Unfair Dismissal

Despite a lot of attention has been drawn to the sex discrimination recent decades which had been talked about last post, the issue of unfair dismissal a bit underwhelming.  It is unfair for an employer to dismiss an employee, regardless of length of service, becoming pregnant, or having previously asserted certain specified employment rights. The unfair dismissal law is the part of the labour law that requires fair, just and reasonable treatment by employers in cases where a person’s job could be terminated.

There are three types of dismissal that can be attended. Firstly, the Wrongful dismissal occurs when a termination by the employer in breach of the employee’s contract of employment. For example, an employee was terminated without receiving any notice, but is not seen as unfair dismissal. Secondly, discrimination dismissal is the situation where an employee was dismissed because being discriminated. This is strongly linked with the discrimination act that has been discussed in the last post. The discrimination can be on the basis of race, sex, gender reassignment, disability, religion or belief, sexual orientation, marriage or civil partnership, pregnancy and maternity. A good example in recent time will be the cases of Chelsea Football Club manager Jose Mourinho dismissed their medical doctor Eva Carneiro due to sexuality, as Jose claims that the doctor could not read the football situation because Eva is a women. Lastly, the constructive dismissal is where an employer has committed a serious breach of contract, entitling the employee to resign in response to the employer’s conduct. In other words, the employee can terminate to contract with or without notice if the employer conduct is against the law.

In order to protect the employee from dismissal, the law of unfair dismissal was created in 1971. The law categorise the reasons of dismissal into three different title. The first category is automatically unfair, such as pregnancy, spent conviction, work in unsafe conditions, unlawful working hours, contravention of employee regulation, assertion of statutory right and taking duties as pension fund trustee, employee representative or jury service. The victim has two years of time to claim the dismissal case. Secondly, automatically fair is where the dismissal will treated as a fair dismissal when an employee attended in an unofficial strike or the dismissal reason is national security. Lastly, there are several reason that will be treated as potential fair dismissal. Capability, is mainly about ability, which can be affected by aptitude, health or physical or mental quality. The underperforming or unadaptable and inflexible employee could be fairly dismissed on ground of capability. Misconduct, is mainly about the willingness, where the employee misbehave on behalf of the employment contract, for example the employee is unwilling to work due to laziness. Redundancy is where similar works were appear to be in an organization and employees are working on two same thing. So the employer might be able to dismiss one of them or some of them. There are still a lot in the list of potential fair dismissal, but it will not be discussed furthermore. The key of potential dismissal is whether the dismissal consider as reasonable. By reasonableness, the law look at the procedure used, consistency of employer treatment and other mitigating factors.

If the employer fail to prove that the dismissal is fair, they have three options to compensate the employees. It will be the choice of re-instatement where they return to their pre-dismissal job, in the same role, under the same terms; re-engagement where employees are re-engaged by their former employer, or by an associated employer, in a role that is comparable to the previous one; compensation where employer will be remediated financially.

 

Reference

-Dismissal: your rights    https://www.gov.uk/dismissal/unfair-and-constructive-dismissal

-H Collins, Justice in Dismissal (OUP 1992)

-Unfair dismissal   Max Winthrop       http://www.xperthr.co.uk/employment-law-manual/unfair-dismissal/20428/

-Human Resource Management’ by Derek Torrington, Laura Hall, Stephen Taylor & Carol Atkinson, ninth edition (2014)

Sex Discrimination

After the previous discussion on how organisations work and manage their employees, the employment between employees and employers should also be looked into. It is important that both the employers and employees are under a protection in the organisation from all forms of potential damage. The employment law mediates the relationship between employees, employers, trade unions and the government. They are essential to the life cycle in an organisation from providing employees with the information of job responsibilities, but also so that they need to know the information about their employer. But most importantly clear policies and procedures will help to avoid future disputes as employees will have clear guidance on what conduct is acceptable and what is not and are invaluable in the event of a dispute arising.

Discrimination has always been an alerting issues within all the industries for a long time, it has been discussed throughout all the years. A discrimination law which protects people from discrimination. It aims to prevent employees or employers from being treated differently or unfairly based on their characteristics. This law also protects people from discrimination on the basis of race, sex, gender reassignment, disability, religion or belief, sexual orientation, marriage or civil partnership, pregnancy and maternity. But in all of the above, sex discrimination has being abused in the recent decades.

Sex discrimination law was the first employment law introduced in the UK and the current discrimination law framework is based on two major act that were introduced in 70’s. The Equal Pay Act were introduced in 1970 and the Sex Discrimination Act were introduced in 1975. The sex discrimination law is an act to render unlawful certain kinds of sex discrimination and discrimination on the ground of marriage, and establish a Commission with the function of working towards the elimination of such discrimination and promoting equality of opportunity between men and women generally; and for related purposes (Sex Discrimination Act 1975 Chapter 65, 1975). It deals with treatment issues in an organisation where recruitment, promotion, training chance, redundancy selection and dismissal is the area the act will take care of.

Sex Discrimination Act divide the discrimination into four different categories. Firstly, direct sex discrimination is when men or women employee are treated unfairly on the basis of their sex by the employers. The act on this category focuses on whether the employee be treated the same if the sexuality of the employer is different (Lord Bridge, 1990). The second category is indirect sex discrimination where discrimination was happened unintentionally. It is considered as indirect sex discrimination if a generally applied policies or practice favors one sex over the others or a portion of men or women. Thirdly, victimisation describes the situation when employees are treated badly or subjective to a detriment because employees complain about discrimination or help someone who has been the victim of discrimination. Lastly, Sexual harassment is bullying or coercion of a sexual nature, or the unwelcome or inappropriate promise of rewards in exchange for sexual favors. It is depended on how much the person was offended, some person could be taking it as a joke while some person could take it very offensive.

In terms of compensations enforced by the law, there are two types of common compensation. Financial compensation is a type of compensation that will be provided by the offender to the victim. Another type of compensation focuses more on the mental measures. An award for injury to feelings will be given to compensate the victims feeling.

 

References

-JAMES -V- EASTLEIGH BOROUGH COUNCIL; HL 14 JUN 1990  http://swarb.co.uk/james-v-eastleigh-borough-council-hl-14-jun-1990/

-Paludi, Michele Antoinette; Barickman, (1991). Academic and Workplace Sexual Harassment. SUNY Press. pp. 2–5. ISBN 0-7914-0829-9.

-Human Resource Management’ by Derek Torrington, Laura Hall, Stephen Taylor & Carol Atkinson, ninth edition (2014)

 

Bureaucratic and Pragmatic Management

In the previous posts, the ways of managing people in an organizations have been discussed, but it is all theories. It is important the organization knows how to implement those theories into real life cases, therefore, the relation and characteristic of the human resources management strategy for the employee and employer will be an interesting area to look into. Most of the organisations in recent years have underlie bureaucratic or pragmatic characteristic inside their HR strategies.

The term “Bureaucracy” was developed into a theory by a sociologist who named Max Weber in 1922. This model of organization is based on functional specialization; hierarchy of authority; a system of rules; and impersonal implementation. There will be policies implied and by enforcing documentation to give a strong impression to the employees that the policies should be respected. The rules should be followed in order to be optimal in achieving the designated end goals. Max Weber viewed this to be the most technically efficient means of organization. Furthermore, if rules are sensible, and those giving orders have legitimacy to do so, the rules will most likely be followed.

Bureaucratic management have the advantage of ensuring that people are treated equally, since everyone in the organization is treated equally based on the rules. This creates harmony inside the organization and prevent demotivation due to unfairness and unnecessary argument. Moreover, management level in bureaucratic organizational structures will have much more control in strategic decision making, which is ideal for business fits with only one control and command. Since, strategic decision making time can be shorter in a tall organizational structure, since less individuals are involved in the process.

However, the nature of bureaucracy had also worried Max Weber, where he described its nature as an iron cage, a soulless place to work. The nature of working will become different where following rules and documentation will be more important than working effectively and being productive. Bureaucratic structures can discourage creativity and innovation throughout the organization. This might make the employer’s job much harder as it is nearly impossible to generate a great range of strategic idea on his own. Moreover, the adaptiveness to environmental change will be low for bureaucratic organization as they are bounded by rigid control.

The alternative approach is to cut back as far as possible on rules and documentation, change to the management style to pragmatic. A pragmatic style of management is opposite to bureaucratic, where management level put their focuses on real life practice and small tasks, but not the whole visionary picture of the organization. The employers will be free to treat different employer in different way based on their performance. This approach is more result oriented where the employer do not care about the way of their employees’ work as long as they provide a good performance in their work. This will create an atmosphere where the employees will think that if they provide a good result, they will be rewarded. In other words, this will result in a considerable diversity in the organization where some employees will want to get a good result and performance in any form of ways including ways that harm others. Moreover, it might causes inequality since the employer can reward and manage employees based on their ‘gut instinct’. As some of the employees might focus on getting relationship with employers rather working hard to good result.

To conclude, an organization should include pragmatic and bureaucratic management from the top down. Therefore, by mixing these different ways of thinking and working, an organization will be well-balanced and ultimately capable of creating the best outputs

 

References

-Weber, 2015, pp. 73-127 in Weber’s Rationalism and Modern Society, edited and translated by Tony Waters and Dagmar Waters, New York: Palgrave MacMillan

-Merton RK (1940). Bureaucratic structure and personality. In: Merton RK et al. Readers in Bureaucracy. New York: The Free press, 361-371

-Blau, P. M. 1955. The Dynamics of Bureaucracy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

-Steven A. Cavaleri, (2004) “Principles for designing pragmatic knowledge management systems”, The Learning Organization, Vol. 11 Iss: 4/5, pp.312 – 32

-Human Resource Management’ by Derek Torrington, Laura Hall, Stephen Taylor & Carol Atkinson, ninth edition (2014)

 

 

Taylorism VS Humanism

Following the post of human resources management strategies, there are still a lot of theories about HR management that can be looked into. Taylorism and humanism are two distinct traditions to the management of people in organisations, they are easily identifiable with their own principles and characteristic. In order to manage employees in an organization to perfection, these theories analyse and study the behaviour on employee which led to certain results from different management method of people. Therefore, the job design for employee are very important. It is the specification of jobs’ contents, methods and relationship in order to satisfy technological and organizational requirements as well as the social and personal requirements of the job holder (Harold, 1971).  The principles are geared towards how the nature of a person’s job affects their attitudes and behaviour at work, particularly relating to characteristics such as skill variety and autonomy (Wall, 1971).

Taylorism, also known as scientific management, is a theory of manag
ement that analyses and synthesis workflows. Frederick Winslow Taylor argued that scientific Management is the best rational way of performing any task and it would lead to enhancement in productivity and profitability. It would not only lead to greater profits for the organizations, but also for the workers, who would be given the tools, knowledge and training to perform at optimum performance. Taylor’s scientific management is based on four underlying principle. Firstly, replace rule of thumb work methods with scientific methods based on measuring output, and by performing detailed studies of time and human movement. Secondly, employees should be trained, selected and developed scientifically. Taylor stated that each workers should be fitted to certain jobs based on their aptitudes. So the employers’ job is to fit people into jobs and train them scientifically in order to achieve the maximum productivity. Thirdly, detailed instruction and supervision to each employee on their discrete tasks should be provided. (Montgomery 1997:250). Lastly, the specialisation and collaboration within the organization. Management should focus on developing, designing and supervising improved systems, whereas employees focus on their work. With divided work between managers and employees and everyone focus on their role, no conflict would arise in the organisation.

However, this theory suffer from several criticism. Firstly, many supervisory jobs would be rendered useless as the work become standardized and workers will not be pleased, since many jobs would be terminated in an exchange of productivity. Secondly, the assumption of this theory is argued as not ethical, since employees were believed to be reduced to bolts and nut in the industrial machine.

The alternative theory humanism opposite Taylorism, where it focuses on making the job fit for the employee but not the employee to fit the job where level of motivation, satisfaction and performance are higher. This theory emphasis on the notions of intrinsic motivation and involves designing and managing work in ways which engage and motivate people (Talyor, 2012). It is a management approach that must take several criteria into consideration in terms of humanity. Firstly, the basic dignity and humanity of employees, customers and anyone else affected by the company’s actions should be considered. Secondly, all business decisions should include ethical judgement and thinking. Lastly, business decisions should be made in dialogue with all people who will be affected by the decisions.

To conclude, humanistic approach is more convincing than Taylorism in managing people in organisation. With less and not significant drawbacks with using humanistic approach, there has been a particular focus placed on team working, on partnership approaches to management and on the development of emotionally intelligent leaders in recent years.

 

References

-Montgomery, D. C. (1997), Design and Analysis of Experiments, 4th edition, John Wiley & Sons, New York. (1st edition, 1976, 2nd edition, 1984, 3rd edition, 1991).

-Human Resource Management’ by Derek Torrington, Laura Hall, Stephen Taylor & Carol Atkinson, ninth edition (2014)

-Taylor, Frederick, W; (1911); New York: Harper  The Principles of Scientific Management

-Rush, Harold F. M. (1971). Job Design for Motivation. New York: The Conference Board. p. 5.

-Wall, T. D.; S. Parker (2001). Neil J. Smelser and Paul B. Baltes, ed. International encyclopedia of the social & behavioral sciences(Encyclopedia) (2nd. ed.). Amsterdam, Netherlands: Elsevier. pp. 7980–7983. 

Best Practice VS Best Fit

Due to the rapid change in the business world recently, more and more firms and companies realize that their employees are considered as an asset which is an important resources of the organisation. In order to integrate these resources, a lot of organisations start to focus on planning and implementing the ideal model or strategy that can enhance the integration and connection of the human resource with regards to their success which they share their standards, visions and goals. Wheelen and Hunger (1995, p. 3) define strategic human resource management as ‘that set of managerial decisions and actions that determines the long-run performance of a corporation’.

The best-fit model emphasizes that HR strategies and organizational strategies must be aligned. In other words, it is important to make sure the HR strategies are suitable in different circumstances along with the culture and operational process as well. Thus, according to Armstrong (2006, p.138), it is an idea that different HR strategies have to focus on a given needs of both the organization and its employees.

The management should come up with strategic changes from lesson learnt by what might be applicable and relevant in order to fit the organization overall. It can be seen that culture, structure, technology, behavior and process of work indication are treated as the criteria in the analysis of the business needs of the organization.

On the other hand, this models also suffers from several limitations. Boxall and Purcell (2003) criticizes this model limits the strategy such that they are subject to multiple alternating contingencies and it will be difficult to handle new challenges as the HR system could not be adjust entirely. Moreover, its flaws focus on the limitation of the search for contingency as well as the difficulty in showing their interconnection. (Armstrong 2006, p. 139).

The Best-practice model claims that certain bundles of HR activities exist which universally support companies in reaching a competitive advantage regardless of the organizational setting or industry (Redman and Wilkinson 2009). Which means that it contemplate those bundles of HR practice that can be applied in most of the organizational context to increase performance that helps produce better outcome. It implies a strong connection between HR practices and organizational performance that requires high commitment management (Paauwe & Boselie 2003). The best-practice model are based on the idea of superiority of the organizational performance and Pfeffer’s model is a good example of the set. His model shows seven important HR practices which are employment security, selective hiring, self-managed teams, high compensation contingent on performance, training, reduction of status differentials and sharing information. (Armstrong 2006, p. 65)

However, this model is also subject to sever criticism. Firstly, it might result in a deterioration of employee collaboration. Since implementing this practice will introduce mutual prohibitive combinations like team working and compensation based on individual performance are running a huge risk (Delery 1998 in Redman and Wilkinson 2009).  Moreover, it is also hard to have a universal best practice, since discussions with regard to the appropriate choice of best practice did not and will not come up to a conclusion due to insufficient methodology and theoretical definition. Even a practice have been successful for popular and successful organization, it does not necessarily work on the others.

To put everything under consideration, both models offer organizations powerful tools for shaping human resource management processes. There will not be any absolute judgments on which approach works best, but best-fit models works better in overall, as  it  has a huge appeal to the HR practitioners due to the fact that it positions them as the first-level strategic partners in the process of management decision-making.

 

References

-Armstrong, M (2006), A Handbook of Human Resource Management Practice, Kogan Page Publishers

-Redman, T. and Wilkinson, A., (2009) CONTEMPORARY HUMAN RESOURCE MANAGEMENT: Text and Cases, Prentice Hall-Financial Times, Third Edition.

-Paauwe, J. and Boselie, P. 2003. Challenging ‘strategic HRM’ and the relevance of the institutional setting. Human Resource Management Journal, 13(3): 56-70.

-Wheelan, T. L., Hunger, J.D. (1995), Strategic Management and Business policy, 5th ed, Reading : Addison – Wesley Longman.

-Boxall, P. and Purcell, J. (2003). Strategy and Human Resource Management, Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan.