▪ Which of these six stereotypes do you find most attractive?

▪ Which best describes the work of the personnel department in your organisation?

Task 29. Talking Point 7

Read the situation below and act out the conversation between Jana and Dirk. Consult Speaking References p. 126–130.

Jana and Dirk talked about some of the main issues within Personnel Management and Human Resources Management. Although the two fields have many common areas, there is a substantive difference of emphasis.

Personnel Management is directed mainly at the organisation's employees. Although a management functions, it is never totally identified with management's interests.

Human Resources Management is directed mainly at management needs for human resources (not necessarily employees) to be provided and deployed. It is totally identified with management's interests and is relatively distant from the workforce as a whole.

Underpinning Personnel Management are the twin ideas that people have a right to proper treatment as dignified human beings while at work, and that they are only effective as employees when their job-related personal needs are met.

Underpinning Human Resources Management is the idea that the management of human resources is much the same as any other aspect of management, and getting the deployment of right numbers and skills at the right price is more important than interfering with people's personal affairs.

Task 30. Vocabulary 6

The box below contains a number of areas related to Personnel Management and Human Resources Management. Classify them according to their primary focus within these two areas.

Table 4

Learning outcomes

▪ Understand different types of organizing activities in a company, the functions they carry out, get to know about structures for organizations and decide which of them is the best for effective management

▪ Learn to study information presented in diagrams and support your talks with the information given in them

▪ Participate in discussions using your personal experience

Task 1. Reading 1

Getting started

▪ Before reading the text, discuss in small groups how many people must be responsible for the effective managing of the company? In what way should they inform the staff about important solutions, decisions, innovations, restructuring, etc.

▪ All organisations have this or that structure. Do you know anything about the structures? What are they? What are the principal differences between them?

▪ Discuss in groups of three how many departments can be in a big organisation and what they are responsible for. How is the work among departments organised?

▪ Read the text below about the different ways of organising companies, consult Vocabulary p. 142–143, and then label the diagrams, according to which of these they illustrate:

Figure 2

Most organisations have a hierarchical or pyramidal structure, with one person or a group of people at the top, and an increasing number of people below them at each successive level. There is a clear line or chain of command running down the pyramid. All the people in the organisation know what decisions they are able to make, who their superior (or boss) is (to whom they report), and who their immediate subordinates are (to whom they can give instructions).

Some people in an organisation have colleagues who help them: for example, there might be an Assistant to the Marketing Manager. This is known as a staff position: its holder has no line authority, and is not integrated into the chain of command, unlike, for example, the Assistant Marketing Manager, who is number two in the marketing department.