What is personnel management?

Abstract

Chapter 1 identifies four models of personnel management: the normative, the descriptive-functional, the critical-evaluative and the descriptive-behavioral model. These models of personnel management provide a benchmark for later consideration of HRM and related developments. Legge argues that personnel management may be viewed as a set of contradictions and ambiguities leaving most personnel managers with a kind of inferiority complex. This tends to leave personnel management, Legge suggests, prone to bouts of introspection and ripe for reassessment, remoulding and remarketing - to emerge in the 1980's and 1990's as human resource management.