“When group members try to work together to achieve specific ends, complexities of leadership, coordination, integration, control and communication occur. Management is the concept that encompasses all of these problems.
Dalton E. McFarland (1).
I. Vision of Business Administration
The idea of Administration that we have is fundamental to define the conceptual notion of Personnel Administration, this that seems so obvious is complex given the numerous definitions that each school proposes.
So, let's start from its etymological root to clear the subject, in this regard we quote the Argentine professor José Roberto Dromi, namely:
"Etymologically, the word administration comes from the Latin terms administrativo and administrare, from ad (a) and ministrare, (to serve), its literal meaning being to serve, which translates the idea of action or activity. According to others, administrare results by contraction of ad manus trahere, made up of the prefix ad, the noun manus and the verb trahere, which implies allusion to the idea of direction, management or management towards an end. In German, by contrast, the noun verwaltung (administration) derives from the verb walten (reign, to rule) which refers to an idea of power. ”(2)
This term expresses a double face in its meaning, in an objective sense it is the activity of the person or a group of them, directed to specify an end, and in a subjective sense it is an apparatus or organ that is attributed the function of administering.
Modernly, the administration is considered as the organization of human activity in the direction of achieving results, in other words, we can say with the Spanish professor Ramón De Lucas Ortueta, that it is “… the purpose of preventing results and controlling coincidence among our forecasts of the events that occur in newspapers. ”(3)
Hence, business administration is the science, technique and art of organizing people and their contributions of capital, materials and labor, in order to produce goods or services that meet the needs of consumers, whose radius of Organizational and managerial action reaches even suppliers and customers, and at the same time seeks a strategic alliance with other companies to add value to the product or service it offers in the market.
Through this concept it is made clear that the goods (capital, work, materials, etc.) come from the people, consequently, the human person and his organization for a determined productive purpose, is central in defining the administration of companies, and therefore The same as we refer to the most complex being known up to now, is that science or technique is not enough, even art is necessary.
In this way, we overcome the old dilemma of considering human resources on a par with material or economic resources, and which still persists today, expressed in the organization chart of not a few companies, where the Administration and Finance Manager, It "manages" human, material, and financial resources, as if things or money could receive and carry out orders like humans.
On the other hand, we include suppliers, strategic partners and clients in the area of influence of the business organization in the concept, and we do not constrain it to the classic concept of capital, work and natural resources, since this new type of organization, intertwined with many others through various forms of business alliances and integration of the consumer society, around the business group that meets their needs (joint venture, subcontracting, outsourcing, customer organization systems eg credit cards for consumers, online integration systems, via the internet, providers and consumers, etc.), will be the seed of the social order of the future: the Networked Society.
II. Personnel Administration: Conceptual proposal
In this order of ideas, our concept of Personnel Administration in a summarized way is the following: It is the specialty that aims to manage work culture.
We define this conceptual notion in a developed way as follows: Personnel Administration as a specialty of Business Administration is recognized as an interdisciplinary area, and its object of study and action is the administration of people directly or indirectly linked to a company or group of companies, from the search for a minimum cultural coherence in their labor dimension.
Then, the unity of thought between the workers that make up the management group and the staff in general, in direct relation to the client or final consumer, will be the guide for action in the following three spheres:
The first corresponds to an education or contributions to the way of thinking and acting of company managers, at all levels and categories; from the President to the most humble team leader or supervisor, clarifying and strengthening its concepts, values and principles on the exercise of its powers of direction (powers to regulate statutorily the work, issue orders to execute them, and punish disciplinary), and organization (selection, assignment, evaluation, promotion, motivation, assistance, retraining of workers, and hiring of staffing companies).
In the second sphere, it seeks to train, re-train or reinforce, in short, to raise the quality of the morale of producers of personnel who receive orders, at all levels, and its full adaptation to the conception of corporate culture that its leaders have, not only in its ethical and ideological aspect (concepts, values and principles), but also in what concerns their contribution and personal behavior in the creation of wealth, and fundamentally, collecting information on the techniques and proposals that arise from them to improve the production process, product quality or service provision.
Lastly, the strategic sphere carried out by the intersection of the other two, inhabited by the people who make up the Personnel or Human Resources area, is responsible for managing the organization's cultureIn other words, it structures the guiding thought and shares it with the people related to the company, whether by direct or indirect contract, for this it develops, among other sub-functions, the following: It plans the strategy, designs and executes programs, establishes the management controls, determines the standards, designs the career lines of the personnel, constructs and evaluates the numerical indicators that allow to measure the added value of its administration and of the workers, and also, channels the flow of the information that will facilitate knowing and preparing the climate and the work environment as a whole, to achieve or carry out the proposed objectives, and will be the great communicator and trainer par excellence within the company.
Through the proposed conceptual notion, the term culture is rescued in the world of work, so this meaning deserves further analysis, revising the dictionary (4), literally, culture is defined as cultivation, cultivation action, instruction, illustration, wisdom resulting from the exercise of man his understanding in cultivating human knowledge.
From the sociological point of view, Dr. Armand Cuvillier cites us various contributions that together will allow us to form an idea about culture, namely:
"Under the influence of German romanticism,… the Kultur conceived as the expression of the deep soul of the community, (…)…. the sociologist Alfred Weber, the creator of the kultursoziologie, considers that… Culture consists of the realization of the spirit, the realization of the philosophical and emotional self. Tylor defined culture as that complex whole that includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom and all the other capacities acquired by man as a member of society. J. Folsom called culture the sum of everything that is artificial: all the equipment of tools, habits of life, that have been invented by man and that are transmitted from one generation to another. Dixon, with even more precision, gives that name to all the products and activities of a town:social and religious order, customs and beliefs that, in the case of a more advanced people, we have the custom of calling it civilization. Sorokin, finally, tells culture,… and defines it as the totality of the thoughts (meanings), values and norms that people possess in interaction, and the totality of the vehicles that objectify, socialize and transmit those thoughts. (…) And, remembering Keyserling,… culture is,… the supreme, permanent, generic value that grows and matures in contrast to the flowering and decline of the technical aspects of civilized society. (…), As M. Harrou suggests, keep the French term for culture to designate the 'personal way of life of the spirit'. (5)culture tells… and defines it as the totality of the thoughts (meanings), values and norms that people have in interaction, and the totality of the vehicles that objectify, socialize and transmit those thoughts. (…) And, remembering Keyserling,… culture is,… the supreme, permanent, generic value that grows and matures in contrast to the flowering and decline of the technical aspects of civilized society. (…), As M. Harrou suggests, keep the French term for culture to designate the 'personal way of life of the spirit'. (5)culture tells… and defines it as the totality of the thoughts (meanings), values and norms that people have in interaction, and the totality of the vehicles that objectify, socialize and transmit those thoughts. (…) And, remembering Keyserling,… culture is,… the supreme, permanent, generic value that grows and matures in contrast to the flowering and decline of the technical aspects of civilized society. (…), As M. Harrou suggests, keep the French term for culture to designate the 'personal way of life of the spirit'. (5)… The supreme, permanent, generic value that grows and matures in contrast to the flowering and decline of the technical aspects of civilized society. (…), As M. Harrou suggests, keep the French term for culture to designate the 'personal way of life of the spirit'. (5)… The supreme, permanent, generic value that grows and matures in contrast to the flowering and decline of the technical aspects of civilized society. (…), As M. Harrou suggests, keep the French term for culture to designate the 'personal way of life of the spirit'. (5)
Culture, then, is the structure of thought consolidated in the spirit of each person, in whose internal dynamics the representation of the world, value systems, ethical conception, lifestyle, archetypes and personal paradigms, patterns of conduct, etc. are configured.., and on the basis of this conscious factor the human being projects his life plan, which permanently influences the subject's decision-making regarding the outside world.
Well, this culture in its labor dimension will be the object of study and action of personnel administration. Then, the personnel operator has to know the work culture that each worker brings to the workplace or develops within it, and evaluate its evolution during his time of service, and fundamentally, not only convince him to endorse the paradigms cultural aspects of the company, but to testify to it with their daily work, in their human relationships with their bosses, coworkers, customers, suppliers and business partners.
The task of reinforcing and improving the work culture of the workers will be a permanent function that deserves everyone's participation in its development, where the personnel administrator will be the conductor, the great motivator and systematizer of experiences.
So much so, that in cutting-edge companies in personnel administration, the Knowledge Management has been created attached to the Central Personnel Management, and whose basic function is the administration of the organization's channels, through which knowledge flows required by the worker according to their skills.
Next, we cite some concepts on personnel administration indicating the reasons why we disagree with them, namely:
The Mexican Professor Fernando Arias Galicia defines the administration of human resources as follows: “it is the administrative process applied to the increase and conservation of the effort, experiences, health, knowledge, skills, etc., of the members of the organization and the country in general ”(6)
This "proceduralist" view of the subject gives a life of its own to the "administrative process" where the person is the input and the result is a better worker. We consider that external mechanisms are not enough to increase personal effort, among other values, it is necessary and decisive internal, cultural springs, in the ideological conception of the worker, without them we would make the workplace a sort of competition for the prize and continuous improvement at work would not be the result of personal moral conviction, based on internal identification with the institutional culture and its personal and collective contribution to the country's progress. That is, to focus attention on the deepest part of the being, the transcendent motivation (spiritual value). Without neglecting, by the way,intrinsic motivation (intellectual value) and extrinsic motivation (remuneration value - working conditions).
For his part, the Peruvian professor Teodosio Palomino Ramirez, considers that: “The importance of industrial relations, as a profession, lies in the difficult task that the professional of this branch has to carry out in order to select, train, develop and adequately train the workers, for their best development in the production and productivity of the company. This profession has the most advanced methods and techniques for the purposes of human promotion; and as a social discipline, it studies man as a social labor entity and sole creator of wealth. ” (7)
In short, it is a matter of trying a definition exhibiting a relationship of the sub-functions of personnel administration, without focusing on their medulla and central nerve, that is, starting from the labor culture of the workers, from the conscious factor that mobilizes man as bio - psycho - social entity in its function of creating and distributing wealth.
Finally, under the stated perspective, the Human Resources or Personnel Administration Management should not be a Department under the aegis of the Administration and Finance Management, in the organizational structure of a company, it should be located attached to the General Management, given that their actions radiate from the maximum Chief to the last of the workers, and even encompasses the personnel that stand out for special service companies and worker cooperatives, since they are all tributaries and agents that form the culture of the company, and Privileged clients of this internal consultant in facilitating management tools in personnel administration.
(1) Dalton E. McFarland: Personnel Administration. Theory and practice. Economic Culture Fund, Mexico, 1989, p. fifteen
(2) José Roberto Dromi: Institutions of Administrative Law, Astrea, Buenos Aires, 1983, p. 157
(3) Ramón De Lucas Ortueta: Personnel Manual. Personnel management techniques. Index, Madrid, 1981, p. 9
(4) Illustrated Encyclopedic Dictionary of the Spanish Language, t.II Ed. Sopena, Barcelona, 1974
(5) Armand Cuvillier: Manual of Sociology, El Ateneo, Buenos Aires, 1960 pp. 525 - 528
(6) Fernando Arias Galicia: Human Resources Administration, Editorial Trillas, México 1978.
(7) Teodosio A. Palomino Ramirez: Industrial Relations. Theory and practice, Juris Laboral, Lima, 1989, p. 10
