In human resource management, selection is described as a negative process because it:

Eliminates candidates from the pool until the suitable one remains

Discourages people from applying for the post

Is carried out only when the recruitment process has failed

Reduces the wages offered to the candidate

Job evaluation is concerned with determining the relative worth of:

Jobs, in order to build a rational pay structure

Individual employees, in order to decide promotions

Training programmes, in order to allocate budgets

Departments, in order to fix headcount

Lewin's three-step model of change consists of:

Unfreezing, moving and refreezing

Planning, organising and controlling

The interactionist view of conflict holds that:

A moderate level of conflict is necessary to keep a group self-critical and creative

All conflict is harmful and must be eliminated

Conflict is inevitable and should simply be accepted

Conflict arises only from poor communication

Human Resource Management and Organisational Behaviour

The second half of Unit 6 is the people function, in two layers. The first is HRM as a set of processes — planning, hiring, developing, paying, appraising, and dealing with the workforce collectively. The second is organisational behaviour, the syllabus's long list of individual and group phenomena from personality to stress and from culture to change. The paper asks the first layer as procedure and the second as attribution: which appraisal method, which stage of group development, which base of power, whose model of change. The chapter keeps each list short and each distinction sharp.

1. HRM: concept, planning, recruitment and selection, training, succession

Human resource management is the function that acquires, develops, motivates and retains the people an organisation needs, and its shift from personnel management is one of stance: personnel administered rules and records, HRM treats people as a resource to be invested in and aligns that investment with strategy. Human resource planning is where it begins — forecasting the demand for people from the business plan, forecasting the supply from the existing workforce and the labour market, and closing the gap by hiring, training, redeployment or separation.

Job analysis produces two documents: a job description, which states the duties and conditions of the job, and a job specification, which states the qualifications and qualities the holder needs. The first is about the job, the second about the person.
Recruitment is a positive process that generates a pool of applicants, from internal sources — promotion, transfer, employee referral — or external ones — advertisement, campus, agencies, walk-ins. Selection is a negative process that eliminates from the pool until the right person remains, through screening, tests, interviews, reference checks and a medical.
Training improves skill for the present job and development prepares a person for future roles; the methods split into on-the-job — apprenticeship, job rotation, coaching — and off-the-job — lectures, case study, role play, vestibule training, which reproduces the workplace away from it.
Succession planning identifies and prepares people to fill key positions as they fall vacant, so that a departure at the top is a transition rather than a crisis. It is distinguished from replacement planning by its time horizon and by developing candidates rather than merely naming them.

⚠️ Recruitment is positive, selection is negative

The words describe direction, not merit. Recruitment adds to a pool and wants as many suitable applicants as possible; selection subtracts from it and wants to reject everyone but one. A question calling recruitment a negative process, or selection positive, has reversed the pair, and it is asked precisely because the everyday sense of the two words does not carry this distinction.

2. Compensation, appraisal, and dealing with labour collectively

Job evaluation rates the worth of JOBS, not of the people in them, to build a rational pay structure. Its methods are non-analytical — ranking jobs whole, or grading them into predefined classes — and analytical — the point method, which scores each job on compensable factors such as skill, effort, responsibility and conditions, and factor comparison, which ranks jobs factor by factor against benchmark jobs. Incentives tie pay to output, through individual schemes like Halsey and Rowan or group schemes like profit sharing; fringe benefits are paid regardless of performance — provident fund, gratuity, leave, medical cover, housing.

Performance appraisal methods
Method	How it works	Known weakness
Graphic rating scale	Rate traits on a scale	Halo effect and central tendency in the rater
Ranking and paired comparison	Order employees relative to one another	Says who is better, not by how much or against what standard
Critical incident	Record specific effective and ineffective behaviours as they occur	Demands continuous recording; incidents may not be representative
BARS	A rating scale whose points are anchored by described behaviours	Costly to develop, job by job
Management by objectives	Appraise against goals set jointly at the start of the period — Drucker	Rewards what is measurable; goals may be set low
360-degree appraisal	Feedback from superior, peers, subordinates, self and sometimes customers	Anonymity can be misused; heavy to administer

Collective bargaining is negotiation between an employer and a union over terms of employment, ending in an agreement binding on both. Its forms are distributive, where one side's gain is the other's loss, and integrative, where the parties enlarge what is shared. Workers' participation in management is the wider idea of giving employees a voice in decisions, from works committees and joint management councils to worker directors on the board — a ladder the paper asks by level of participation, from information sharing at the bottom to co-determination at the top.

3. The individual: personality, perception, attitudes, emotions

Personality is the stable pattern of traits that makes a person's behaviour consistent across situations. The Big Five — openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness and neuroticism — is the model with the strongest evidence, and conscientiousness is the trait that predicts job performance across occupations. The Myers-Briggs indicator sorts people on four dichotomies and is widely used and weakly supported. Locus of control, self-esteem, self-monitoring, risk-taking and Type A behaviour are the other named attributes, and Type A — driven, impatient, competitive — is the one linked to stress.

Perception is how a person selects, organises and interprets sensory information, and the errors it makes are the examinable part because they contaminate every appraisal and interview.

Perceptual errors
Error	What happens
Halo effect	One trait colours the judgement of all the others
Stereotyping	Judging a person by the group they belong to
Selective perception	Noticing what confirms existing views and filtering out the rest
Projection	Attributing one's own traits to others
Contrast effect	Rating a person relative to whoever came just before
Fundamental attribution error	Explaining others' behaviour by character and one's own by circumstance

An attitude has three components — cognitive, what one believes; affective, what one feels; behavioural, what one intends to do — and the work attitudes the paper names are job satisfaction, job involvement and organisational commitment. Festinger's cognitive dissonance is the discomfort of holding inconsistent attitudes or acting against one, which a person reduces by changing the attitude, the behaviour, or the importance attached to the conflict. Emotions are intense and directed at something; moods are diffuse and undirected. Emotional intelligence — Goleman's self-awareness, self-regulation, motivation, empathy and social skill — is the named framework, and emotional labour is the effort of displaying an emotion the job requires, which is what the airline cabin and the customer desk pay for.

4. Groups: dynamics, power and politics, conflict and negotiation, stress

Tuckman's five stages of group development are asked in order: forming, storming, norming, performing and adjourning. Groupthink is the pressure to conform that suppresses dissent in a cohesive group, and social loafing is the fall in individual effort when working in a group — both are reasons cohesiveness does not automatically mean productivity. A team differs from a group in having complementary skills, mutual accountability and a shared product, so that the team's output exceeds the sum of individual contributions.

French and Raven's bases of power
Base	Source	Formal or personal?
Legitimate	The position held	Formal
Reward	Control over things others want	Formal
Coercive	Ability to punish	Formal
Expert	Knowledge others need	Personal
Referent	Being admired and identified with	Personal

Organisational politics is the use of power to influence decisions outside the sanctioned channels, and it rises where resources are scarce, goals ambiguous and evaluation subjective. Conflict is a process in which one party perceives another as frustrating its interests; the traditional view held all conflict harmful, the interactionist view holds a moderate level necessary to keep a group self-critical and creative. The five conflict-handling styles — Thomas and Kilmann — are competing, collaborating, compromising, avoiding and accommodating, plotted on assertiveness against cooperativeness. Negotiation resolves conflict either distributively, dividing a fixed pie, or integratively, finding a settlement that leaves both better off.

ℹ️ Stress, and Selye's three stages

Stress is the response to a demand that exceeds a person's perceived ability to cope. Selye's general adaptation syndrome runs through alarm, resistance and exhaustion, and burnout is the third stage reached and stayed in. Eustress is the productive level that sharpens performance; distress is the level beyond it. Its sources are environmental, organisational — role conflict, role ambiguity, overload — and personal, and its management is individual, through time management, exercise and social support, or organisational, through job redesign, participation and wellness programmes.

5. Culture, organisational development and change

Organisational culture is the shared system of values, beliefs and assumptions that shapes how members behave — the way things are done here. Schein sets it out in three levels: artefacts on the surface, espoused values beneath them, and basic underlying assumptions at the bottom that members no longer notice. A strong culture aligns behaviour without rules, and is for the same reason the hardest thing in an organisation to change.

Lewin's three-step model — unfreeze the present state by creating dissatisfaction with it, move to the new state, and refreeze by anchoring the new behaviour in structure and reward. His force-field analysis weighs the driving forces for change against the restraining forces, and change comes from weakening the second as much as strengthening the first.
Kotter's eight steps — establish urgency, form a guiding coalition, create a vision, communicate it, empower action, generate short-term wins, consolidate gains, and anchor the change in the culture.
Resistance to change — individual, from habit, security, economic fear and selective information processing; organisational, from structural inertia, threatened expertise and threatened power. It is met by education and communication, participation, facilitation, negotiation, and as a last resort manipulation or coercion.
Organisational development — a planned, organisation-wide effort managed from the top to increase effectiveness through interventions in processes, using behavioural science: sensitivity training, survey feedback, process consultation, team building and intergroup development. It is change with the human process as its object.

Key takeaways

A job description is about the job and a job specification about the person; recruitment adds to a pool and selection subtracts from it; training is for the present job and development for future ones.
Job evaluation rates jobs, not people; MBO appraises against jointly set goals and is Drucker's; 360-degree appraisal draws on superior, peers, subordinates and self.
Conscientiousness is the Big Five trait that predicts performance; the halo effect lets one trait colour all; dissonance is Festinger's; Tuckman's stages run forming, storming, norming, performing, adjourning.
Legitimate, reward and coercive power come from the position; expert and referent power from the person. Moderate conflict is necessary on the interactionist view, and Selye's stages are alarm, resistance, exhaustion.
Lewin changes in three steps — unfreeze, move, refreeze — and weighs driving against restraining forces; Kotter takes eight; organisational development is planned change aimed at the human process.

Practice questions (9)

Attempt each one before opening the answer. Every explanation names the tempting wrong option as well as the right one, because that is where marks are lost.

In human resource management, selection is described as a negative process because it:
1. Eliminates candidates from the pool until the suitable one remains
2. Discourages people from applying for the post
3. Is carried out only when the recruitment process has failed
4. Reduces the wages offered to the candidate
Show answer
Answer: A — Eliminates candidates from the pool until the suitable one remains
The terms positive and negative describe direction, not merit. Recruitment is positive because it builds a pool, seeking as many suitable applicants as it can attract. Selection is negative because it works by subtraction — screening, tests, interviews and reference checks each remove candidates until the one to be appointed is left. It has nothing to do with discouraging applicants, and it follows recruitment as the next stage rather than substituting for a failed one. Reversing the two labels is the standard error, because the ordinary sense of the words carries no such distinction.
Job evaluation is concerned with determining the relative worth of:
1. Jobs, in order to build a rational pay structure
2. Individual employees, in order to decide promotions
3. Training programmes, in order to allocate budgets
4. Departments, in order to fix headcount
Show answer
Answer: A — Jobs, in order to build a rational pay structure
Job evaluation rates the job and not the person in it: it asks what a position is worth relative to other positions, using ranking, grading, the point method or factor comparison, so that pay can be set in a defensible hierarchy. The worth of individual employees is assessed by performance appraisal, which is a separate process with separate methods, and confusing the two is the error this question is built to catch. Budgeting training and fixing departmental headcount belong to other parts of the HR function and use no job evaluation method.
An interviewer, impressed by a candidate's fluent English, rates the candidate highly on technical competence as well. This is an instance of:
1. The halo effect
2. Stereotyping
3. Projection
4. The contrast effect
Show answer
Answer: A — The halo effect
The halo effect is the perceptual error in which one salient trait colours the judgement of unrelated traits, so that a favourable impression on one dimension is generalised to all of them — here fluency has been read as competence. Stereotyping would judge the candidate by a group they belong to, projection would attribute the interviewer's own qualities to them, and the contrast effect would rate them relative to whoever was interviewed immediately before. The halo effect is named as the chief weakness of graphic rating scales in appraisal for exactly this reason.
In Tuckman's model, the stage in which members test one another, conflict over roles and challenge the leader is:
1. Storming
2. Forming
3. Norming
4. Performing
Show answer
Answer: A — Storming
Tuckman's stages run forming, storming, norming, performing and adjourning, and the paper asks them in order. Forming is the polite, uncertain first stage in which members find out what the group is for. Storming follows, with intragroup conflict over roles, status and the leader's authority, and a group that does not get through it never becomes effective. Norming settles the conflict into shared expectations and cohesion, performing is the productive stage, and adjourning is the wind-down of a temporary group. Placing the conflict in forming is the usual error.
According to French and Raven, power that derives from knowledge others need is:
1. Expert power
2. Legitimate power
3. Referent power
4. Coercive power
Show answer
Answer: A — Expert power
French and Raven separate the bases of power into those that come with a position — legitimate, from the office held; reward, from control over what others want; coercive, from the ability to punish — and those that belong to the person — expert, from knowledge or skill others depend on, and referent, from being admired and identified with. Expertise is the base described here. Referent power is the tempting wrong answer because it is also personal, but it rests on attraction rather than competence, and it is the base a charismatic leader draws on rather than a specialist.
Lewin's three-step model of change consists of:
1. Unfreezing, moving and refreezing
2. Forming, storming and norming
3. Alarm, resistance and exhaustion
4. Planning, organising and controlling
Show answer
Answer: A — Unfreezing, moving and refreezing
Lewin held that change requires first unfreezing the present equilibrium by creating dissatisfaction with it, then moving to the desired state, and finally refreezing by embedding the new behaviour in structures, norms and rewards so the organisation does not slide back. His force-field analysis accompanies the model, treating any state as a balance of driving and restraining forces. The other options are all genuine three-item sequences from elsewhere in the unit — Tuckman's first three stages of group development, Selye's stages of the stress response, and three of the classical functions of management — placed here to test whether the candidate can attribute each list to its author.
The interactionist view of conflict holds that:
1. A moderate level of conflict is necessary to keep a group self-critical and creative
2. All conflict is harmful and must be eliminated
3. Conflict is inevitable and should simply be accepted
4. Conflict arises only from poor communication
Show answer
Answer: A — A moderate level of conflict is necessary to keep a group self-critical and creative
Three views of conflict are distinguished. The traditional view treats all conflict as dysfunctional, a sign of management failure to be removed. The human relations view treats it as natural and inevitable, to be accepted and managed. The interactionist view goes further: a group that is entirely harmonious becomes complacent and unresponsive, so a minimum level of functional conflict should be encouraged to keep it questioning itself, while dysfunctional conflict is still to be resolved. The claim that conflict arises only from communication failure is a misconception the traditional view leaned on and no current view holds.
Management by objectives, as a method of performance appraisal, is associated with:
1. Peter Drucker
2. Frederick Taylor
3. Henri Fayol
4. Elton Mayo
Show answer
Answer: A — Peter Drucker
Management by objectives was set out by Peter Drucker in The Practice of Management in 1954: superior and subordinate jointly set specific, measurable goals for the coming period, and performance is then appraised against those goals rather than against traits or against other people. Its strength is clarity and participation, and its known weakness is that it rewards only what can be measured and tempts people to set goals low. Taylor is scientific management, Fayol is administrative theory and the fourteen principles, and Mayo is the Hawthorne studies and the human relations movement.
Which of the following is an on-the-job method of training?
1. Job rotation
2. Vestibule training
3. Case study
4. Role play
Show answer
Answer: A — Job rotation
On-the-job methods train the person while they do real work in the real workplace — apprenticeship, coaching, understudy assignments and job rotation, in which the trainee moves through several positions to learn each. Off-the-job methods take the trainee away from production: lectures, case studies and role play are classroom methods, and vestibule training is the tempting wrong answer because it uses real equipment, but it does so in a separate area that reproduces the workplace rather than in the workplace itself, which is exactly why it is classified as off-the-job.