-
Industrial revolution era— 19th century
The systematic development of HRM started with industrial revolution that started during 1850s in Western Europe and USA. The industrial revolution consisted, essentially, the development of machinery, the use of mechanical energy in production processes, and consequently the emergence of the concept of factory with large number of workforce working together. -
Trade union movement era — close to the 19th century
Shortly after the emergence of factory system, workers started to organize themselves based on their common interests to form workers’ associations which were subsequently known as trade unions. The basic objectives of these associations were to safeguard interest of their members and to sort out their problems which arose primarily because of employment of child labour, long hours of work, and poor working conditions. -
Social responsibility era — beginning of the 20th century
In the first decade of 20th century, some factory owners started adopting a more humanistic and paternalistic approach towards workers. Paternalistic approach to labour management is based on the philosophy that labour is just like a child and owner is just like a father and the owner should take care of his labour just like a father takes care of his children. -
Scientific management era— 1900-1920s
Around the beginning of 20th century, Taylor started to find out ‘one best way of doing thing’ based on time and motion studies. On the basis of his experiments, he was able to increase workers’ productivity considerably and wrote many papers based on these experiments and a book on scientific management. -
Systems and Contingency Approach Era
Systems and contingency approach has attracted maximum attention of thinkers in management in the present era. It is an integrated approach which considers management of human resources in its totality based on empirical data. The basic idea of this approach is that analysis of any object must rely on a method of analysis involving simultaneous variations of mutually-dependent variables. This happens when systems approach is applied in managing human resources. -
Human Resource Management Era
However, as the time passed and the complexity of managing human resources in large business organizations increased, the scope of industrial relations department was extended to cover supervisory staff and subsequently managerial personnel. Industrial relations department was named as personnel department. With the increasing competition for market share, competition for resources including human talents, and increased knowledge in the field of managing human resources. -
Human Relations Era
Around 1920s, management researchers gave a close look at the human factor at work and the variables that affected people’s behaviour. Before that, Hugo Munsterberg wrote a book on ‘Psychology and Industrial Efficiency’ which suggested the use of psychology in the field of personnel testing, interviewing, attitude measurement, learning, etc was termed as ‘Industrial Psychology Era’. In 1924, a group of professors from Harvard Business School, USA, began an enquiry into the human aspects
