How Personal Management Changed Over the Years

Nowadays there is a great focus on the way people in organisations are being managed to ensure the organisational goals and objectives are being met.
The HR department manages, supports and develops the people in an organisation which translates into responsibilities such as man power planning, job analysis, recruitment, staff training, performance appraisals, employee welfare, implementing organisational policies, employee dismissal and more. Personal management has changed greatly over the years and is a result of hundreds of years of analysing and documenting human behaviour at the work place.
During the early 20th century people started analysing employees’ work performance and developed two main organisational approaches – the Classical and the Human Resources Approaches.
The classical approach concentrates on increasing employees’ efficiency within the organisation by breaking down the production process into a sequence of stages and assigning workers to particular stages, also known as division of labour. The advantages of this approach are highly skilled employees who are specialised in certain business areas or locations which leads to increased production levels and reduced production costs. On the negative side, training workers to be experts in a specific field is more expensive and means that employees’ tasks will be rather repetitive. In this way employees are more likely to get bored which will negatively impact their skills and the quality of their work.
Being less common today, Command and Control is another management technique whereby workers have to do what they are told and be yelled at if they disobey.
Another theory of the classical approach is the so called Scientific Management or Taylorism. The theory suggests increasing efficiency, decreasing waste and using methods to decide what