Courtesy: ISO 30400:2016 Human resource management
The human resources field began to take shape in 19th century Europe. It built on a simple idea by Robert Owen (1771-1858) and Charles Babbage (1791-1871) during the industrial revolution. These men concluded that people were crucial to the success of an organization. They expressed the thought that the well-being of employees led to perfect work; without healthy workers, the organization would not survive.
HR emerged as a specific field in the early 20th century, influenced by Frederick Winslow Taylor (1856–1915). Taylor explored what he termed “scientific management” (sometimes referred to as “Taylorism”), striving to improve economic efficiency in manufacturing jobs. He eventually focused on one of the principal inputs into the manufacturing process—labor—sparking inquiry into workforce productivity.
Meanwhile, in England, C S Myers, inspired by unexpected problems among soldiers which had alarmed generals and politicians in the First World War of 1914–1918, co-founded the National Institute of Industrial Psychology (NIIP) in 1921. In doing so, he set seeds for the human relations movement. This movement, on both sides of the Atlantic, built on the research of Elton Mayo (1880-1949) and others to document through the Hawthorne studies (1924–1932) and other studies how stimuli, unrelated to financial compensation and working conditions, could yield more productive workers. Work by Abraham Maslow (1908–1970), Kurt Lewin (1890–1947), Max Weber (1864–1920), Frederick Herzberg (1923–2000), and David McClelland (1917–1998), forming the basis for studies in industrial and organizational psychology, organizational behavior and organizational theory, was interpreted in such a way as to further claims of legitimacy for an applied discipline.
Birth and development of the discipline
By the time enough theoretical evidence existed to make a business case for strategic workforce management, changes in the business landscape – à la Andrew Carnegie (1835-1919), John Rockefeller (1839-1937) – and in public policy – à la Sidney (1859-1947) and Beatrice Webb (1858-1943), Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal of 1933 to 1939 – had transformed employer-employee relationships, and the HRM discipline became formalized as “industrial and labor relations”. In 1913 one of the oldest known professional HR associations—the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD)—started in England as the Welfare Workers’ Association; it changed its name a decade later to the Institute of Industrial Welfare Workers, and again the next decade to Institute of Labour Management before settling upon its current name in 2000. From 1918 the early Soviet state institutions began to implement a distinct ideological HRM focus alongside technical management – first in the Red Army (through political commissars alongside military officers), later (from 1933) in work sites more generally (through partorg posts alongside conventional managers).
In 1920, James R. Angell delivered an address to a conference on personnel research in Washington detailing the need for personnel research. This preceded and led to the organization of the Personnel Research Federation. In 1922 the first volume of The Journal of Personnel Research was published, a joint initiative between the National Research Council and the Engineering Foundation. Likewise in the United States, the world’s first institution of higher education dedicated to workplace studies—the School of Industrial and Labor Relations—formed at Cornell University in 1945. In 1948 what would later become the largest professional HR association—the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM)—formed as the American Society for Personnel Administration (ASPA).