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In addition, organizations are becoming increasingly interested in ways to evaluate the effectiveness of human resource management activities, the source of those activities, and this is an strategic goal of the modern human resources management department. many experts believed that human resource management practices could not be assessed with anywhere near the objectivity that we could evaluate the effectiveness of a sales campaign, for instance. assumed that, if the human resource management department was functioning properly, people would generally be happier, but there was little real attempt to measure effectiveness beyond that. This view changed, first in the 1950s with the beginning of serious discussions about the utility, or value, of human resource management practices. In the 1980s and 1990s utility analysis became much more sophisticated, and it became possible to determine exactly how much human resource management activities contributed to a company's bottom line. The advent of high-performance work systems resulted in broader metrics for evaluating human resource management activities, 30 and as a result, it is now possible to develop fairly objective measures of the impact and/or effectiveness of human resource management practices. It remains the role of the human resource management department however, to develop these metrics and to apply to all resource management activities undertaken on behalf of the organization. We will return to this topic again in Chapter 2.
Despite the importance of the activities for which the human resource management department is typically responsible, the fact remains that many activities formerly carried out by the human resource management department are either subcontracted to outside firms(who can presumably carry them out more efficiently at lower cost) or performed by line managers
Management positions that were once called line positions are more likely to be called operating managers today. These managers oversee the acquisition of other kinds of resources, the transformation of those resources into goods and services, and the sale and distribution of those goods and services to customers, Even in organizations that continue to have specialized human resource managers to handle some of the human resource duties, operating managers are increasingly expected to participate in the human resource management function For example, operating managers are expected to recognize, appreciate, follow the various legal constraints imposed on the organization, even though compliance may technically be the responsibility of the human resource depart ment. For example, it is not advisable to ask a job applicant certain questions regarding personal plans or active (i.e.” Are you planning to start family soon?" or "What type of position does your husband/wife have) Such questions, even when asked innocently, may be the basis for discrimination(real or imagined) and can damage the career prospects of the applicant and cost the firm money in the form of a lawsuit or legal settlement if actual discrimination as later demonstrated. Thus, it is the responsibility of every operating manager to understand legal framework within which they function
In fact, in many organizations where self-managed work teams are common almost all human resource activities are the responsibility of the team leader and the team members themselves. In such cases, a human resource manager might be asked to provide consulting help to the team design and implement necessary practices, but the human resource manager provides only help and guidance. He or she does not set or implement policy. But even as the lines of distinction between human resource managers as staff and operating managers blur, the potential for conflict still exists between the staff