THEORETICAL STUDY ON HUMAN RESOURCES MANAGEMENT APPLIED IN WORKING AND BUREAUROCRATIC ORGANIZATIONS

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1 THEORETICAL STUDY ON HUMAN RESOURCES MANAGEMENT APPLIED IN WORKING AND BUREAUROCRATIC ORGANIZATIONS Alexandru Marius RIZESCU * mariusrizescu@yahoo.com Alexandru RIZESCU ** rizescu_alexandru@yahoo.com * LUCIAN BLAGA UNIVERSITY, SIBIU, ROMANIA ** NICOLAE BĂLCESCU LAND FORCES ACADEMY, SIBIU, ROMANIA ABSTRACT The training function is particularly important in the whole process of management, in that it conditions and correlates the effective exercise of the functions of planning, organizing and coordinating to that of controlling adjusting, thus guaranteeing the achievement of the intended objectives. The performance of the organizations is directly related to the motivational level of the employees. An organization of de-motivated employees is prone to staff fluctuations, violations of internal regulations, lack of concentration in achieving the organizational objectives. The organizational culture is an overall framework for conducting all processes and activities of an organization. The way managers of an organization think, the way they motivate their employees, the values to which they refer when making decisions or the rules and regulations they adopt in order to meet the intended objectives are set in the culture of the organization as a hard core of the organizational culture, leading to the development and performance of the institution. Keywords Human resources management, management functions, the training function, motivation, motivating, organizational culture, managerial culture, performance 1. Introduction Motivating the personnel is a major component of management, at the same time being the foundation of the global management structures, which come from the correlation of satisfying the personnel s needs with achieving the objectives and the assigned tasks. The Training Function, Factor of Personnel Motivation The training function is highly important in the management process on the whole, in that it determines and correlates the effective exercise of the functions of planning, organizing and coordinating to the function 80

2 of controlling adjusting, being at the same time the guarantee of achieving the intended objectives. The training function combines all the processes which determine the organization s personnel to participate in setting and achieving the organizational objectives. Training is founded on motivation, which involves correlating the personal satisfaction in the working process with the performed efforts, and especially with the obtained results. This function involves the sum of processes which help determine the personnel of the unit to contribute to the achievement of the set objectives by considering the motivational factors [1]. The training function includes all management actions through which the managers influence the staff of the company to contribute to the achievement of the expected objectives, taking into account the motivational factors which form the work processes that determine the personnel of the company to help set and achieve the predicted objectives, taking into account the factors which motivate them. In other words, this function creates the appropriate conditions for using the personnel s skills and abilities in order to value their experience and creativity, and to stimulate their initiative. Hence, the purpose of training which has a strong operational character is the most profound and the most effective involvement of the exercising and managing personnel in achieving the assigned objectives, part of the overall objectives of the company. Therefore, training answers the question: why is the company personnel involved in establishing and achieving the objectives assigned to that particular company? The foundation of training is motivation that lies in correlating the fulfilment of the needs and interests of the personnel with the achievement of the assigned objectives and tasks. That is why the action of motivating, conceptualized here using simple definitions of the type offered by Steers and Porter, who consider that motivation is what energizes, directs and supports a behavior [2], or from Johns point of view, who believes that motivation should involve the extent to which a persistent effort is directed in order to achieve a goal [3]. In its managerial sense, motivation is the process of moving some of the members of the organization by the help of others, in order to act towards fulfilling, achieving both the individual and the organizational objectives. The function of training-motivating is of special importance in the whole management process because it determines the effective exercise of the other four functions. The phenomenon of training the human resources revolves around motivation. It is the psychological factor which determines the activation of the performance and the efficiency. Motivation in human resources means to motivate people in their work. It does not necessarily mean to reward them with money, but to improve the mental/social representations in terms of the work, of the organization where it is performed and of the products obtained by that specific activity. No organization can be successful without a joint effort of its members. This is the reason why the managers and the management schools have developed training and motivating strategies. The problem of motivating the personnel is given a great importance both in the private and public sectors. All managers agree that achieving the organizational goals depends heavily on the behavior and attitude of their subordinates towards the duties assigned to them. But when trying to answer questions like: How can you determine people to do what you want? or Why A works more and better than B in the same living and working conditions? [4] we reach the conclusion that the problem is quite complex and difficult. At the same time, we must shutter from the very beginning the illusion that there is a sure recipe for success that would ensure the resolution of the problem of motivation for 81

3 any situation or individual. Why? Because people are different. Each has a well-defined personality, with different needs, skills, values and aspirations. These individual qualities are further combined with the conditions and issues related to the place of work. There is another important factor besides these, and that is the dynamics of the personality and of the environment. Individuals do not conservatively preserve all their characteristics. Some feel the need or are required to develop their knowledge. Others improve their skills acquired in a field of activity through a sustained and persistent working pace. Not to mention the changes occurred in the private life with the passing years. Nor the organizational conditions stay unchanged. The results and the reactions generated by the wave of changes in the information technology are sufficiently well known. The institutions follow their path known as the organizational life cycle in which they are born, evolve, mature, stagnate and then decay, each of these stages having well defined characteristics. With all these dynamic individual and organizational factors which are continuously transforming, we may reach the point of the rhetorical and full of skepticism question: Will we ever be able to understand what determines an employee to have a certain attitude and a certain behavior at the workplace? But let us not despair and proceed to the systematic approach to the problem, by starting of course with trying to define the term motivation as simply and shortly as possible. Within the function of training and motivating, we delineate two points: control and motivation. By control, managers exert direct influence over their subordinates by virtue of the authority with which they were invested, involving them in performing their tasks and obligations. The following factors interfere in the controlling process: the manager with his authority and personality, the acting individuals, respectively the subordinates with their characteristics (occupation, level of training, work experience, etc.), the tasks or problems to be solved. The concrete way in which, through control, the manager influences the actions of the others, depends both on the actual situation in which he finds himself and on his traits of character, on the experience he has and the extend to which he knows his subordinates. The managers working style has a special role in carrying out the command; they should promote a democratic style of leadership. A second point in accomplishing the training function, which is particularly important, is motivating the employees towards achieving the set objectives. The motivation lies in the factors, causes, impulses that support people s behavior and taking certain actions. In the process of management, the quality of training plays a very important part, because at a decisive degree, it determines the effective materialization of the upstream functions planning, organizing and coordinating and the efficiency of the assessment following the training. The market economy requires essential changes in the design and performance of motivation in firms and companies, in the direction of adapting the motivations to the characteristics of each employee, eliminating the standardized smoothing approach to motivation of the previous period, which stimulates non-interference, minimal effort, and inefficiency. Deep changes are required in motivating managers whose income should be linked to the performance and development of the company. The training function heavily relies on the behavioral approach of management, where the processes of communication and motivation play a decisive role and it is closely related to interpersonal relations of the manager and consists of stimulating the personnel of the organization, of organizing its efficient participation to actions oriented towards reaching the set goals, taking into account the factors that motivate people. 82

4 The proper performance of the training function implies the manager s understanding the role and the characteristics of the human factor in the company, the motivations of people, the practice of an appropriate style of management and the establishment of effective internal communications. The training function is highly operational in character and answers the question: why do the personnel of the organization participate in setting and achieving the objectives? The analysis of the question leads to the conclusion that the foundation of training is motivation. Motivation provides the correlation of meeting the personnel s needs and interests with achieving the objectives and tasks. At the level of the organizations (companies) the fulfillment of this function by managers implies: a). Mobilization and motivation of the subordinated staff. A genuine motivation is difficult to obtain and can only be achieved through: promoting a favorable working climate, avoiding routine and accommodating the entire personnel to new or unexpected situations in order to effectively cooperate and communicate; encouraging the active participation of the subordinated staff in the decisionmaking process; involving the efficient and full of initiative employees in the decision making process; providing the material and comfort circumstances for the personnel to carry out the work in good conditions. b) The ability to understand the valences of each employee and to use their aptitudes through: the division of tasks according to the skills, specialization and experience of each employee in order to obtain maximum efficiency of the activity; the precise delineation of the performance so that every employee should know what is expected of him; the good communication between senior employees and their subordinated personnel; the knowledge of the work performed by each subordinated person and of the problems they have to face. c) The ability to channel the employees towards common objectives and to motivate them in executing the decisions which imply that the senior employees should know the aspirations of the team they lead, should take into account the views expressed by each member of the personnel, should provide the appropriate framework for the conduct of team activities and should identify the most appropriate solutions for achieving positive results that will lead to the promotion of performances and values. d) The readiness to respond to any request coming from the subordinates. This is the ability of leaders to listen and provide support to their subordinated personnel in order to solve the problems they face. The literature of public service motivation is fairly recent, having as a starting point the analysis of the differences between the stimulating systems in the public and private sectors and the analysis of ethics of the public service conducted by Rainey [5], an approach followed by the efforts of Perry and Wise [6] who intended to develop the concept of public service motivation. Perry is the one who later achieved a particularization and an explanation of the concept, his work being a starting point for the literature on public service motivation. The basic premise of the literature on public service motivation considers that the public sector employees and the public servants are different from those working in the private sector. The analysis and the discussion on this issue have highlighted the differences between the public and private sectors on the same profession, such as the engineers [7] who work for the Government, compared to those who work for private companies. An important focus in the public-private debate was placed on the issue whether a group works for the financial reward gained in a business company and weather the other group is considering a reward associated with a purpose, other than the additional financial profit. 83

5 The theory of public service motivation TPSM [8] does not exclude the extrinsic stimulation or even the financial stimulation of the state agents, but believes that while the problem of decent wages is resolved in both the public and the private sectors, we observe at the public servants a number of reasons which are essential in directing their behavior and which are not connected to the financial reward, but to the fulfillment of tasks related to the welfare of the public good and helping the others, missions that are specific to the public service. These reasons were analyzed and associated to a type of motivation which is specific to public service. 2. Differences between the Concepts of Motivating and Motivation The foundation of training is the motivation that lies in correlating the fulfillment of the needs and interests of the personnel with the achievement of the assigned objectives and tasks. In the circumstances when the increase of the personnel s satisfaction is considered, as a result of fulfilling the assigned tasks. The behavior of the members of an organization clearly affects its structure, its functioning and the principles according to which it may be led. People are considered a special type of resource and the most important category of assets that an organization may use. They not only work for the organization, they are the organization. Therefore, a proper understanding of the human motivation and motivating, of the factors that influence human behavior, of the inevitable conflict between the individual needs and the objectives of the organization is vital for the success in management. The motivation is the foundation of the behaviors and the activities that the individuals perform within the group, depending on the specific of the requirements stemming from one or another category of functional relationships (relationships between the subject and the tasks of the work). In the case of working relations, the problem of motivation is connected to the meaning and the reason that the individual assigns to his professional role. Depending on the way in which the social valorization of work is done (how work is perceived, understood and practiced) and on the social context, the motivation of the working individual is achieved. The motivation is based on needs, these being the immediate causal substrate of the most different interpersonal activities and behaviors. The reason is not a derivate of a single need, but the expression of the way in which they interact in the system. The highest form of motivation is internal motivation, which occurs when the professional role with which the subject interacts becomes a necessity in itself. Such motivation contains in itself the subject s need of activity, the positive social valuing of his work and the awareness of the social importance of the conducted activity. Motivation represents the internal state of the employee, which guides and directs his behavior by satisfying certain needs. Motivation is synonym to the mental energy that an individual is willing to invest in achieving a certain goal. It belongs to the human s will to act in a certain way. By motivating we mean the process by which the managers direct and focus the efforts, the energies of the subordinated personnel towards using the resources of the organization with the maximum economic efficiency [9]. Motivating means energizing an individual towards an objective (notice the fact that the definition implies a factor which is external to the individual). Motivating the employee belongs to the manager s skills of influencing his behavior. Once the latter is aware of this, he has the chance to get good results both at the subdivision/public authority and at the individual levels. Those in charge of motivating the personnel must however bear in mind that each person is different, characterized by different needs and aspirations, and the place in the organization and the role it has 84

6 there generate these needs. And we do not stop to the needs and desires; each person has different character traits, different temperament, different knowledge and different mentality, which differentiates it from the rest of the people. It is therefore very difficult for a manager to decide which would be the optimal motivating methods suitable to each employee. The concept of motivating represents the total of factors that are responsible for the conduct of actions, the level of performance or endurance of the employees at the workplace. The performances of the organization are actually the sum of the individual performances of the employees, and the individual performance depends on the motivation, the professional ability and the image that the employee has about his workplace. From this stems the importance the motivation has for improving the organization s level of performance. Managers can not order their employees to be motivated; what they can do is to create an atmosphere that would foster the accountability, the dedication and the perfection at work. Some managers choose a shorter, but not efficient way trying to motivate through fear. This method, however, quickly loses effect. Real managers motivate through their personality and authority, not though fear. Only motivation through authority is long lasting. In order to use the full potential of the personnel, the postmodern organizations and managers have changed their approach from giving orders and controlling to consulting and supporting, as efficient ways to motivate the personnel. This shift in attitude started when managers understood that acknowledging the achievements of good performance is way more efficient than punishing for weak performance. At the workplace, each employee is motivated by different things, but the goal of the manager is to influence the behavior of the employees in order to correlate their motivation with the needs of the public authority. The changes occurred within the system of the individual s needs profoundly influence his degree of motivation; this move is often marked by contradictions arising from the duality of the means of creating motivation as a result of the system of the individual needs and of the dependence on the consecution of the degrees of engagement in work for each level of needs. The needs at the workplace are different: the stability, the appreciation, the membership to a group, the personal/ professional achievement, etc. Depending on the needs of the employee, the manager can build his own system of motivation through individual approach, giving his employees what they need most, and, respectively, what they are motivated by [10]. Considering the dynamics of the individual s system of needs, motivating allows us to understand a series of highly significant psychosocial phenomena in terms of practicality, such as: choosing a profession, work integration, the socio-professional development of the individual. Between motivation, activity and behavior, a functional cycle is established that, for the previously mentioned cases, would have the following components: choosing the profession according to the strongest unmet need in that context; conducting the chosen profession; satisfying the initial need which gradually ceases to motivate the individual; the appearance of new needs, which are either created during the conduct of the profession, or they were there before and are updated. The process continues, eventually ending with the individual s increasingly close connection to the profession. There is, however, the possibility that due to the stagnation or the regression on the motivational level, adverse effects could occur: dissatisfaction, poor integration, tendency to quit the job. Empirical research has shown that in organizations, the needs and the motivations of the individual are subordinated to a greater or lesser extent to the needs of the 85

7 group, the individuals tend to place their aspirations and performance around the average of the group which exerts a normative, regulating influence. The motivation lies in correlating the needs, the aspirations and the interests of the personnel within the organization with the achievement of the objectives and the conduct of the duties, the authorities and responsibilities assigned within the organization. Motivation is a major component of management and a topic frequently approached by specialists. From the point of view of the design of the management, we distinguish two major meanings of motivating: a) motivating in a narrow sense, based on a traditional vision of the organization and management, which refers only to the personnel of the organization. This vision still prevails in managerial practice. It involves correlating the needs, the aspirations and the interests of the personnel in carrying out tasks in order to achieve the objectives. b) motivating in a broader sense, shaped in recent years, is based on a modern vision of the organization and the management. Its essential feature is to focus the interest on stakeholders (individuals, groups of people and organizations that have major interests in the development and the performance of the company: owners, customers, managers, employees, unions, suppliers, banks, central and local administration, local community etc.) [12]. Motivating is the action to motivate somebody else, and motivation is the totality of the impulses (conscious or not) which determine people to do things, to choose from several options a certain behavior, to act in a certain way in order to achieve goals. Motivation is associated with the rational approach and the possibility of choice of a course of action. Managers can not effectively fulfill their part without knowing the causes which support the attitudes and the behaviors of the personnel of the organization. All the actions of the manager must be based on the actual knowledge of how people behave and change over time, and not on the way he would like them to behave. Thus, the question arises of determining the human behavior and the internal dynamic factors that contribute to the mobilization of energy needed for performing an act or that intervene in choosing an action faced with an external reality. Motivating the personnel has several roles: a) the managerial role consists in determining the content and effectiveness of the training function which in turn decisively influences the realization of the other management functions planning, organizing, coordinating and controlling; b) the organizational role refers to the major impact that motivation directly and indirectly has on the way the company functions. The content and the used methods of motivating greatly contribute to imprinting certain features of the organizational culture; c) the individual role aims at the dependence on motivation of the satisfactions and frustrations of each employee, of his evolution. If the motivation is based on considering the needs, the aspirations and the expectations of the employees and take into account the potential and the effort, the personnel are more satisfied, and use the capacities at a higher extent and develop faster and more intensely; d) the economic role refers to the indirect but substantial conditioning of the economic performances through the type of motivation which prevails in each company; e) the social role represents the synergistic effect of the other roles in terms of the psycho-sociological elements which characterize the members of an organization [12]. Despite the difficulties concerning the consensus on defining the concept of motivating, we observe in these definitions that there are some common elements which facilitate the understanding of the phenomenon of motivating: the intense need which energizes the human behavior; the dynamism, the internal force that orients the behavior in a certain direction; 86

8 the objectives, respectively inducements or rewards, that reinforce the satisfaction of the people, the latter enhancing motivation [11]. Analyzing the phenomenon of motivation, two delivering sources have been discovered: one subjective and the other one objective. The objective dimension uses as the main motivating source the effect of inequality in rewarding the work. The equal distribution of the income has a de-motivating effect. The differentiation of the monetary rewards according to effectiveness, skills and success is an effective way to motivate. The subjective dimension of work uses as a motivational source the effect of the non-pecuniary rewards. Numerous studies have pointed out the fact that many categories of individuals can be motivated in their actions just as well by other means than money, or financial rewards. Motivating according to the means of conditioning the personnel s satisfactions, according to their results, is positive or negative. Positive motivation is based on amplifying the personnel s satisfaction of participating in the working process, as a result of accomplishing the assigned tasks, provided that the level of the tasks which should be accomplished is accessible to most performers. Negative motivation is based on threatening the personnel with reducing the satisfactions unless they accomplish exactly the assigned objectives and tasks, whose level is very high and inaccessible under the given circumstances for a considerable part of the performers. Characteristic to the scientific management is the design of the motivation and hence of the training based on the socalled motivational scales, i.e. items of interest to the members of the company, of their needs, ordered according to the sequence in which they should be considered. Among the motivational scales especially considered in the specialized literature, we mention that of Maslow, which includes the following types of needs: physiological, safety and security, human contact and group affiliation, social status and self accomplishment. In modern organizations, positive motivation is primarily used, since the same amount of financial resources used for motivation, a significantly higher proportion of personnel gets satisfaction from participating in the working process, and the work climate and the organizational culture are superior, a fact which thus generates better economic results. In order to achieve an effective training, it is necessary that the process of motivating the personnel should simultaneously meet multiple requirements: a) it should be complex, in the sense of a combined use, both of material and moral rewards, based on considering the key factors involved, endogenous and exogenous to the company; b) it should be differentiated, i.e. the motivations considered and their use should take into account the characteristics of each person and each group of work so as to obtain the maximum participation in setting and achieving the company s objectives; c) it should be gradual, meaning that it should successively satisfy the needs of the personnel in close correlation with its contribution, taking into account the interdependencies between the different categories of needs. The gradual nature of the motivation is also required by the limited amount of the material resources which could be used for motivation. In the management of the organization (company), the true meaning of the actions and the behavior of the employees can not be revealed without knowing the reasons that generated them. This justifies the frequency with which we ask and are asked the reasons for our decisions and those of the others. Knowing the reasons not only helps increase the efficiency of operations, increase the possibility of explaining and predicting the human behavior, but also decipher its moral value. 87

9 3. Keys for Motivating the Employees towards Improving Organizational Performances Performance management involves finding the best strategies to motivate the employees, so that they should feel satisfied with their workplace and thus achieve the highest performances. The satisfaction goes both ways, both towards the employees and towards the organization, namely towards the managers. To motivate a person means to persuade it to make efforts in a certain direction, and it also means to reward that effort. The effort is the employee s behavior directed towards a specific purpose. The employees behavior can be manipulated by the managers towards achieving the organizational performance and fulfilling the organization s goals through knowing, sorting and emphasizing those suitable motivational methods: both to the employee, to the manager and to the set objective. The intelligent motivation, based on the needs of the employees and not on the managers idea of what the employees desire (which may be a totally wrong idea) helps to increase the efficiency of the employees, to predict the human behavior and to decipher its moral value. We could say that motivation can lead to satisfaction in a well done and organized work, but satisfaction may also involve motivation towards a permanent increase of the individual performance. An organization will remain competitive only if there is a successful management in the use of all resources, including the human resource. Here, the individual performance must be sufficiently high so that the organization could achieve excellence. The individual performance depends only on the employees, on their desire to exceed, on the effort that you make, on their capabilities to perform the tasks they are given, on their training. The individual performance may be expressed in three basic ways: productivity, innovation, loyalty [13], all equally important. The main means to motivate employees are the following: a. Effective communication; b. Devolution of authority; c. Encouraging employees; d. Regularly provided feedback; e. Individual approach (situational management). Employees are human beings who differ in personality, value system, work capability, type of motivation etc. Thus, a manager may be able to manage them efficiently by applying a situational management style. What does this mean? It means that the employees cannot be treated and led equally, since you may be successful in some situations and you will fail in others. According to these two criteria, there are four leadership styles, applied according to the situation, meaning depending on the actual circumstances: the direct/authoritarian style; the facilitation style; the supportive style and the devolution style. Applying the management styles according to the situation is not an easy job, because it requires a high degree of flexibility from the manager [14]. 4. Conclusions The human factor is essential in shaping the development of each organization; that is why it is highly important that the human resources should be motivated and should have a positive attitude towards the development and the performance of the organization. One of the tasks of the management is to have the capability to predict the behavior of the coworkers and the way it may be influenced. This is where the leadership skills that a manager should have prove efficient. The primary role of human resources in the entire society is reflected in the organization, which is a recognized fact, argued by many scientists from different countries. The main elements which prove this are the following: The labor force is the only creator of useful value. In fact, the organization represents the basic economic cell of the society where people create products and services. 88

10 The human resource is the only creator, not only from an economical but also from a spiritual, scientific point of view. Generating new ideas embodied in products, technologies, management methods, and new organizational solutions is the exclusive prerogative of man. The effectiveness and the efficiency of using the material and informational resources depend to a decisive extent on the human resources. The business practice reveals quite a few situations where the organizations, similarly or closely endowed in terms of techniques, finances and information technology, obtain significantly different economic performances. In conclusion, the human resources represent the organization. Without the actual presence of people who know what, when and how to do, it is simply impossible for the organizations to achieve their objectives. People are a key resource, a vital resource of today and tomorrow of all organizations; they ensure their survival, development and competitional success. The organizations exist because people work together to achieve the organizational objectives, in order to fulfill their own objectives. The essence of any organization is the human effort, and the efficiency and the effectiveness of the organization are largely influenced by the behavior of the people within the organization. Acknowledgment This work was supported by the strategic grant POSDRU/159/1.5/S/133255, Project ID (2014), co-financed by the European Social Fund within the Sectorial Operational Program Human Resources Development References 1. Eugen Burduş and Gheorghiţă Căprărescu, Fundamentele managementului organizaţiei, (Bucharest: Economic Publishing House, 1999), F.E. Saal and P.A. Knight, Industrial/Organizational Psychology. Science and Practice, (Pacific Grove: Brooks/Cole Publishing Company, 1988), T. Johns, Relaţiile perfecte cu clienţii, (Bucharest: National Publishing House, 1998), A. Prodan, Performanţele individuale şi satisfacţia personalului, in Managementul resurselor umane, K.L. Mathis, P.C. Nica, and C. Rusu, (Bucharest: Economic Publishing House, 1997), H.G. Rainey, Reward Preferences Among Public and Private Managers, in Search of the Service Ethic, American Review of Public Administration, (1982): J.L. Perry and L.R.Wise, The Motivational Bases of Public Service, Public Administration Review, (1990): P.E. Crewson, The Public Service Ethic, American University, Public Service Motivation (PSM). 9. Managementul performanţei într-o unitate hotelieră, s6/maxim_raluca, Elena Levinţa-Perciun, Tamara Gheorghiţa and Ansi Shundi, Motivarea personalului: provocări şi soluţii: Ghid practic pentru manageri din serviciul public, Elan Poligraf Publishing House, (2012), St. Stanciu, M.A. Ionescu, C. Leovaridis and D. Stănescu, Managementul resurselor umane, (Bucharest: Comunicare.ro Publishing House, 2003), Ibidem, p D. Abrudan and E. Novac, Managementul resurselor umane elemente teoretice şi practice, (Timişoara: Eurobit Publishing House, 2008), Elena Levinţa-Perciun, Tamara Gheorghiţa and Ansi Shundi, cit.ed.,