Approach to an Integrated Personnel Policy

• Author: MASON HAIRE
• Published date: 01 February 1968
• Date: 01 February 1968
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-232X.1968.tb01067.x

MASON

HAIRE"

Approach

to

an

Integrated

Personnel

Policy

PSYCHOLOGISTS

have generally approached the modification of

behavior of people in organizations in a piecemeal fashion. That is, we have

typically taken up a little selection, a little motivation, and a little training, and

not dealt either with their interaction or with their implications for a broad organ-

ization-wide view of the process of managing human resources. Companies, too,

have tended to deal with the problem a bit at a time. It seems useful to phrase

the question

in

terms of a whole system and examine some of the things that

ffow from such

a

system analysis.

Most large and medium-large companies seem to operate with an implicit

model in mind, one which appears to view the movement of people through the

organization as a procedure rather comparable to the chemical process of frac-

tional distillation. In the chemical process, there is a complex crude base made up

of a variety of related components with different characteristics.

To

this base

is

applied a group of treatments-heat, pressure, catylitic agents, and the like-in

varying amounts depending on

the

outcome desired. At successively higher levels

of

volatility, Werent components of the product are siphoned

off

in amounts

dependent on the demand. In the organization, new managerial hires are taken as

the complex crude base and the demand at higher levels of management accounts

for successive distillations. This model

is

never made explicit as a guide for

organizational practice, but much of

the

behavior of companies seems to flow

from it. It seems useful to describe such

a

system mere precisely

and

see what its

characteristics are.

It

should

be

pointed out

that

no

claim

is made at

this

time

either for the appropriateness of

the

model, or for the degree to which it is in fact

the guiding principle of organization behavior.

A

Model

Let us

assume

that an organization is built on a fractional distilla-

tion model and that it looks something like Figure

1.

It

has five levels of manage-

ment, each of which (we shall assume

for

the

sake of simplicity) has

10

times

as many managers

as

the level below

it.

There is one chief executive. Let us

limit the kinds of movement which may occur

in

the model to the following.

Up.

Individuals may move up one level, and no one may skip a level. For the

sake of working out the model over

time,

probabilities are assumed for this

movement. They

are:

.001

from level V to level IV;

-01

from

IV

to

111;

-03

from

*

Professor

of

Organizational Behavior, Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

107