coffee break can be safely stretched out to 20 minutes, then those workers might sometimes do so. If, on the other hand, their experience is that the boss watches the clock and docks pay accordingly, then they will probably be careful to get back to work on time every day. Workers, and specifically HR practitioners, have a variety of understandings about the nature of employment relationships and the nature and degree of conflict in these relationships. Although every individual’s understanding is likely unique in some way, it is possible to discern broad schools of thought about employment and conflict: unitarism and pluralism.

Unitarism, as its name suggests, asserts that there are no fundamental conflicts of interest between workers and employers. Rather, both groups are united in the pursuit of shared workplace objectives. Their different roles in the workplace mean that employers and managers determine what these objectives are and how they will be achieved, and workers carry out the tasks that they are assigned. Despite the unitarist expectation of a unity of purpose in the workplace, conflict does occur. It is explained as being caused by some combination of miscommunication, poor leadership, the influence of outside actors (e.g., unions), and/or a lack of commitment or work ethic among workers. What these explanations of conflict have in common is that they avoid discussing the potential for the interests of workers and employers to conflict. Rather, they assert that conflict stems from error, outside interference, or poor character. Consequently, unitarism seeks to manage conflict via emphasizing shared interests, excluding outside actors, and rooting out discontented or disruptive workers.

Pluralism, in contrast, accepts that the interests of workers and employers can both converge and diverge. In this view, conflict stems from a contest over who will capture the surplus value generated by workers. Employers typically want to maximize their profits (or, in the public and non-profit sectors, to minimize their expenditures). Workers typically want better wages and working conditions. Because pluralism accepts that the conflict arises from conflicting interests, it seeks to manage it through some combination of repressing and accommodating workers’ interests.

The unitarist perspective on employment and conflict often resonates with HR practitioners more than the pluralist perspective. This preference for a unitarist view reflects, in part, that many employers and HR practitioners believe that a culture of cooperation and mutual commitment benefits both parties. And many HR practices seek to encourage and reward worker commitment to organizational goals. These personal and institutional experiences of HR practitioners tend socially to construct work as unitarist.

Before adopting a unitarist perspective, however, it is worth probing a bit deeper. A useful place to start is to recall the difference between prescription (i.e., how things should be) and description (i.e., how things are). HRM exists to ensure that organizations have the right number and mix of workers necessary to achieve their goals as well as to ensure that workers achieve these organizational goals. The HR practices associated with this goal (e.g., developing incentive structures, performance management processes, discipline, and termination) recognize that, absent such structures, workers might not actually achieve the goals of the organization. This recognition implicitly acknowledges that workers and employers can have conflicting interests that must be managed. If workers and employers fully shared interests, then it would be largely unnecessary to link performance to pay, for example. In this way, the working perspective of HRM is pluralist (i.e., there are diverging interests) rather than unitarist.

This disconnect in HRM—between its unitarist prescription (i.e., we are all here to work together) and its pluralist description (i.e., workers must be managed)—is rarely acknowledged or examined. There are likely multiple reasons that HRM is framed as a cooperative activity rather than one underlaid with conflict. Emphasizing that work is a cooperative endeavour exerts normative pressure on workers to do what the employer asks (e.g., work harder), even if doing so is not necessarily in the workers’ interests. Emphasizing cooperation delegitimizes the notion that the interests of workers and employers might conflict. This, in turn, impedes workers’ ability to articulate their interests as distinct from those of employers and to mobilize other workers to pursue them, thereby making it easier for employers to secure the surplus value of labour as profit.

This analysis of how employment is framed is useful because it helps to explain how power, profit, and intersecting identity factors play out in HRM. Employers seeking profits use their social power to frame employment as a cooperative undertaking. This framing obscures how the interests of labour and capital conflict and how the employment relationship helps employers to shift production costs onto workers (in the form of low pay and poor working conditions). Workers, by virtue of their identity factors (specifically being legally subservient to employers), have a limited ability to challenge this framing or outcome. And, of course, some workers are even less able to challenge this framing because of their other social identities related to gender, ethno-racial background, citizenship status, or disability.

Conclusion

In this chapter, we introduced human resource management and placed it in its political, economic, and legal contexts. The broad purpose of HRM is straightforward. It ensures that employers have the right staff and that those staff achieve organizational goals. HR practitioners achieve these outcomes by applying sets of organizational practices within the organization’s environmental context. In the following chapters, we introduce the contexts and the functional areas of HRM.

Chapter 2 examines the legal environment in which HRM occurs. Common and statutory law delineate the range of permissible employment arrangements and behaviours for HR practitioners. That the government has enacted employment laws suggests that, absent such laws, employment relationships can result in outcomes not in the public interest. Specifically, state intervention in employment law is required because the conflicting interests of labour and capital in the surplus value of labour can result in social instability.

Key HR tasks include workflow analysis, job analysis, and job design. Chapter 3 examines how job analysis helps an organization to identify the number and qualities of the workers whom it needs to employ. Chapter 4 explores how organizations use this information to ensure that they have the right number of appropriately skilled workers, both now and in the future, through HR planning. Job analyses and HR plans are then used to inform the recruitment of prospective employees (Chapter 5) as well as the selection of which candidates to hire (Chapter 6).

When workers are hired, organizations typically provide them with an orientation. Some workers might also be provided with further training opportunities. Chapter 7 explores orientation and training. The compensation provided to workers (in the form of wages and benefits) is examined in Chapter 8. Chapter 9 considers how employers convert workers’ potential to work into actual work through performance management. This chapter also examines how employers discipline workers as well as bring employment relationships to an end. Chapter 10 considers one way that workers seek to increase their power in the workplace: forming unions and collectively bargaining their terms and conditions of work. Chapter 11 shows how HR techniques and analyses can be integrated and applied through a series of real-world case studies.

Although these chapters provide an introduction to the technical nature of HRM, they also give due consideration to its political nature. Specifically, each chapter considers how the converging and conflicting interests of workers and employers affect (and are affected by) human resource management practices. For example, Chapter 3 explores how workers can be both a valuable and a problematic source of information about job duties during a job analysis. Workers can be valuable sources because they often have the best understanding of how a job is done and how it might be redesigned to be performed more efficiently. But it might be problematic for HR practitioners to get this information from workers because it is not in the workers’ interest to tell their employers how to speed up work or shed jobs.

Thinking back to the opening vignette, it is clear that Dr. Kim Barker acted in a way that advanced her own interests at the expense of the organization’s interests. She was able to do so because the organization did not have effective hiring practices. This case is particularly striking because Barker was also the CEO and, presumably, the most trustworthy employee of Algoma Public Health. This case highlights that one of the tasks of HR practitioners is to minimize organizational liability by constraining workers’ scope of action through the creation of standardized policies and processes.

This case is also notable because a relatively sophisticated employer did not have standardized recruitment and selection processes. This draws our attention back to how important it is to distinguish between prescription and description in HRM. HR practitioners must grapple with what is actually happening in a workplace rather than what is an ideal or expected situation or process. Complicating matters is that other organizational actors (e.g., senior executives) might struggle to grasp how reality (description) diverges from their expectations (prescription). This gap can cause stress and conflict as well as negatively affect decision making.