1. Define and explain the significance of the term ‘derived demand’ as it applies to Strategic Human Resources Planning. (5 marks)
Derived demand is the demand for a product/services occurs as a result of a demand for another immediate good or service. When apply this concept on labour demand, the more a company's product or service the market wants, the higher the demand for labour to involve in the production process. The essence of strategic human resources planning is to align human resources planning organization's business strategy. This means company cannot perform their personnel forecast solely based on the product demand because there is some other factor that will affect the product demand. Thus, company need to have a thorough analysis of the external environment and examine potential factor that will affect the overall demand of product/service, then examine how these factors will affect the overall big picture. HR professionals will then be required to view how will these factors affect the business objectives in terms of operations and tried to look for different flexible interventions in order to support the corporate values.
2. Explain ‘derived demand’ as it applies specifically to Stonewall Industries. (5 marks)
The production of the gypsum wallboard is derived from the housing demand. This means if there is a lot of housing activities in the construction and property industry, it will affect the overall demand of the production of gypsum board; this will ultimately affect the overall labour demand. In 1982, the derived demand of labour was extremely low since there were lack of housing starts, which lead to stagnate of consumption of gypsum wallboard. Subsequently, Stonewall had to terminate employees with this low demand of the gypsum board. On the contrary, housing starts increased in 1991, which led to a relatively high derived demand of the gypsum wallboard. This led to the derived demand of