Essay on Management Decisions

Ethical standards

Decision making is a function of managers in any organization. Managers are responsible for making feasible decisions that would propel the organization toward realizing its goal. This responsibility of managers needs control measures, in order to ensure that corruption and other forms of malpractices on the part of managers are minimized if not completely discouraged. Managers of organizations should be accountable for any decision they make since every decision they make has an impact on the organization (Pater & Gils, 2003).

According to Ardichvili, Mitchell, & Jondle (2009), business ethics is categorized into the following management functions; shareholder, long-term, goal centered approach and integration of department’s tasks approach to management. Ethics involves values like honesty and openness of an individual. With the emerging trend where employees are more sociality elevated and the external stakeholders demanding more openness from managers, there is a need of managers to use ethical codes of conduct. Ethical code of conduct is used by an organization to ensure uniformity of tasks and to provide a base for any operation within the organization.

Making ethical decisions calls for one to look into the internal ethical standards within the organization and external environment as a guideline for decision making. Ethical standard is reached at when decisions made are beneficial to the organization and it does not harm any other party in the process (Lockett, Moon, & Visser, 2006).

Managers of organizations are custodians of maintaining ethical standards; they should always make decisions aligned to the organizations code of ethics. Code of conduct ensures that organizations engage in an ethical manner at all levels, employees are motivated and the external society is at peace.

Human resource functions

Human resource management relates to all activities that ensure an organization has sufficient labor force. Human resource management ensures organizations meet their human resources needs, the human resource manager carries out human resource planning, motivates employees, ensure task are allocated to the right and qualified individuals and discipline or reward employees when necessary. Human resource management involves selection, recruitment, orientation, performance evaluation, development and career path development (Gatewood, Feild, & Barrick, 2010)

Human resource management comes with its challenges. One of this is labor turnover. Labor turnover can be voluntary or involuntary. Involuntary turnover occurs when an employee has no control over his or her termination. This occurs due to death, longtime illness, and movement to overseas countries or an employer firing the worker.

A human resource manager manages change within an organization, he or she facilitates recruitment and selection of employees, manage employee’s benefit and pension data and ensuring a perfect communication structure within an organization. As a human resource manager, I would reduce involuntary turnover by ensuring that there is always a replacement for a long term ill employee, In case of death I would ensure timely hiring of new staff and I would ensure that employees are very well compensated to minimize movement of employees.

When calculating the cost of human resources it is prudent to look at real cost and opportunity costs. Compensation of employees is a motivator and it can also be expensive to the organization. Costs is reduced when injured employees report for claims promptly, delay in reporting has a diverse effect on the amount of cost. The other way is by taking advantage of network medical providers available.

References

Ardichvili, A., Mitchell, J. A., & Jondle, D. (2009). Characteristics of ethical business cultures. Journal of Business Ethics, 85(4), 445-451.

Pater, A., & Van Gils, A. (2003). Stimulating ethical decision-making in a business context:: effects of ethical and professional codes. European Management Journal, 21(6), 762-772.

Lockett, A., Moon, J., & Visser, W. (2006). Corporate Social Responsibility in Management Research: Focus, Nature, Salience and Sources of Influence. Journal of Management Studies, 43(1), 115-136.

Gatewood, R. D., Feild, H. S., & Barrick, M. (2010). Human resource selection. South-Western Pub.