Discussion Essay Questions

1. Discuss several areas in which HR can affect organizational culture positively or negatively. A human resources department plays a significant role in determining the culture of an organization. Human resources cultivate and execute policies and procedures in key areas such as hiring practices, compensation, management relations and employee conduct and behavior. The decisions made by the human resources department can have significant positive and negative implications for the overall cultural quality of the organization. Some of the affected areas include creating awareness, compensation plans, hiring practices and behavior. Company executives may not always have a true understanding of their corporate culture, as they are often far removed from the "front lines" of the operation. Human resources personnel can provide the benefit of instructing top management as to what the culture is really like. This may lead to positive changes in the corporate culture, it could also lead to changes that meet with resistance from employees, such as when management decides it needs to change or eliminate popular employee programs that it deems wasteful or unproductive. When it comes to compensation, the human resources department typically accepts the responsibility of designing compensation programs for the organization. Depending on how they achieve this, it could have a positive as well as negative impact on organizational culture. For example, an incentive program for salespeople may provide the opportunity for these employees to increase their compensation through greater productivity. Nevertheless, it could also create an environment where the salespeople are competing against each other, leading to the deterioration of teamwork and morale. Human resources also determine the hiring and recruiting practices used by the organization, which has a great impact on the organizational culture. A strong attention to characteristics of job candidates such as