Week5Lecture - Pr inc iple s of Ma na ge me nt Week5:...

2/25/13 Principles of Management
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Week 5: Managing and Motivating Human Resources ­ Lecture
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The Leading Process
Managing Human Resources | Emotional Intelligence | Employee Motivation and Performance | Review
Managing Human Resources
In today's business environment, human resource management plays a
strategically important role to the organization. Organizations make a huge
investment in attracting, retaining, and motivating their workforce, and they
should because it can be a competitive advantage. Think about it this way: two
companies can be in similar facilities, buy similar technologies, and build similar
products, yet still operate very differently based on how they manage their
human resources.
Performance Appraisals
For many managers, the completion of performance appraisals is an area that
can be improved upon and one area within the scope of a manager's duties that
is often overlooked or not done properly. Note that, as with most of the course,
you're really going to need to differentiate between being managers and being
employees, because the difference in perception is huge.
Performance appraisals are simply formal assessments of how well employees are doing their jobs. However, their impact on
compensation, motivation, training, career planning, and promotions is understandably significant. For example, the faculty evaluation
surveys that DeVry Online students complete in Week 7 ­ these scores are studied carefully not only to monitor individual faculty, but
also to look for larger trends and satisfaction rates.
Let's take this one step further and look at two types of errors or biases that can occur when evaluating an employee.
Recency Error : Let's use the example of an online instructor and a student's end of term evaluation of that instructor. Even
though the instructor has always responded to the student's e­mails within a few hours in the past, in Week 6, it took the
instructor four days to respond to a message from that student. So, the student marks the instructor as being "unresponsive" on
the survey because that's what the student remembers, because it was most recent. As another example, there's a saleswoman
who has been average the entire year, yet booked a huge sale in the 4th quarter. This is fresh in her manager's mind, so he
rates her as above average on her review, when in fact she is not.