chapter 2 trends of human resource management

Question 1

internal labor force

Answer 1

an organizations workers (its employees and the people who have contracts to work at the organization)

Question 2

external labor market

Answer 2

individuals who are actively seeking employment

Question 3

high performance work systems

Answer 3

organizations that have the best possible fit between their social system (people and how they interact) and technical system (equipment and processed)

Question 4

knowledge workers

Answer 4

employees whose main contribution to the organization is specialized knowledge, such as knowledge of customers, process, or a profession

Question 5

employee empowerment

Answer 5

giving employees responsibility and authority to make decisions regarding all aspects of product development or customer service

Question 6

teamwork

Answer 6

the assignment of work to groups of employees with various skills who interact to assemble a product or provide a service

Question 7

total quality management

Answer 7

a companywide effort to continually improve the ways people, machines, and systems accomplish work

Question 8

reeingineering

Answer 8

a complete review of the organization’s critical work processes to make them more efficient and able to deliver higher quality

Question 9

outsourcing

Answer 9

the practice of having another company (a vendor, third party provider, or consultant) provide services

Question 10

offshoring

Answer 10

moving operations from the county where a company is headquartered to a country where pay rates are lower but the necessary skills are available

Question 11

expatriates

Answer 11

employees who take assignments in other countries

Question 12

human resource information systems

Answer 12

a computer system used to acquire, store, manipulate, analyze, retrieve, and distribute information related to an organization’s human resources

Question 13

electronic human resource management e-hrm

Answer 13

the processing and transmission of digitized HR information, especially using computer networking and the internet

Question 14

self service

Answer 14

system in which employees have online access to information about HR issues and go online to enroll themselves in programs and provide feedback, through surveys

Question 15

psychological contract

Answer 15

a description of what an employee expects to contribute to an employment relationship and what the employer will provide the employee in exchange for those contributions

Question 16

alternative work arrangements

Answer 16

methods of staffing other than the traditional hiring of full-time employees (for example: use of independent contractors, on-call workers, temporary workers, and contract company workers)