Human resource is a vital department of every business, organization, directorate, etc. it is responsible for the provision of the daily operations (Prescott & Rothwell, 2012). There are two main approaches to Human resources a traditional/administrative view which can be defined as a responsive approach that illustrates that the human resource department’s actions are not wholly in line with the organization’s governance goals, they are a task-oriented administration aimed at accomplishing employees’ necessities as they unveil. On the other hand, a contemporary/strategic view is proactive and aligns with the organization’s goals in its activities hence all its undertakings are targeted at achieving the organization’s goals. In both the Christian view and human resource management, these approaches provide for servant leadership and pace-setting leadership as advocated by Jesus (Roberts, n.d.) thus bringing about motivation, resources, and integrity hence satisfying a wide range of users who have adopted it. This essay assesses and analyzes the differences between the administrative view and strategic view in human resources while also articulating the perception of Christian scripture on Human resource management.
The most outstanding difference is their methodology one is reactive while the other is responsive. The traditional /administrative human resource management is reactive, insinuating that it responds to employees when the working personnel raise requests or take part in industrial actions (Rousseau and Greller, 1994) for example when members of the nurse’s trade union indulge in a strike due to low pay and poor working environs, an administrative/traditional human resource will react to such an occurrence to resolve the difficulty. An administrative human resource will therefore direct its efforts towards running the employees and employer relations, remedying the worker’s problems to ensure the smooth running of the daily operations by ascertaining that every employee is comfortable and well-motivated. Due to this nature, it barely relays on the key performance indicators of the employees, the human resource management team focuses more on how they can amend negative scenarios to allow the normal working environment to reoccur. The traditional/administrative human resource is an after-the-fact system and proves effective in resolving problems, it limits itself to labor relations only.
Strategic/contemporary human resource management is a bit contrary to the administration in the regard that it is proactive, it involves planning and counteracting predicaments before they surface (Meshoulam and Baird, 1987) for example educating the employees on organization policy and issuing them handbooks outlining their expected code of conduct and the penalty that awaits anyone who goes against the stipulated code. In addition, the strategic HRM assesses the organization’s needs for the impending years and develops tactics to solve them, for instance, ensuring continuous education of employees thus enabling the organization to be run by competent employees who are well updated on the current skills and technology. Due to its hands-on mentality, it heavily relies on data to make decisions by assessing the employees alongside the organization’s key performance indicators they can come up with a hypothesis that enables them to plan for a better future for the organization. It consequently can be acknowledged that this human resource method is visionary and extends to every aspect of the organization.
Their tactics of approaching problems also portray differences in that the traditional human resource as aforementioned is responsive hence hesitates to address problems before they happen (Abwanzo, 2013) due to its inherent nature of supposing that the employees will learn from their superior colleagues about the working relations, expected behavior and the goals of the organization, this administrative human resource management trend of stepping in to resolve a problem when it has already occurred alienates it from indulging and consolidating their work with the set objectives and plans of the organization, this may prove to be erroneous when it leads to costly flaws for the organization for example when misconduct in the workplace is experienced and some staff members have to be laid off due to ill behavior thus directly impacting the output of the organization however when zero misconducts are observed it saves a lot of capital for the organization by being conservative. So with the above argument, I can state that it is passive human resource management that relates its philosophy to the social learning theory.
On the other hand, the strategic human resource as indicated before is well organized, proactive and anticipates the forthcoming difficulties, and delivers a plan to answer them before they emerge (Strobel et al, 2017), owing to this trait there is significant deliberation on aligning the organization’s objectives and plans with the human resource department hence making the strategic/contemporary human resource management to synchronize with every task in their respective organization. For instance, if an organization has a corruption-free zone policy, this method would make a maximum effort to mainstream this policy either through training, organizational print media, and documents such as handbooks in which it would highly condemn the heinous act and also inform the employees of the glaring penalty that awaits the culprits of this policy, as a result, this would save the company from the losses which are related to malpractice and misconduct of employees therefore automatically elevating its status quo. I perceive it as an aggressive human resource management approach that strives to leave no room for error.
Another significant variance between these human resource management is their philosophy on staying updated on contemporary society. Traditional human resource management is reluctant towards change and instead forms a platitudinous loop that employs the same old techniques with the only probable change being the present members (Raeder and Bokova, 2019) for instance an organization that uses traditional human resource management while faced by a task of ensuring every employer is well monitored and there is well-administered evaluation, it will routinely follow up on the issue while administering the same tools of monitoring such as guaranteeing every employee has filled their appraisal hard copies and has been assessed by their superiors. I can for that reason categorize the traditional/administrative human resource as being conservative and predictable contrary to the strategic human resource as argued in the paragraph below.
The strategic/contemporary human resource management is well known for its preparedness to embrace change (Raeder and Bokova, 2019), this system is in a perpetual fluctuating state with accommodating and fit in a working environment where transformation is inevitable a recent transformation that surprised everyone in the globe was the necessity to work from home due to government health measures to curb the covid-19 pandemic. Such unexpected turn of events demands strategic human resource management that is capable of changing to enable daily operations of a workplace to occur even amidst such extreme abrupt transformations for example using technology to monitor and evaluate employees working from their homes with software such as an integrated performance management system account that will generate appraisals of the employees since filling the appraisals manually in hard copies is no longer an option. Hence strategic/contemporary human resource is innovative and best suited to cope with a constantly changing world.
The Christian worldview of thinking perceives Christian source management, both the traditional and contemporary as imperative because a workplace is more than a source of income it is an authentic source of human welfare and also an important aspect of one’s personality (Sullivan, 2012). Christianity advocates for service, every individual to act as a servant and seek to ensure their colleague’s junior or senior best interest is accomplished and more so lead by example, in the Christian scripture Jesus washed his disciple’s feet to articulate the importance of servant leadership concept (Roberts & Hess-Hernandez, 2018). Conclusively human resource management is a ground for moral and principled organizational behavior where humanity and justice prevail in a work setting.
In summary, it is fair to admit that there are differences between traditional/ administrative the contemporary /strategic human resource management, the latter proving to be holistic in its approach and completely immersed in the organization’s activities and in consideration of all its indulgences that is the constant updating and preparedness, etc. is likely to have a high budget cost while else the former has a likelihood of having a low budget cost due to its passiveness. Christian’s world view thinking accommodates both managements but advocates for their approach to be more oriented towards service hence bringing about the concept of servant leadership human resource management. From this argument, it can be derived that human resource management is the brainchild of moral conduct in a workplace and therefore an organization should be careful in determining which type of management they will engage in.
References
Abwanzo, B., 2013. HRM Problems. SSRN Electronic Jo.nal,.
Me.ullam, I. and Baird, L., 1987. Proactive Human Resource Management. Human Resource Management, 26(4), pp.483-502.
Prescott, R., & Rothwell, W. (2012). The encyclopedia of human resource management. John Wiley & Sons.
Raeder, S. and Bokova, M., 2019. Committed to change? Human resource management practices and attitudes towards organizational change. Open Psychology, 1(1), pp.345-358.
Roberts, G. Christian scripture and human resource management.
Rousseau, D. and Greller, M., 1994. Human resource practices: Administrative contract makers. Human Resource Management, 33(3), pp.385-401.
Strobel, M., Tumasjan, A., Spörrle, M. and Welpe, I., 2017. Fostering employees’ proactive strategic engagement: Individual and contextual antecedents. Human Resource Management Journal, 27(1), pp.113-132.
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