HR, the new key role of managers
by Geraldine Hinter
Managers across entire organisations who never thought of themselves as human resource managers suddenly have a new core role, doing HR.
UniSA’s Research Professor and Chair of Human Resource Management, Carol Kulik is helping to equip managers for their new role by making cutting-edge research on human resource issues accessible to managers with no formal training in human resources.
"Managers today have to take responsibility for recruiting and hiring, for mentoring, for succession planning, and for developing the culture of their organisation – often without any education or experience in the HR field," Prof Kulik said.
"We need to be educating all managers in those HR skills. HR can’t only be treated as a specialised program. Parts of HR must be integrated throughout the business curriculum," she said.
Prof Kulik said that 20 years ago Australia was heavily unionised with a centralised industrial relations system. As a result, Australian organisations became relatively homogenous in their managerial practices and there wasn’t a lot of room for individual managers to show discretion and manage people differently.
Prof Carol Kulik’s article The rich get richer, predicting participation in voluntary diversity training was featured in the Twenty-Four Seven section of the September AFR BOSS magazine. BOSS surveys hundreds of articles each month for this section. The article was written with interstate and overseas colleagues Molly Pepper, Loriann Roberson and Sharon Parker, and was published in the Journal of Organizational Behaviour.
"With collective bargaining loosening and more emphasis being placed on individual contracts, there is much greater diversity in HR practices across organisations and a greater need to know what practices work and what practices don’t," Prof Kulik said.
Prof Kulik’s research team has received an Australian Research Council (ARC) grant to look at different HR practices, examining what organisations do in terms of recruiting, hiring or grievance procedures, and then to identify what practices appeal to different segments of the workforce.
Organisational fairness is another key area of research being undertaken by Prof Kulik. This research looks at what practices employees feel lead to fair outcomes.
"Employees want to feel that they have been given a fair go even if they don’t get a particular job for which they have applied," Prof Kulik said.
How organisations manage diversity, such as gender, age, race, and disability, through practices that let a diverse workforce succeed and interact successfully is the third key area of research being undertaken by Prof Kulik.
"In all of these areas, my aim is to make sure that the kind of research we do in HR is very visible, that it addresses the areas of most concern to people, and that it is of interest to people on campus and in the business community," Prof Kulik said.
"What I find interesting is that when organisations try to create change, many are so focused on one part of the system that they don’t realise the effects elsewhere. For example, a lot of emphasis is placed on getting people with disabilities into the workforce, but what affect does employing people with disabilities have on the co-workers who interact with them at work, or on the family members who care for them at home?
"Our research shows that people with disabilities often become
more stressed by their work responsibilities, especially when their
disability is very severe. This isn’t surprising as they are dealing
with big challenges in their lives.
But organisations’ efforts to employ people with disabilities can
also have a stressful effect on the people who care for them - a
spill-over effect," Prof Kulik said.
"My research will look at what organisations do differently, and then evaluate the different types of interventions and their effects on people with disabilities and their carers."
While a major part of Prof Kulik’s role will be undertaking research funded by her ARC Discovery grant and an ARC Linkage grant with the Australian Human Resources Institute, she will also be working towards facilitating other people’s research, particularly that of new researchers.
Prof Kulik has a PhD in business and administration from the University of Illinois in the United States. She moved to Australia in 2002 and was Professor of Human Resource Management at the University of Melbourne before moving to UniSA.