Human Resources Management in New Zealand Richard Rudman

Fifth edition, 2010

History and development of human resources management

Adapted from Chapter 2, Human Resources Management in New Zealand, fourth edition, 2002.

The origins of human resources management

Human resources management is not a new term. It was being used mainly in the United States as a synonym for personnel management as far back as the 1950s. Personnel management has a much longer history, going back to the Industrial Revolution and beyond. Just how much further back is mainly of interest to historians. But people have been making personnel decisions since the earliest times, when tribal leaders had to be selected, and young people had to be trained to hunt prey, cook food, tend crops, farm animals, and so on. Ancient history has many examples of personnel management in action. As far back as 1750BC, the code of laws proclaimed by Hammurabi, King of Babylon, set wages for people hired as agricultural labourers, ox-drivers and shepherds. Craftsmen could be prosecuted if they failed to pass their skills on to apprentices, builders were held liable for the standard of their work, and owners were required to pay for the health care of their slaves. Many of the early examples are concerned with workers health. In the 1st century AD, a Roman scholar, Pliny the Elder, warned about the hazards of handling zinc and sulphur and described a protective mask, made from an animals bladder, which protected labourers from dust and lead fumes. In 1473, Ulrich Ellenbog wrote a pamphlet on occupational diseases and injuries to gold miners. The field of occupational health was further advanced in 1556, when the German scholar, Agricola, described diseases which affected miners and prescribed preventative measures. The first comprehensive book on occupational medicine Diseases of Workmen was published in Italy in 1760 by Bernadino Ramazzini, who became known as the father of industrial medicine.

Modern personnel management

People have been managed as long as they have worked for others, yet the origins of modern personnel management lie mainly in the Industrial Revolution. Two principal themes began to emerge in those early days: a concern for the welfare of workers the employers need to guide and control workers and their efforts. These themes feature throughout the development of personnel management and contain many of the conflicts and ambiguities which have shaped its history. To a considerable extent, the key influences on the development of personnel management the scientific management, industrial welfare and human relations movements, the development of trade unions and Sources of personnel management collective bargaining, and the growth of employment-related Industrial Revolution legislation were responses to the interplay of these twin themes.

Industrial Revolution
Before the Industrial Revolution, most manufacturing was carried on by individual craft workers in their own homes. With the development of coal-fired steam power, and the invention of new manufacturing

Scientific Management Industrial Welfare movement Human Relations movement Development of trade unions Collective bargaining Employment law

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machinery, the Industrial Revolution began around the middle of the 18th century. Power, plant and people harnessed in new factory-based production units began to replace cottage-based industry and agricultural work as the major sources of employment. These new employment patterns led to population shifts chiefly, the process of urbanisation which would alter the nature of society dramatically. Workers could get higher wages in the factories than they earned under the cottage system, so there was a ready supply of labour. But along with increased wealth and better job opportunities, the factory system had its less attractive consequences. Workers who had carried out a wide range of tasks in the cottage now found themselves doing the same operation time and time again. And the factory brought regimentation to working life which had not been part of cottage industry or agricultural work. The employment of large numbers of people, and the interdependence of their tasks and positions in the production process, seemed to require detailed and often harsh rules to govern many aspects of working life. Working life became more organised in other ways also. A hierarchy of managers developed, and the social distance between workers and owners increased as a consequence. Most factory employees worked long hours for low pay, in working conditions which offered little protection against extreme temperatures, noise or dust, and largely ignored safety considerations. Child labour was common. In 1833, Britain adopted its first effective factories legislation, which Thousands of little children, from seven restricted the hours that children could work in factories. It was a to fourteen years of age, are daily forerunner to modern health and safety legislation. compelled to labour from six o'clock in There were more subtle evils as well. In both Britain and the the morning to seven in the evening, with United States, for example, employees were frequently given only Britons, blush while you read it vouchers on the company store instead of wages. It was not until with only thirty minutes allowed for the Truck Act of 1891 that employers in Britain were required to eating and recreation. Poor infants pay wages in cash. Such factors profoundly influenced the feel and mourn that ye are slaves. development of personnel management.
Oastler (1830)

Effect in New Zealand

The impact of the Industrial Revolution was felt early in the European period of New Zealands history, because many immigrants came to this country to escape the working and living conditions of Victorian Britain. The stand for the eight-hour day made by Samuel Parnell, a carpenter, in 1840 at Petone, has become a key event in New Zealands industrial history and is still celebrated in the annual Labour Day holiday. The churches and other sponsors of settlement in New Zealand held views similar to those of the great English social reformers, and were determined not to replicate the miseries of the Industrial Revolution in the new country. In this they were not successful. By the 1880s, New Zealand had an increasing number of manufacturers who were able to compete internationally, partly because raw materials were cheap and readily available, partly because labour was also cheap, and partly because there was no restrictive labour legislation. In 1890, a Royal Commission into industrial conditions found many instances of sweated labour and recommended the introduction of employment legislation and a system of conciliation and arbitration.

Scientific Management
The Industrial Revolution introduced specialisation, division of labour, and the concentration of employment in factories. In this way, it anticipated the scientific management movement which came at the end of the 19th century. Its most prominent name is that of an American engineer, Frederick Winslow Taylor. He believed that managers could use scientific techniques to improve productivity and efficiency and achieve greater co-operation. Taylor (1911)

The first case inquired into by the pressman (Mr Silas Spragg, a reporter for the Otago Daily Times) was that of Mrs M, who was busily employed finishing boys' knickerbockers. The home was scrupulously clean. 'How long will you work tonight?' asked the pressman. Mrs M replied: 'Till just about 11 o'clock, but then I shall have made 3s 6d today that is, by working from half-past 8 this morning till 11 o'clock tonight. But this is a special day it is all the better class of work. It is only when one gets the first-class work that you can make anything like that.' Paul (1939)

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laid an early foundation for personnel management: First. Develop a science for each element of a mans work, which replaces the old rule-of-thumb method. Second. Scientifically select and then train, teach, and develop the workman, whereas in the past he chose his own work and trained himself as best he could. Third. Heartily co-operate with the men so as to insure all of the work being done in accordance with principles which have been developed. Fourth. There is an almost equal division of the work and the responsibility between the management and the workmen. The management take over all work for which they are better fitted than workmen, while in the past all of the work and the greater part of the responsibility was thrown upon the men. Taylor and his colleagues were pioneers in work study, ergonomics and production-related payment systems. Although they are often scorned today for their apparently impersonal techniques, the advocates of scientific management loudly proclaimed that they were concerned about the welfare of workers. Psychologist Lillian Gilbreth (1914) wrote that scientific management provided for: the physical improvement of workers (increased health, better colour and general appearance); mental development (wider interest, deeper interest, increased mental capabilities); moral development (personal responsibility, responsibility for others, appreciation of standing, self-control, squareness); contentment, brotherhood, and the will to do (developments which are natural consequences of moral development). The scientific management school dominated management thinking until the 1920s. It provided a foundation for the modern professionalisation of management, including the development of personnel management as a discipline in its own right.

Industrial Welfare movement

Reaction against the Industrial Revolutions impact on people was another contributor to the development of modern personnel management. For example: Cuming (1975) argues that the origins of personnel management can be found wherever enlightened employers have tried to improve the lot of their workers; and Niven (1967) asserts it was the plight of the workers which was to mould the form welfare work was to take. Charity was a driving force for many of the early personnel practitioners, many of whom were women. But they were genuinely concerned for the welfare of workers, even if somewhat paternalistic in their approach. The great English social reformers of the nineteenth century like Robert Owen, who is sometimes called the father of personnel management, and Lord Shaftesbury roundly criticised the working conditions and treatment of workers provided by other employers, and set out to improve the lot of the workers in their own factories. Owen, for example, introduced shorter working hours, meals for employees, and staff purchasing privileges to his textile mills in Scotland. Other examples come from the Rowntree, Cadbury and Lever families names which live on in modern enterprises who set up unemployment benefit, sick pay and employee housing schemes for their workers, partly because it made good business sense, but mainly out of charity. Their criticisms of the terrible impact of the Industrial Revolution are echoed in the writings of Charles Dickens and reflected in the pictures of William Hogarth. Industrial welfare work involved voluntary efforts on the part of employers to improve, within the existing industrial system, the conditions of employment in their own factories (Pround, 1916). In addition, some employers took their welfare concerns outside the workplace and provided libraries, recreational facilities and medical care, as well as financial assistance for education and home purchase. The first personnel officers were employed to administer these welfare programmes, and usually had titles like social secretary or welfare secretary. The Institute of Welfare Officers, founded in Britain in 1913, is now the

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Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development. The influence of the welfare tradition remains strong even today when, for example, employee assistance programmes are a common feature of HR management.

Human Relations movement

The origins of the human relations movement lie in the Hawthorne Experiments a research programme whose design criteria would have satisfied any advocate of scientific management. In 1924, efficiency experts at the Hawthorne plant of the Western Electric Company in Illinois set out to study the effects of lighting on workers productivity. They assumed that increases in lighting would lead to higher output. Two groups of employees were selected: a test group to work in conditions of changing light, and a control group whose lighting would be kept at normal levels. As lighting increased, the test groups output went up as expected, but so did the output of the control group and without any change in their lighting. Over a period of 18 months, the researchers led by Australian-born Elton Mayo (1949) of Harvard University improved the working conditions of the women who assembled telephone relays by introducing rest periods, providing meals and shortening the working week. All the time, production increased. Next, anticipating that a return to the original working conditions would affect production negatively, they took all the improvements away. Output reached new peaks. The explanation lay in the human dimensions of these experiments, not in the technical changes. The workers were made to feel important by the attention they received from the researchers; they saw themselves as members of a team rather than as individuals; and they developed relationships which met their needs for affiliation, competence and achievement. Subsequent interviews with more than 20,000 Western Electric employees confirmed that they wanted to be seen as important, both as individuals and as a group, and wanted opportunities to participate in the operations and future of the company. The methodology of the Hawthorne studies has been criticised, but their findings are the basic theme of the human relations school: managers need to study and understand relationships among people. In summary: Productivity is influenced more by interpersonal relationships on the job than by pay and working conditions. Workers should be seen both as individuals and as members of groups which have norms and values that influence the behaviour of their individual members. Productivity rises when groups identify with management, but fall when their goals are different or opposed. This happened at the Hawthorne plant when workers felt their sense of mastery and achievement was replaced by close supervision and a loss of control over their jobs and environment. The human relations movement is important for its recognition that an organisation is a social system, not just a formal arrangement of functions. Thus it gave managers a new set of assumptions and decision criteria based on the behavioural sciences. Traditionally, their assumptions had been based largely on economics.

Trade unions and collective bargaining

The question whether or not workers are to be permitted to act in combination to advance and protect their interests and welfare leads to a second theme in the historical development of personnel management the need to seek consensus or compromise between employers and their employees yet, at the same time, to maintain the organisations need for control. Associations of workers existed before the Industrial Revolution most often in the form of guilds of craft workers but the changes that factory-based employment brought to working life encouraged the growth of unions. At the end of the 18th century, when violent strikes made many fear there could be a repeat of the French Revolution in Britain, the House of Commons enacted the Combination Laws. They made it a criminal offence for workers to organise to increase their wages or reduce their working hours. In the United States, in 1842, workers gained the right to organise and bargain collectively, but unions were not legal in Britain until the Trade Union Act 1871. By then, socialism was growing in Europe. Marx and Engels published The Communist Manifesto in the revolutionary year of 1848, the First International was held in London in 1864, social democratic parties were increasing their representation in European parliaments, 1906 saw the formation of the British Labour Party, the

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Bolshevik Revolution erupted in 1917, and Britain elected its first Labour government in 1924. Revolution, socialism, war and government served to persuade organised labour that it should have both political and industrial agendas.

Early unionism in New Zealand

New Zealand had its first recorded strike in 1841. The first unions for skilled trades workers were formed about 20 years later, at the initiative of migrants from Britain and with rules copied from their British counterparts. Unions were given legal standing by the Trade Union Act 1878 which simply copied English legislation but they tended to gain and lose membership and strength rapidly. Unions were hit hard by economic depression at the end of the 1870s, but revived in the early 1880s with the formation of district trades and labour councils. A national trades and labour congress met in Dunedin in 1885, but the first real upsurge for the unions came in 188990. This was part of the international rise of political and industrial labour, but resulted also from the rising public concern about working conditions fuelled by newspapers and church leaders which led in 1890 to the appointment of a Sweating Commission. However, the crushing defeat of the unions in the 1890 Maritime Strike was a blow from which they took many years to recover, despite the reforming zeal of the 1890 Liberal government. The formation of the Labour Party in 1916 largely at the initiative of unions was clear recognition that organised labour needed both industrial and political arms to pursue its values and goals. Origins of human resources management

Employment legislation

The 1890 Liberal government in New Zealand was sympathetic to labour, and set about a legislative programme that would have a significant impact on both of the main themes in the development of personnel management. It enacted the Industrial Conciliation and Arbitration Act 1894 and, at the same time, brought in legislation to regulate conditions in factories and other workplaces. The Labour Department was set up in 1891, initially to help people find employment, but later as the administrative and enforcement machinery for the Liberal governments labour legislation. As Noel Woods (1963) writes: By 1891, two distinct movements simultaneously reached a climax. The first, a movement for the state regulation of conditions of work, was supported by a community whose conscience had been pricked by the exposure of working conditions existing in the eighties. The second, a movement for state regulation of industrial relations, was supported by a community determined that it should not again be subjected to the discomforts of widespread industrial warfare. These twin concerns have remained strong influences ever since. Any account of the development of industrial relations and employment legislation in New Zealand must reflect their importance.

Systems theory Behavioural sciences Organisation Development 'New' management Competitive advantage Strategic management Managerialism and 'economic rationalism'

Towards Human Resources Management

As we have seen, human resources management is frequently used as a synonym for personnel management. Human Resources Management with those initial capital letters is something different. Its foundations were laid probably unintentionally when: Peter Drucker (1955) advocated visionary goal-directed leadership as the best management approach for modern organisations; and Douglas McGregor (1960) stressed the importance of management by integration as the strategy for managing people across an entire organisation. However, the emergence of Human Resources Management as a specific management approach or philosophy dates mainly from the mid-1980s.

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Systems theory
Since the 1950s, systems theory has helped all managers not just those in specialist HR roles to appreciate how the various parts and functions of an organisation relate to each other and, therefore, why a change in one area will have an effect in other places. Rensis Likert (1961) argued that all components of the system of management must be consistent with each other and reflect the systems basic philosophy. The idea that HR policies and plans should reflect the organisations culture and be integrated with its business plans is fundamental to HR management.

Behavioural sciences
The behavioural sciences can help managers: improve their understanding of individual motivation, group behaviour, leadership and communication take more systematic and better informed approaches to job design, recruitment and selection, training and development, employee appraisal and counselling, and remuneration planning and management. During its prominence in the 1960s, the behavioural science movement, led by Abraham Maslow, Christopher Argyris, Frederick Herzberg, Rensis Likert and others, focused on issues of integration and involvement. It also stressed quality of working life as a key factor in employee motivation, job satisfaction and performance.

Organisation Development
During the 1960s and 1970s, the behavioural sciences led to the development of Organisation Development. OD is a series of interventions designed to help people to analyse and understand their organisations holistically, and to plan and implement change strategies from this perspective. The development of teams and the management of change were central aspects of the OD approach, which featured process consulting techniques as a means for people to analyse their own situations and problems and generate solutions.

New management
In Search of Excellence was the first management blockbuster book, and the beginning of the modern boom in management theory. In some ways, In Search of Excellence is most important for encouraging a whole generation of managers to think more carefully about what they do. Its authors, Tom Peters and Robert Waterman (1982), clearly described the significance of the so-called soft skills of management in the success of American enterprises to what became a huge international audience. And they stressed the need for all aspects of an organisations management to be integrated, and in harmony with its overall values and objectives. Corporate values, culture and mission were among the key focal points of new management. In a subsequent book, Peters and Austin (1985) summarised the excellent characteristics of successful organisations as a triangle of virtues: care for customers, innovation, and people. Leadership was at the centre of the triangle to be exercised largely through management by walking around (MBWA). In addition, decentralisation would reduce the number of management layers, and put decision making nearer to both customers and employees. In Search of Excellence was, perhaps, most influential in its attack on the rationalist model which had dominated Behavioural sciences American business and government during the Second World psychology study of human behaviour War and beyond. Peters and Waterman advanced three social psychology human behaviour in arguments against the rationalist model (Mickelthwait & social settings Wooldridge, 1996): It puts too much emphasis on financial analysis and too little on motivating workers or satisfying customers. It encourages bureaucratic conformity and the expense of entrepreneurial innovation.
organisation theory organisational design and functions organisational behaviour human behaviour in organisational settings

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It rests on a misunderstanding of human nature.

The central problem with the rationalist view of organising people is that people are not very rational. To fit Taylors old model, or todays organisational charts, man is simply designed wrong (or, of course, vice versa). . . . (Peters & Waterman, 1982, p. 55).

Around this time too, many organisations adopted Japanese management techniques like Total Quality Management (TQM) and continuous improvement (Kaizen). Employee empowerment, development and commitment are central to these practices, which thus influenced the path which HR management took in those organisations.

People as competitive advantage

During the 1980s, the idea that people are our most important asset began to give way to the proposition that people are a source of competitive advantage. In other words, the asset had to be turned to the organisations advantage by the application of appropriate management techniques. As Charles Greer (1995) says:
In a growing number of organisations, human resources are now viewed as a source of competitive advantage. There is greater recognition that distinctive competencies are obtained through highly developed employee skills, distinctive organisational cultures, management processes, and systems. This is in contrast to the traditional emphasis on transferable resources such as equipment. Increasingly, it is being recognised that competitive advantage can be obtained with a high quality work force that enables organisations to compete on the basis of market responsiveness, product and service quality, differentiated products, and technological innovation.

This applies especially to organisations in the service sector where product and service differences have narrowed. Most airlines, for example, operate similar aircraft on similar routes at similar prices: according to the people as competitive advantage argument, passengers choose their airline mainly for the service they receive from check-in staff and cabin crews. Thus, how people are managed, and respond to that management, will be reflected in the organisations performance. The argument here is that organisations can achieve sustainable competitive advantage through their human resources, if they meet these criteria: The people improve the efficiency or effectiveness of the organisation. Their skills, knowledge and abilities are not equally or easily available to competitor organisations. The employees capabilities and contributions cannot be duplicated quickly or readily by other organisations. The organisations human resources are appropriately organised for the present task, and easily adaptable to move to future tasks when needed.

Rise of strategic management

The development of HRM as a distinct philosophy of management was encouraged by the rise of strategic management thinking. Shareholders and managers have been forced to rethink the structure and operations of their organisations and how they should respond to increasing international competition, globalisation, the growing complexity and size of organisations, technology changes, flatter organisational hierarchies, a better educated workforce, changing workforce values, and changes in workforce demographics. Organisations have had to learn how to manage strategically rather than operationally, and many have sought but fewer have succeeded to recognise the central role of human resources in this new, integrated approach.

Managerialism and economic rationalism

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The new philosophy of HRM has been attractive to managers who face the need to change rapidly and radically. Guest (1989) describes HRM as an attractive option to managements driven by market pressures to seek improved quality, greater flexibility and constant innovation. At the same time, the move towards HRM reflects the ascendancy of new right or neo-classical philosophies, and managerialism. Purcell (1989) comments that in the entrepreneurial 1980s, the HRM philosophy was aligned closely with prevailing ideas of enterprise and the freeing up of management initiatives. That alignment continued into the 1990s. As a result, HR management as strategies and practices, as well as a specialist function was to become closely identified with the interests of the organisation. The new legitimacy for managerialism is often most obvious in the public sector where successive governments have insisted that market conditions apply and new management structures be used to emphasise accountability. Paradoxically, this means that the new ideology of HRM has been widely introduced to organisations which are not actually businesses in the usual sense of that word. Predictably perhaps, in an increasingly individualistic world, the ideas of common interest and mutuality are not necessarily shared by workers. Following the shift to HRM, employees in some organisations have become suspicious of their HR managers, and some HR professionals have become rather cynical about their own roles and the expectations that others have of them. In fairness, it should be noted that many changes were forced on organisations by their general or line managers often against the advice or over the opposition of their personnel specialists.

Personnel management and HRM in New Zealand

The development of personnel management in New Zealand followed a similar pattern to Britain, but emphasised administration more than welfare (Ransom, 1966). Before the Second World War, the typical New Zealand enterprise was small and lacked tradition: its owner-manager was likely to be an individualist, often without much sense of a social responsibility to employees. Very few organisations had developed staff policies. Instead, they relied on the fact that it was relatively easy for them to hire and fire individual employees, and left the details of their employment terms and conditions to be dealt with in industrial awards and agreements negotiated by unions and employers associations.

War and the labour force Under manpower regulations, women and men were conscripted and directed to essential work. In 1944, all men aged 1859 and all women (without dependent children) aged 1840 could be directed to a job. Acts of Parliament and Arbitration Court awards could be set aside under wartime emergency regulations. Restrictions on overtime working and the requirement to pay penalty rates for overtime work were lifted. The minimum working age was lowered and children were employed on shift work.

After the war

During the Second World War, labour shortages forced both politicians and employers to rethink manpower policies. Government regulations made it hard for employers to dismiss workers, and for workers who had been dismissed to get new jobs. Employers realised that they would have to find tools other than dismissal to help them deal with discipline, labour turnover, absenteeism, and industrial unrest. New Zealands first welfare officers and industrial nurses were appointed during the war to deal with the problems of those in directed labour, especially women who had not worked before, and now found themselves in jobs previously done by men.

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Twenty firms were known to employ welfare officers in the early 1940s, although these were low-level positions with duties restricted to canteen services, first aid, handling personal difficulties and welfare, and controlling absenteeism. Most of these welfare officers were untrained and not well suited to their positions. And, because they were women, society allowed them to have no real authority over men: thus they were found mainly in femaleintensive organisations. But the general success of these appointments led to changes in management views. After the war, the Department of Health encouraged the employment of industrial nurses. By 1946, some 38 industrial nurses had jobs, again in firms which employed predominantly women. Their duties were mainly limited to health and first aid, but some were used to control discipline and absenteeism, although their training in autocratic institutions did not prepare them for that very well. Only two organisations, both of them large, were known to employ personnel officers, although they had no formal personnel management training. At the same time, studies and reports from the industrial psychology division of the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research, which had been set up in 1942 to investigate problems arising from wartime industry, were encouraging interest in the business community in industrial psychology and systematic management. In Stewart Ransoms view, the greatest impetus for the introduction of personnel management to New Zealand was the arrival of large organisations whose headquarters were overseas. The New Zealand operations had to conform to the overseas model both in working conditions and staff policies and in having a personnel department and these companies appointed experienced personnel managers and provided excellent training. The development of major public works (like hydro-electric dams) and industrial projects (in the pulp and paper industry, for example) led to the appointment of personnel officers to handle the challenges of employing large numbers of people, often in isolated areas. Initially, the responsibilities of these personnel officers were usually restricted to accommodation, canteens, social and recreational facilities, transport and welfare problems but were soon extended to employment activities like recruitment and selection, and later to staff development and personnel policy issues.

The IPM surveys

In 1958, the Institute of Personnel Management now the Human Resources Institute surveyed 39 private sector firms which employed 35,000 staff and a number of government departments which employed another 105,000 people. The survey found that 25% of organisations with 150 or more staff had a personnel department. This was a post-war development, because only four personnel managers had been appointed before 1945, 10 between 1945 and 1949, another 10 between 1950 and 1954 and 13 between 1955 and 1958. On average, larger Ratio of HR specialists to total staff organisations in the 1958 IPM survey 1958 1968 1978 1987 employed one personnel 1:145 1:125 1:82 1:149 Less than 600 employees staff member for every 185 employees. The 1:185 1:173 1:195 1:172 More than 600 employees ratio for organisations with fewer than 600 staff was 1:145. By Women and the war 1968, these ratios were 1:173 and 1:125 The national emergency of war had a liberating effect on women; respectively; in 1978 they were 1:195 they became more recognised as people who could and should and 1:82. A 1987 survey showed a ratio contribute to economic life. Hitherto, because of tradition, prejudice, of 1:172 for organisations with more and womens lack of social equality in the community, they had than 600 employees and 1:149 for been prevented from doing so. Now they drove tractors and buses, smaller organisations. did all types of farm work, mended the tram tracks, cleaned out the In its 1978 survey, IPM said there railway carriages, entered the public services as clerical workers. In had been significant economic and 1947 the percentage of women clerical workers in the public social change between 1969 to 1978, service was 25; in 1939 it had been 5 per cent. the effects of which had made new Sutch (1969) demands on all those concerned with

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the management of people as employees. It had been a period of high immigration and emigration, with many immigrants in the early 1970s unused to industrial employment and many of those who left being skilled tradesmen. Legislation had created an almost new environment for the employer and employee: equal pay, human rights, accident compensation, wage control, industrial training and industrial relations were some examples. It had been a period of unprecedented economic change: expansion and great development in some industries; contraction, mergers and close-downs for others; companies had had to become more efficient in order to survive. It had also been a period of change for the trade union movement, with young professionals appearing in the movement, new strengths discovered, and real challenges to the place of trade unions in society.

Power and position

A mid-1980s study of personnel and industrial relations staff (Gilbertson et al., 1987) showed that just over half of all respondents (54%) were responsible for recommending or making personnel or industrial relations policy for their organisations. However, one-third of them were neither personnel nor industrial relations executives: it appeared that many organisations included personnel and industrial relations policy making as part of a wider management portfolio such as corporate services or administration. This suggested that there may be evolutionary stages in the specialisation of the personnel and industrial relations function: It emerges as a series of duties incorporated with other managerial tasks, for example administration manager. Next, the need emerges for a manager devoted full time to personnel and industrial relations matters, leading to a combined personnel and industrial relations manager role. The size or complexity of the combined task then demands further specialisation into personnel and industrial relations matters, hence the emergence of a group of managers specialising in either personnel or industrial relations work. Eventually, sub-specialisation can occur within the function itself with the appointment of staff specialists at both manager and officer level for example, training managers. The 1987 survey found that few New Zealand organisations had sufficiently large numbers of employees to justify the final evolutionary stage of specialisation. It also found that: almost half the people in personnel and industrial relations work had no tertiary or professional qualifications: they relied on work experience as the basis for their knowledge; fewer than one in five had a tertiary qualification, and only 28% of these qualifications were in personnel and industrial relations; 82% of the respondents were male, and women held only 9.5% of all policy-making positions; at the policyimplementing level, 37% of personnel officers were women while only 8% of personnel managers were women; 87% of the respondents had worked outside the personnel and industrial relations fields, in other business functions, the armed services, general administration and a range of occupations. Nearly one-third of personnel and industrial relations managers had come from non-business careers, while 51% of all the respondents reported line working experience.

Into the 1990s

A 1990 survey (Geare & Stablein, 1993) found that the typical New Zealand HR manager was a married man in his forties, a New Zealander of British descent. He was a non-graduate with a fair amount of HR management training, more than 10 years experience in management, but only about five years experience in the HR department. The majority of HR managers were not graduates, but a significant proportion were (37%), and a significant proportion were women (31%). Later in the decade, a survey of IPM members (Pajo & Cleland, 1997) updated the profile of the New Zealand HR specialist. It found that: more than two-thirds of HR practitioners were aged between 30 and 49 years;

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60% of HR practitioners were women, compared with only 20% in 1978; there were more males in the older age groups, but women made up the majority of younger practitioners suggesting that HR management would increasingly become a female-dominated field; ethnic groups other than Caucasian (96% of all respondents) were severely under-represented in HR positions; 85% of respondents had a tertiary qualification, compared with only 13% in 1968; and the most common background for HR people was clerical and administration work (where nearly one-quarter began their working careers), but almost the same proportion had started in HR-related work. This profile had scarcely changed four years later when the Human Resources Institute (IPM changed its name in 1999) analysed its membership and found:

46% were aged 30-49 years; 56% were female; 74% of respondents identified themselves as New Zealanders and another 16% as Europeans; 87% held a tertiary qualification.

The ratio of HR specialists to total staff has often been used as an indicator of the development of the personnel and HR functions. With the recent enthusiasm for outsourcing non-core functions and devolving operational responsibilities to line managers, this ratio may no longer have the same relevance. Of the respondents to a 1997 survey of New Zealand organisations with more than 50 employees (Johnson, 2000), 61% had an HR department or manager. The median number of HR staff was three. The median ratio of HR staff to all employees was 1:73, similar to organisations in Europe.

References
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