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29 Emp. Resp. & Rts. J. 1 (2017)

handle is hein.journals/emprrj29 and id is 1 raw text is: Employ Respons Rights J (2017) 29:1-14 CWssMark DOI 10.1007/s10672-016-9282-0 Evolution of a Strange Pathology: HRM as a Strategic Business Partner and Employee Advocate in the USA Ernie Stark' - Paul Poppler2 Published online: 22 September 2016 © Springer Science+Business Media New York 2016 Introduction A number of ways of thinking about the management of workers and employees in the U.S. preceded today's highly publicized concept of Strategic Human Resource Management. Beginning in the early 1900s, these methods were known variously as Employee Relations, Personnel Management, Labor Relations, and Industrial Relations (Kaufman and Aldao- Zapiola 2014). A common feature across all of these approaches was a sense of humanism, a serious rejection of the notion that employees are a commodity whose sole purpose is to produce more output and wealth for the employer. Rather, employees were viewed as human beings with rights to decent terms and conditions of employment, fair treatment, voice, and participation (Kaufman 2008). Reflecting the work of Elton Mayo (1933), Chris Argyris (1957) Douglas McGregor (1960), Victor Vroom (1964), and others, these early approaches to managing employees gave rise to internal functions that largely embraced employee-centered roles and focused on creating and administering pay, training, and development systems that serviced the needs of an organization's workforce (Brown et al. 2009). In the 1970s, these various approaches came to coalesce under the overarching concept of Human Resource Management (HRM), an internal organizational function that supported the product or service value chain by ensuring that workers were provided channels of due process and employee voice necessary to enhance the efficiency and equity ofthe employment relationship (Kaufman 2001; Godard 2014). From those earlier approaches, HRM acceded to a long-standing expectation that the responsibility of any attempt to manage human resources or administer personnel policy required serving as an advocate for employee welfare (Van Buren et al. 2011). 2 Ernie Stark eescad@rit.edu; estarkphd@me.com Saunders College of Business, Rochester Institute of Technology, Global Village Building 400, Room 2075, 6000 Reynolds Drive #5006, Rochester, NY 14623-5603, USA 2 College of Business, Bellevue University, 1000 Galvin Road South, Bellevue, NE 68005, USA 4 Springer