Brief History of Human Resource Management

The origin of the HRM function can be traced in England where masons, carpenters, leather workers, and other crafts-people organized themselves into guilds. The groups worked towards the common objective of attaining "improved work conditions".

18th Century: During the later part of the century the concept of Industrial Revolution laid the basis for a new and complex industrial society. The industrial revolution began with the substitution of stem power and machinery for time consuming hand labor. Working conditions, social patterns and the division of labor were significantly altered. A new kind of employee- a boss, who wasn’t necessarily the owner, as had usually been the case in the past- became a power broker in the factory system. These changes led to widening the gap between workers and owners.

19th Century: During the era of the world wars scientific management and welfare work represents two concurrent approaches, along with industrial psychology, merged. Scientific management represented an effort to deal with inefficiencies in labor and management primarily through work methods, time and motion study, and specialization. Industrial psychology represented the application of psychological principles toward increasing the ability of workers to perform efficiently and effectively. Scientific management can be summarized as a one best way to do a job which includes the following principles: 1. Science, not rules of thumb; 2. Harmony, not discord; 3. Cooperation, not individualism; 4. Maximum output, not restricted output. Whereas scientific management focused on the job efficiencies, industrial psychology focused on the worker and individual differences. The maximum well being of the worker was the focus of industrial psychology.

1920’s: The drastic change in technology, the growth of the organizations, the rise of unions, and government concern and intervention concerning working people resulted in the development of personnel departments. Though no such trace for first personnel department can be traced still it is found that around 1920’s most of the organizations starting thinking on matters such as conflict between employees and management. The term “welfare secretaries” were used to denote the personnel administrator. The main task of the welfare administrator was to facilitate the communication between the worker and the management and recommend management as to what had to be done to get the best results from the employees.

1930’s: During mid of 1920 & 1930’s another concept of Human relations movement came up after the studies conducted on “human factors at work” be Elton mayo and other famous researcher. This study pointed out the importance of the social aspect and work groups on the employee output & workers satisfaction. Around 1960’s human relations movement became a branch of and became a contributor to the field of organizational behavior.

We can conclude from the above discussion that till the 1960’s HRM functions was only considered to be an record keeping functions confined to blue collar or operating employees and were not considered to be an important function in management, while with the recent development and researches in the field of Human relations and organizational behavior the Human resource management has come in line along with the other strategic management function