The Human Resource Glossary

-a compared analogy-

Human resources have become the politically correct way of addressing Earth’s most valuable resource… the human being. There is a long history of attempts to achieve an understanding of human behavior at the work place. From the early 1890, academicians and practitioners developed theories and practices in order to explain and influence the behavior of employees at the work. The Human Resource Glossary by William R. Tracey defines Human Resources as: “The people that staff and operate an organization”. The people that work within an organization are subject of common analysis for political economics, economics, corporate business and psychology. In political economics and economics, the employees are taken into consideration as one of the four production factors: Labor, while in the corporate world they are known as Human Resource or Human Capital and it is not referring to the people within an organization as physical matter, but what those people bring and contribute to organizational success. Sometimes it is called intellectual capital when it reflects creativity, knowledge, skills and motivation. The authority level that deals with it, it’s called Human Resource Management.(SITE1) The original term, Personnel Management was used to describe “the specialist management function which determines and implements policies and procedures which affects the stages of the employment cycle” (BOOK). It first appeared in the early years of the 20th Century and it had an administrative nature, dealing mostly with payroll, employment law and handling related tasks. The term of Human Resource Management is the result of the famous Hawthorne experiment of Elton Mayo of the Harvard School of Business Administration. This experiment was meant to demonstrate the connection between theory and practice of Personnel Management with Psychology. The term began to be used in the 1950s, to designate the expansion of traditional personnel management to include modern psychology. (Site 2) The term defines a managerial perspective which argues the need to establish an integrated series of personnel policies to support the organizational strategy (Buchannan, 2004). A number of authors stress the difficulties of identifying clear differences between personnel management and HRM, and maintain that the most obvious change is a “re-labeling process” (Legge, 1989) Some experts, such as Lowry (1990) and Fowler (1987), argue that there is no major difference between human resources and personnel management going further by suggesting that “HRM is the continuing process of personnel management”.