人力资源管理专业英语教材.doc

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Unit 1
An Overview of Human Resource Management
Pre-reading questions:
1. What are the features of employment that you value most?
2. How can Human Resource Management activities contribute to the presence of these features?
3. How is Personnel Management different from Human Resource Management?
4. Human Resource is not a department — it is the department". How do you interpret this saying?
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Organizations require a number of things to be effective: physical resources, financial resources, marketing capability and human resources. While all these are important anizational effectiveness, the factor that is most likely to provide petitive advantage is human resources and how these resources are managed. The production technology, financing, and customer connections (marketing) can all be copied. The basics of managing people also can be copied , but the most anizations find unique ways to attract, retain and motivate employees — a strategy that is harder to imitate.
In a superb article, Competitive Advantage through People, Jeffrey Pfeffer gave Southwest Airlines as an example.
Consider . . . Southwest Airlines, whose stock had the best return from 1972 to early 1992. It certainly did not achieve that ess from economies of scale. In 1992, Southwest had revenues of $ billion and a mere percent of the . passenger market . . . Southwest ( has not ) eeded because it has had more access to lower-cost capital — indeed, it is one of the least leveraged airlines in the United States. Southwest’s planes, Boeing737s, are obviously available to all petitors. It isn’t a member of any of the puterized reservation systems; it uses no unique process technology and sells essentially modity product— low-cost, low-frills air-line service at prices petitors have difficulty matching.
Most of Southwest’s cost es from its very productive, very motivated, and by the way, unionized workforce. Compared to the . airline industry, according to 1991 stati