Chapter One
Introduction to
Human Relations
Chapter Preview
• Nature, purpose and importance in
organizations
• Career success and work/life balance
• Major developments in field
• Historical overview of field
• Forces influencing behavior
• Seven themes for effectiveness
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The Nature, Purpose and Importance of
Human Relations
• Best-managed organizations…
– understand work is done through
relationships
– are not simply being “nice to people”
– genuinely help employees come alive
through their work
– align goals of worker and workplace
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Human Relations Defined
• Study of all types of interactions among
people, including:
– Conflicts
– Cooperative efforts
– Group relationships
• Study of why beliefs, attitudes, and
behaviors can cause problems in
personal and professional relationships
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Human Relations in the Age of Information
• Industrial to information economy
• Information exchange is foundation of
most economic transactions
• Increase in amount and speed of
information
• Alters traditional patterns of work and
leisure
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Human Relations in the Age of Information
• Dynamic, but disorienting and stressful
• Reduced sources of connection away
from work
• Less contact with extended families
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Human Relations in the Age of Information
• Over emphasis on information can limit
one’s effectiveness
• Need balance and perspective
• Human-contact deficiency weakens the
spirit, the mind, and the body
• To survive and thrive, we need warmhearted contact with people
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The Importance of Human Relations
• Interpersonal skills essential for success
in most jobs
• Technical competencies not sufficient
for success
• Recent trends in the workplace give
new importance to human relations
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Trend: Instability of Labor Market
• Worker dislocation due to increased
numbers of:
– Mergers and acquisitions
– Buyouts and downsizing
– Business closings and bankruptcy
• Can result in:
– Low moral
– Mistrust of management
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Trend: Changing Work Patterns
• When, where and how
• New opportunities and challenges
– Increase in temporary workers
– More self-employed and contract
employees “Free Agent Nation”
– Telecommuting
– More employers over a career
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Trend: Orientation Toward Service to
Customers
• Service economy
• Some competitive advantages are easy
to copy (i.e., technology, financial
structure)
• Relationships key to sustainable
competitive advantage and they are
difficult to copy
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Total Person Insight
No matter what we do, we do it with
people. People create technology.
People implement the technology.
People make it all happen. People
ultimately use whatever it is we create.
No matter how small your organization
or how technical its process, it takes
people to be successful.
Harry E. Chambers
Author, The Bad Attitude Survival Guide
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Trend: Lack of Civility in the Workplace
• Rudeness, insensitivity, disrespect
• “Me” rather than “We” attitudes
• Workplace incivility threatens employee
relationships
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Trend: Increasing Use of Teams
• Using teams can:
– Improve product quality and customer
service
– Improve job satisfaction
• Organizations need to develop team
skills:
– Group decision making
– Leadership
– Conflict resolution
– Communication
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Trend: Increasing Work Force Diversity
• Prominent characteristic of today’s work
force
• Organizations need to increase
tolerance and understanding for
differences in:
– Age
– Gender
– Race
– Physical traits
– Sexual orientation
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Trend: Growing Income Inequality
• Socioeconomic status influenced by:
– Income
– Job
– Education
• Created climate of resentment and
distrust
• Wage gap keeps getting bigger
• Negatively impacts physical and mental
health of lowest socioeconomic status
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Challenges of Today’s workplace:
• Wide range of interpersonal skills are
needed
• Contact with customers, clients,
patients, and other workers
• Every relations differs in:
Age and Gender
Communication style
Work background
Work ethics
Values
Culture
• Each encounter offers new challenge
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Manage Three Relationships
• People must manage three types:
– Relationships with ourselves
– One-to-one relationships
– Group relationships
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Figure 1.1: Major Relationship
Management Challenges
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Relationship with Ourselves
• Positive self image and self-confidence
is good for relations with others
• Many people have negative ideas and
feelings about themselves
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One-to-One Relationships
• Occupations with high client/customer
contact face this challenge every day
• Biases can be barriers:
– Racial
– Age
– Gender
– Communication-style
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Group Relationships
• Many assigned to work as members of
a team
• Lack of cooperation among members
can result in quality or productivity
problems
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Human Relations Draws on
Behavioral Sciences
• Psychology 
• Sociology
• Anthropology
Individual
Group dynamic
• Focus on “why” of human behavior
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Beyond Human Behavior….
• The field of human relations goes
further than “why”
• Emphasis on applied:
– Anticipation of problems
– Resolution
– Prevention
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The “Total Person”
• Each person’s characteristics part of
single system making up the whole
person
• Only “total person” can be employed
• Traits are interdependent:
– Physical fitness
– Self-awareness
– Value orientation
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Emotional control
Self-esteem
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The “Total Person”
• Organizations recognizing that when a
whole person is improved, significant
benefits accrue to the firm
• Organizations can separate:
– Work and home
– Emotional and physical
• Many employee development programs
are being established
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Examples of “Total Person”
Development Programs
• Stress management
• Physical fitness
programs
• Balancing work and
family seminars
• Values clarification
education
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• On-site services
(i.e., Dental)
• Parenting classes
• Financial planning
and home loan
assistance
• Software training
• Assertiveness
training
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Total Person Insight
The rules for work are changing, and
we’re all being judged, whether we
know it or not, by a new yardstick—not
just how smart we are and what
technical skills we have, which
employers see as givens, but
increasingly by how well we handle
ourselves and one another.
Daniel Goleman
Author, Working with Emotional Intelligence
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The Need for a Supportive Environment
• A positive and supportive environment
can lead to:
– Greater personal career satisfaction
– Greater employee commitment
– Increased organizational productivity and
efficiency
• Requires full commitment and support
of management
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Influential Forces
• Understanding human behavior at work
begins with a review of the six major
forces that affect every employee
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Figure 1.2:
Major Forces
Influencing
Worker
Behavior
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Organizational Culture
• Collection of shared values, beliefs,
rituals, stories, and myths that create a
common identity and feelings of
community among employees
• Every organization has unique culture
• Reflection of deeply held values and
beliefs of top management
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Supervisory-Management
• Managers hold key position to influence
employee behavior
• Spokespersons for the organization
• Philosophy, competence, and
leadership style establish image in eyes
of employees
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Supervisory-Management
• Establish perceptions of organization’s
concern for employee welfare
• Perceptions influence factors such as:
– Productivity
– Customer relations
– Safety
– Loyalty to the firm
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Total Person Insight
Jobs do a lot more than merely provide
income. They provide the opportunity to
learn and enhance skills, to have some
control over one’s fate and, perhaps
most important, to gain a sense of selfworth, a sense of carrying one’s own
weight.
William Raspberry
Syndicated Columnist
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Work Group Influence
• Research has identified three functions
of group membership.
• It can:
– Satisfy social needs
– Provide emotional support
– Lend assistance in solving problems and
meeting goals
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Job Influence
• Work has taken central stage in the
lives of many
• Can more than satisfy economic needs
• Provide sense of meaning, community,
and self-esteem
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Personal Characteristics
• All employees bring combination of:
– Abilities and interests Aptitudes
– Values
Expectations
• Behavior often reflection of match
between environment and individual’s
characteristics
• Creating idea work environment to meet
all needs is a challenge
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Family Influence
• Need for balance between work and
family
• Increase in dual-income families
• Problems on the job often linked to
family
• Many organizations attempt to create
family-friendly environment
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Human Relations Movement
• Early attempts to improve productivity
focused on plant layout and mechanical
processes
• Focus has changed to:
– nature of work
– workers as complex human beings
• Shift from concern for things to concern
for people
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The Industrial Revolution
• Marked shift from home-based
processes to factory production
• Little understanding of employee needs
and relation to production
• Limited productivity and uniformity of
work
• Profound impact on nature of work and
role of worker
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Taylor’s Scientific Management
• Frederick Taylor started movement in
1874
– He became aware of inefficiency and
waste
– Systematically studied each job
– Segmented work down into isolated,
specialized tasks
– Different workers were assigned to each
task
• Resulted in more efficiency, but required
little thinking by worker
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Taylor’s Concept
• Theories became very popular among
business owners and managers
• Paved the way for the assembly line
• Criticized for exploiting, not helping,
workers
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Total Person Insight
You can only get so much more
productivity out of reorganization and
automation. Where you really get
productivity leaps is in the minds and
hearts of people.
James Baughman
Director of Management Development, General Electric
Co.
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The Hawthorne Studies
• 1920s, Elton Mayo sets out to study
effects of illumination and ventilation on
worker fatigue
• Became seminal investigation into role
of human relations in group and
individual productivity
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Mayo’s Two Discoveries
1. Workers increased performance when
they felt important and had greater
freedom from supervisory control
2. Interaction among workers created an
“informal organization”
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The Great Depression to the New
Millennium
• During Great Depression
– Interest in human relations research waned
as other concerns gained momentum
– Labor unions increased campaigns to
improve working conditions and pay
• During postwar economic expansion
– Interest in human relations field increased
– Important theories emerge
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During the 1940s
• Douglas McGregor
– Performance related to tapping human
potential
• Abraham Maslow
– Hierarchy of needs
• Frederick Herzberg
– Employee motivation and satisfaction
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The 1950s and 1960s
• Eric Bern
– Interpersonal communication and
transactional analysis
• Carl Rogers
– Personality development, interpersonal
communication and group dynamics
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During the 1980s
• William Ouchi
– Theory Z style of management
• Tom Peters and Robert Waterman
– Importance of people in organizations
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Major Themes
• Several themes emerge from these
studies of human relations
• Themes concern two goals:
– Personal growth and development
– Achievement of organizational objectives
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Figure 1.3: Major Themes in
Human Relations
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Communication
• “Heart and soul” of communication
• Means by which we come to an
understanding of ourselves and others
• To grow and develop, we must
communicate skillfully and effectively
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Self-Awareness
• Good relationships with others stem
from a better understanding of
ourselves
• Increased self-awareness helps us
develop an understanding of how our
behavior influences others
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Self-Acceptance
• The degree to which you like and
accept yourself is the degree to which
you can like and accept others
• Self-acceptance is the key to successful
interaction with others
• Able to cope better with change,
responsibility, diversity, and teams
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Motivation
• Motivation of self
– Comes from within
• Motivation of others
– Comes from understanding complex
motivation theories and strategies
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Trust
• Building block of successful
relationships
• Trust
– Frank discussion
– Free exchange of ideas and information
• Lack of trust
– Reduced productivity and communication
– Stifled innovation, high stress, slow
decision making
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Self-Disclosure
• Self-disclosure is an intricate part of
building trust
• Constructive part of good
communication and helps eliminate
unnecessary guessing
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Conflict Resolution
• Conflict tends to obstruct cooperative
action, create suspicion and distrust,
and decrease productivity
• Resolution strategies improve
communication, emotional control, and
team building
• Requires much energy
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Benefits to You
• Better understanding of human behavior
in groups
• Can help you become more sensitive to
yourself and others
• Provides techniques for solving peoplerelated problems
– Act more wisely when problems arise
– Anticipate conflicts or prevent them from
escalating
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Summary
• The study of human relations helps
people fulfill growth needs and meet
organizational goals
• Realization that employee’s life outside
of work has impact on organization
• Many firms are developing training and
education programs for “total person”
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Summary
• Human relations gives people a better
understanding of basic behavioral
concepts
• Understanding allows them to make
better choices when problems arise
• It helps them anticipate and prevent
conflicts
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Summary
• The development of the human
relations field redefined:
– Nature of work
– Perception of managers and workers as
complex human beings
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Summary
• Seven major themes:
Communication
Self-acceptance
Trust
Conflict resolution
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Self-awareness
Motivation
Self-disclosure
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