Educating Entrepreneurs for Wealth Creation by Michael G. Scott Heinz Klandt Peter Rosa

Author:Michael G. Scott, Heinz Klandt, Peter Rosa [Michael G. Scott, Heinz Klandt, Peter Rosa]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781859721858
Goodreads: 601600
Publisher: Brookfield (VT)
Published: 1998-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

The Tayside findings

The importance of HRM to small businesses would seem obvious in the light of their relative resource poverty. Small, specialised companies need the right people in the right roles performing the right tasks in the right ways at the right times, or they suffer quite quickly. HRM is normally distinguished from conventional personnel management by virtue of its strategic, proactive, integrated and individualistic orientation. In other words the active, forward-looking management of employment is seen as a strategic matter, an integral part of business policy and a responsibility of top job holders, and its historic, if that is the right word, emphasis is not on collective relations in employing organisations but on specific relationships between management and employees as individuals. Small businesses would not seem able to survive without it. The respondents certainly gave this impression.

In Company one, the health care products company, in which staff needed detailed product knowledge in order to sell, there was a strong emphasis on training, although finding the resources for it strained company finances and relationships because recession had been affecting sales and profits for some time.

In Company two, the chartered accountancy practice which handled many small business accounts, internal promotion and staff development were important policies, training was a major priority, and staff were expected to be extroverted and empathetic in dealings with clients. Thus there was an attempt to develop a distinctive culture.

In Company three, the chain of butcher shops, there was an emphasis on quality of work and long service as well as on high standards of training and customer care. However an HRM-style approach to employment was less explicit than with most of the other companies in the sample, although it was clearly present. This company was definitely in the maturity stage of the product life cycle.

In Company four, the jewellers, there was considerable pride in the amount and quality of training provided and in low staff turnover. The son who was taking over the business from his owner-manager father was a business studies graduate with a strongly explicit interest in proactive HRM.

In Company five, the public house, very high levels of staff turnover, mainly of students or people on working holidays, were the norm. Competition was cut-throat, and training was on the job only: close involvement of the franchisees, a husband and wife team, in supervision meant that HRM was present, albeit implicitly and of a somewhat limited kind.

In Company six, the chain of florist/green grocery shops with the garden centre, training was continuous if largely on the job, with strong emphasis on customer contact and care and on product knowledge. Thus strong elements of integrated HRM were present, even if promotions only went up to shop manager level with more senior positions in this family business monopolised by family members.

In Company seven, the quite new company set up to look after and guide the public around an object of historic interest, training of various kinds was very strongly emphasised, as was imaginative but careful recruitment and the development of team-working and a distinctive culture.

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