What Is a Leader?

Richard M. Cyert, president of Carnegie-Mellon University and author of books and articles on organizational theory, has divided leadership into two dimensions:
1. The Consideration Dimension is characterized by an emphasis on good relations. The leader is friendly, approachable and a good listener. Leadership behavior can be described as open and enlisting mental trust.
2. The Initiating Structure represents the leadership behavior involved in directing the organization, helping it to define its goals and structure for execution – including the ability to understand the actions others can act upon.

From these two dimensions, it is possible to generalize three basic functions that a leader performs:
1. Organizational function
The organizational function involves the organizational structure and the selection of people who operate within this structure. It involves various units or segments and the control of internal and external communication flows. The leader has to make certain that the participants in the organization and related groups external to the organization are knowledge and working well together.
2. Interpersonal function
The interpersonal function involves the morale of the organization. It reflects the degree of concern about the humanness of the organization. It requires that the leader pay attention to individual concerns.
3. Decision function
The decisional function involves the making of decisions that must be made in order for the organization to achieve its goals. This traditional function has been associated with leadership.
Although there is no single definition of leadership, these three functions are clearly part of any definition of leadership. Moreover, more to this point, creating a compelling vision that can be constantly reshaped is the hard task of a leader. The leader is the captain of the ship and the vision is the means by which the leader steers the organization. However, there are many people on the ship and if this ship is to reach its final destination, it depends on the behavior of these people.

Warren Bennis, which called as “the father of modern leadership” by Fortune Magazine, had observed several observations about leaders:
• Leaders pull rather than push
• Leaders empower and trust others to act
• Leaders have a clear vision and communicate that vision
• Leaders work through teams and not through hierarchies
• Leaders possess a strong doss of self-esteem and positive attitude
Leaders have a good grasp of self – they realize their strengths, develop their skills, and identify how to use their talents to meet organizational needs. Even more so, leaders evoke positive feelings in others, in which Bennis refers to this as an “attitude of positive other regard.” This gives leaders creditability in the eyes of the follower.

Bennis described four essential qualities of leaders – Vision, Trust, Communication, and Management of Self. These qualities apply to everyone throughout the entire organization. Therefore, leadership does not reside in isolated places, but is infused and threaded everywhere – everyone must become a leader. Bennis also argues that leaders have a responsibility for making sure people get a kick out of what they are doing – people believe in the cause and purpose set forth.

Human Resources Management

Human Resource Management (HRM) is the strategic and coherent approach to the management of an organization's most valued assets - the people working there who individually and collectively contribute to the achievement of the objectives of the business.
The terms 'human resource management' (HRM) and 'human resources' (HR) have largely replaced the term 'Personnel Management' as a description of the processes involved in managing people in organizations.
Human resource management (HRM) is both an academic theory and a business practice that addresses the theoretical and practical techniques of managing a workforce. Synonyms include personnel administration, personnel management, manpower management, and industrial management, but these traditional expressions are becoming less common for the theoretical discipline. Sometimes even industrial relations and employee relations are confusingly listed as synonyms (e.g. Encyclopædia Britannica) although these normally refer to the relationship between management and workers and the behavior of workers in companies.
The theoretical discipline is based primarily on the assumption that employees are individuals with varying goals and needs, and as such should not be thought of as basic business resources, such as trucks and filing cabinets. The field takes a positive view of workers, assuming that virtually all wish to contribute to the enterprise productively, and that the main obstacles to their endeavors are lack of knowledge, insufficient training, and failures of process.

HRM is seen by practitioners in the field as a more innovative view of workplace management than the traditional approach. Its techniques force the managers of an enterprise to express their goals with specificity so that they can be understood and undertaken by the workforce, and to provide the resources needed for them to successfully accomplish their assignments. As such, HRM techniques, when properly practiced, are expressive of the goals and operating practices of the enterprise overall.
Nowadays, the more traditional synonyms such as personnel management are often used in a more restricted sense to describe those activities that are necessary in the recruiting of a workforce, providing its members with payroll and benefits, and administrating their work-life needs. These activities can require regulatory knowledge and effort, and enterprises can benefit from the recruitment and development of personnel with these specific skills.

Academic theory
The goal of human resource management is to help an organization to meet strategic goals by attracting, and maintaining employees and also to manage them effectively. The basic premise of the academic theory of HRM is that humans are not machines, therefore we need to have an interdisciplinary examination of people in the workplace. Fields such as psychology, industrial and organizational psychology, industrial relations, sociology, and critical theories: postmodernism, post-structuralism play a major role. Many colleges and universities offer bachelor and master degrees in Human Resources Management.

Careers
The sort of careers available in HRM are varied. There are generalist HRM jobs such as human resource assistant. There are careers involved with employment, recruitment and placement and these are usually conducted by interviewers, EEO specialists or college recruiters. Training and development specialism is often conducted by trainers and orientation specialists. Compensation and benefits tasks are handled by compensation analysts, salary administrators, and benefits administrators.

Human Resources

Human resources has at least two meanings depending on context. The original usage derives from political economy and economics, where it was traditionally called labor, one of three factors of production. The more common usage within corporations and businesses refers to the individuals within the firm, and to the portion of the firm's organization that deals with hiring, firing, training, and other personnel issues. Human resource management serves 5 key functions:
1) Hiring
2) Compensation
3) Evaluation and Management (of Performance)
4) Promotions
5) Managing Relations.

It is the responsibility of human resource managers to conduct these activities in an effective, legal, fair, and consistent manner. The objective of Human Resources (HR's raison d'etre) is to maximize the return on investment from the organization's human capital. "Human resource management aims to improve the productive contribution of individuals while simultaneously attempting to attain other societal and individual employee objectives." Schwind, Das & Wagner (2005)

In reality, human resources deals with two different worlds:
1) Non-Unionized - Where management has the control, and
2) Unionized - Where there is shared control through a collective agreement - Management and a union negotiate a collective agreement with respect to terms and conditions of employment.
The Union represents employees to management (that is the Union speaks for employees, both collectively and individually).
Collective Agreements - Can cover any and all terms and conditions of employment. Collective agreements become "the Bible," the code and are binding in law. - Disputes of the collective agreement are resolved by arbitration.