Human Relations v Human Resources

For your fourth post, discuss the differences between the human relations and human resource approaches to management. Pay particular attention to how they approach the issue of worker participation.

With productivity as the key concern, there are two approaches that have stemmed from the classical model of organizations.: Human resources and human relations.

“The human resources approach is concerned with the total organizational climate as well as with how an organization can encourage employee participation and dialogue” (87). In the human resources approach participation is the focal point, it is where the question “what does an organization look like” is asked. The workers participate in the way that they themselves are rearranging the workplace through a workplace democracy. The teams that they work in (marketing team, news team, sales team etc.) are so needed that the structure changes in such a way to facilitate their needs without jeopardizing the company as a whole.

“ The human relations approach starts with the assumption that all people ‘want to feel united, tied, bound to something, some cause, bigger than they, commanding them yet worthy of them, summoning them to significance in living’” (82). This approach focuses more on psychological factors that can increase or decrease worker productivity, such as the physical environment, or the “feeling” they get from listening to music at work. There is also a subculture of informal organization, in which workers are networked within the company as well as out of the company. These little networks or cliques, are part of what “ties” the worker to the organization because they have something that cannot be gotten at by management. It is a culture unto itself where the workers bind together through the experiences they have shared and the non-formal information that they can acquire. Worker participation in human relations deals more with these informal networks, because the workers are drawn in not only because of interest in their career but because they are personally drawn into the system.