Chapter 1:
THE DYNAMIC ENVIRONMENT OF HRM

LEARNING OUTCOMES

After reading this chapter, students should be able to:

• Discuss how cultural environments affect human resource management (HRM) practices. • Describe how technology is changing HRM • Identify significant changes that have occurred in workforce composition • Describe the HRM implications of a labor shortage • Describe how changing skill requirements affect HRM • Explain why organizational members focus on quality and continuous improvements • Describe work process engineering and its implications for HRM • Identify who makes up the contingent workforce and the HRM implications • Define employee involvement and list its critical components • Explain the importance of ethics in an organization.

CHAPTER OVERVIEW

The chapter’s opening vignette illustrates how Four Seasons Resorts and Hotels uses the Golden Rule to treat the employees as you expect them to treat the customer. While customers like to be pampered, so do the employees as evidenced by the Four Seasons being listed in Fortune magazine as one of the “Best Companies to Work For” every year since the list started in 1998. Overviews of today’s dynamic business world, highlighting cultural environments, globalization, technology, and social history evolution, set the stage for discussions about the implications to the HR field. These topics include: multicultural issues, global workforces, HRM technology, workforce diversity, labor supply and management, contingent workforces, decentralized work sites, continuous improvement, work process engineering, employee involvement, HRM challenges, and ethics.

Additional Features of This Chapter

Exhibits include: 1 – 1: Cultural Values 1 – 2: FexEx Corporation Diversity Mission Statement 1 – 3: The Contingent Workforce 1 – 4: Are