Allocation of HR management tasks to supervisors
Many of the respondents seem to believe that the responsibility for HR manage-ment will be increasingly allocated to supervisors. In fact, they already take a cen-tral role in implementing the many important people-management practices on a day-to-day basis (Donaldson-Feilder, Yarker & Lewis 2008). The allocation pro-cess has gradually increased during the last few decades mainly because of the new opportunities brought by systems such as those of HR-systems®. Neverthe-less, transferring HR tasks to line management has not always occurred without problems. For example, according a study by Brewster (1992), supervisors often lack the knowledge and skills to execute personnel tasks properly and they also do not have sufficient time to take on the responsibility for these personnel tasks.
Respondents to the HR Baro were also worried about supervisors’ knowledge in terms of HR management and raised this issue as one of the future challenges for leadership development.
Developing leadership to meet new challenges:
Generation Y Growing HR responsibilities
Continual change
Developing leadership as a profession Developing leadership
culture of an organisation
“All ad hoc [decisions] related to personnel should not fall on HR in the future. Instead, individuals in executive positions should be trained and supported in the proactive management of personnel matters.”
“The area of expertise of many executives is something other than management or human-resource management. These executives should also somehow be made to understand that managing person-nel is their job and they should be encouraged to keep up this abil-ity.”
“Executives struggle amidst various demands on them. Human-resource work may at times be overlooked when facing other busi-ness challenges. It may be difficult at times to motivate them to em-phasise, both in terms of quality and quantity, with human-resource work.”
Generation Y as a driver for leadership development
The respondents raised a variety of factors that involve new kinds of development needs or that strengthen the present trends in leadership development. The most interesting issue that came up in several comments was Generation Y’s new kinds of needs in working life.
Kultalahti’s (2011) quantitative study on Generation Y revealed that supervisor satisfaction is a strong moderator between Generation Y and job satisfaction as well as overall well-being. Her literature review shows several typical traits in Gen Y-ers, which differentiate them from other generations. They are searching for a work–life balance and for better working hours, since they want to enjoy life outside of the job as well (Behrstock-Sherratt & Coggshall 2010; Broadbridge, Maxwell & Ogden 2007). They place high demands on their supervisors (Jamrog 2002). For instance, they expect feedback from their supervisors (Behrstock-Sherrat & Coggshall 2010; Twenge 2009). These aspects indicate that leading people based on traditional assumptions does not succeed when dealing with younger employees. Therefore, leaders should develop themselves in order to understand changed values and styles in order to handle younger staff within their workplaces. The following quotations illustrate the awareness of the issue:
“Developing leadership is a continuous development challenge.
Young people operating on new paradigms are entering working life. How different generations face each other should become a new
kind of human-resource management.”
“Both managing issues as well as personnel requires a lot of devel-opment in order to be able to meet the current and future challenges as human, as well as other resources dwindle, and to take into ac-count the change in employee attitudes."
“Leadership needs to develop in accordance with changes in work-ing life. It must adapt to young employees’ demands as well as to the continuous change in work. Distance work, flexible hours and mobile work require well-established aims, good trust and responsi-bility. The need for interaction increases, and instead of answers, leadership is based on questions [nor can] managing people’s well-being be left out of normal daily management. Well-well-being is a part of producing outcomes and scales to measure; it should be equal to the so-called “hard” scales.”
Developing leaders to meet continual change
During the turbulent times facing contemporary organisations, the ability to un-derstand the contents and dynamics of change has become paramount. Rapid changes may, for example, concern the external or internal surroundings of the company, they may concern physical or mental conditions and they can be opera-tive or strategic in nature. Changes are often very complex and impossible to plan properly. The supervisor’s role in this process is always important. They often manage much of the information concerning the change and they at least partially manage the time and money for developing new skills necessary for meeting the change. Additionally, supervisors significantly influence the climate of the unit, which is an important contextual component for shaping employee change-related behaviour (Schneider & Bowen 1985; Burke & Litwin 1992; McCabe 2010). It also appears that leaders may influence organisational change by developing rela-tionships with employees (see Weisbord 1976; Tierney 1999) as the following respondent statements illustrate:
“Both technical and organisational change occurs in working life continuously. It would be ideal to be able to support and motivate employees when change occurs, because they may find it difficult to see the improvements behind the changes. Managing change should be included in every manager’s training.”
“How to achieve real change in manager’s behaviour and opera-tions? How to offer managers practical tools to support managerial work? How do managers cope with change? How can we make time for human-resource management, when a manager’s days are full of projects, expert tasks, administrative routines?”