CHAPTER ONE

INTRODUCTION

1.1.    BACKGROUND OF THE STUDY

One area of an organizational performance is the management of workers in an organization. An organization primarily in both private and public sector lies upon certain resources such as men, material, money, machine and information resources. It is by the combination of these different resources that the achievement of an employee performance can be attained. However the most important and complex component for the achievement of employee performance in an organization is the personnel management.[ Johnson, P 2009] opined that “personnel management is primarily concerned with how people are managed within organizations, focusing on policies and systems”. Personnel management departments and units in organizations are typically responsible for a number of activities, including employee recruitment, training and development, performance appraisal and rewarding (e.g., managing pay and benefit systems). [Hellrigel, D., Jackson, et al 2009], also define personnel management as “the process of analyzing and managing an organization’s personnel managers needs to ensure satisfaction of its strategic objectives” Which implies that an organization can achieve its stated objectives and goals if and only if the personnel are analyzed and manage effectively. [Dessler, G. 2015]in his own view sees personnel management as the policies and practices involved in carrying out the people or human resources aspects of a management position including recruitment, screening, training and appraising. Personnel composed of individual working for an organization, employed these days as permanent staff, temporary staff, or contracted staff but collectively making up the most important aspect of organizational resources. Therefore, an organization must have the right number and types of employees who must be managed in such a way that they will be able to achieve their personal objectives and organizational performance. Since the early 2009s, the field of personnel management has been in a state of rapid transition. As the world continues to experience major innovations, various sets of changes are revolving.  The method an organization manages people can affect its employees’ performance. In particular personnel management practices such as employee participation and empowerment, job redesign, team-based production systems, extensive employee training and performance-contingent incentive compensation are widely believed to improve the employees’ performance in an organizations (Pfeffer, 2012). Organizations can adopt various personnel management practices to enhance employee skills as well as motivate them to work harder towards achieving the set targets. Organizations can enhance the quality of current workers by availing them comprehensive training and development activities. Considerable evidence recommends that investment in training reproduces beneficial organizational result (Bartel, 2012; Knoke & Kalleberg, 2012). The effectiveness of skilled employees will be limited, however, if they are not motivated to perform their jobs. Organizations can enforce merit pay or incentive compensation methods that give rewards to employees for achieving specific goals. Incentive compensation and performance management systems enhance the performance of employees and organizations (Gerhart & Milkovich, 2010). Personnel management as a process explicitly recognizes that in today’s globally competitive industrial environment, every employee’s efforts must focus on helping the company to achieve its strategic goals (Dessler, 2008). The notion behind individual performance-related pay is that employees will be motivated if they believe they will be rewarded for improving their contribution to the success of the enterprise. This view derives from many years of psychological thinking. For behaviorists such as B. F. Skinner, learning only takes place through external positive and negative reinforcement. The right attitude could be encouraged by the adoption of rewards and praise and, to a smaller extent, discouraged by punishments. F. W. Taylor effected these theories in the work environment and pronounced the use of piece rate payments as a method of controlling attitude and orientating it to management requirements. In contrast to this employer-centred view, expectancy and goal theorists put the emphasis on cognition i.e. the thought processes employees go through that enhances their performance in the workplace. They viewed at the expectation of future capacity rather than past. Goal theorists pursued this debate by saying that future objectives can be used to influence behaviour and motivation (Reily, 2013).

Implementing performance-related pay (PRP) is by no means an absolute solution for motivating employees and increasing productivity, as it is widely accepted that for most people cash is not the most important aspect of a job. Opinions vary greatly between establishments over the effectiveness of PRP-many organizations have used PRP, only to leave it later. Whenever PRP is used, it should be in agreement with other methods to improve employee performance (Chartered Management Institute, 2013). Recently, majority of managers are satisfied with the term “Human Resources” but a few still prefer to refer employee as “personnel”.[ Allan, C. 2010] concur at one level that terminology may be deemed to be less important, because it is practice that really counts. However, at another level he argues that it’s also of importance in the sense that ways of managing people at work have come a long way in the last fifteen years, and a refusal to adopt the contemporary term “human resources” can be a sign of a failure to recognize and utilize recent innovation. Therefore, for an organization to achieve its goal effectively and efficiently, human resources which is seen as the most active agent of all its resources must be given due recognition. Employee performance plays an important role for both an employee and the organization at large. [Armstrong, M. 2010] is of the opinion that employee performance is looked at in terms of outcome and behavior of an employee. Hence, employee performance is what an employee does or does not do. Against this background, the study tends to examine personnel management and employee performance.

1.2 STATEMENT OF PROBLEM

Recruiting and selecting high potential employees doesn’t guarantee that they will perform effectively. People who do not know what to do or how to do it cannot perform effectively even if they want to. Therefore there is need for organizations to properly manage the personnel in order to ensure that they know what to do, and how to do it. Personnel management is a venture and organizations need some assurance of return on investment on personnel, in the form of enhanced employees’ productivity. The question is, does personnel management increase performance? Since the business environment is becoming more and more competitive, organizations are looking out for employees that can perform, hence the issue of personnel management. Do all these personnel management practices i.e. training, performance-related pay, empowerment, job-design and job security increase employee performance and productivity?

1.3 AIMS AND OBJECTIVES OF THE STUDY

The major aim of the study is to examine personnel management and employee performance. Other specific objectives of the study include;

1.  To examine personnel management and employee’s performance in an organization

2.  To examine the other factors affecting employee performance

3.  To examine the impact of personnel management on employees performance

4.  To examine problems of personnel management

5.  To examine the relationship between personnel management and employees performance

6.  To examine importance of personnel management

1.4 RESEARCH QUESTIONS

1.  What are personnel management and employee’s performance in an organization?

2.  What is the other factors affecting employee performance?

3.  What is the impact of personnel management on employees’ performance?

4.  What are the problems of personnel management?

5.  What is the relationship between personnel management and employees performance?

6.  What is the importance of personnel management?

1.5 RESEARCH HYPOTHESES

Hypothesis 1

H0: There is no significant impact of personnel management on employees’ performance.

H1: There is a significant impact of personnel management on employees’ performance.

Hypothesis 2

H0: There is no significant relationship between personnel management and employees performance.

H1: There is a significant relationship between personnel management and employees performance.

1.6      SIGNIFICANCE OF THE STUDY

The study would be of benefit to provide with a useable information and knowledge for the management of organizations about the importance of personnel management practices for getting more involved and productive employees with improved performances. The study will also contribute valuable information to the existing empirical knowledge about the link of human resource management practices to the employee performance in Nigeria. The study would also be of immense benefit to students, researchers and scholars who are interested in developing further studies on the subject matter.

1.7      SCOPE AND LIMITATION OF THE STUDY

The study is restricted to personnel management and employees performance.

LIMITATION OF THE STUDY

Financial constraint: Insufficient fund tends to impede the efficiency of the researcher in sourcing for the relevant materials, literature or information and in the process of data collection (internet, questionnaire and interview)

Time constraint: The researcher will simultaneously engage in this study with other academic work. This consequently will cut down on the time devoted for the research work.

1.8      DEFINITION OF TERMS

Employee performance: is defined as the outcome or contribution of employees to make them attain goals (Herbert, John & Lee 2016) while performance may be used to define what an organization has accomplished with respect to the process, results, relevance and success Uganda National Development Program (2015). Afshan et al. (2012) define performance as the achievement of specific tasks measured against predetermined or identified standards of accuracy, completeness, cost and speed. Employee performance can be manifested in improvement in production, easiness in using the new technology, highly motivated workers.

Management: This is the process of dealing with making decision and controlling people of things in a business or organization.