Human Resource Management Functions Questions and Answers

Answer: D

The answer is All the above. In 360 degree performance appraisal the employee is rated by supervisors and peers, by subordinates, by himself, and by outsiders such as users of the service and consultants, so the full circle of people around the job gives feedback.

Supervisors and peers alone, subordinates and the employees themselves alone, and users of service and consultants alone are each only part of the circle. Each is wrong as the sole answer because the term covers all of them.

Answer: A

Performance appraisal links employees and the organisation, and it feeds other human resource processes through three steps: identification of what is to be assessed, measurement of performance against it, and management of performance by using the results. Recruitment, selection and onboarding belong to the staffing process, and skill, effort and responsibility are job evaluation factors. Option B, assessment, direction and development, is not the standard statement of the three processes.

Answer: A

Graphology is the technique of drawing conclusions about a person's personality, and by extension his likely performance, from handwriting. Physiognomy judges character from facial features, phrenology from the shape of the skull and astronomy is the scientific study of heavenly bodies, which has nothing to do with candidates' handwriting. The answer is graphology. The word 'graph' in graphology refers to writing, which is why it is the field that uses handwriting. Employers sometimes use it as an aid in selection, although its predictive value is doubtful and it is not accepted as a reliable test of future performance.

Answer: A

Reducing the number of employees at the operational level and reorganising the work to get greater productivity is downsizing. Manpower inventory is a record of the existing workforce and manpower forecasting is an estimate of future needs, so neither describes a reduction of staff. Since only one description fits, 'all the above' is wrong. The answer is downsizing. Downsizing is also called rightsizing. It involves a planned cut in the workforce, often with a change in the structure of jobs, and it is carried out to lower costs and raise productivity. The other two items concern counting and planning for manpower, not reducing it.

Answer: B

The concept built on unitarism, individualism, high commitment and strategic alignment is Human Resource Management.

HRM, in the form usually contrasted with personnel management, assumes a unitary view in which employer and employees share the same interests, treats employees as individuals rather than as a collective, seeks high commitment instead of mere compliance, and links people policies to business strategy. Personnel management and personnel administration are the older, more clerical and administrative approaches. Industrial relations, by contrast, rests on a pluralist view and deals with collective relationships and the interests of the parties, so it is the opposite of unitarism.

Answer: D

Human resource planning includes all of the listed activities, so the answer is All the above.

Planning for human resources starts from the organisation's objectives and forecasts the demand for people and the supply available, internally and externally, and then fills the gap. Scenario planning is used to consider how different futures would change manpower needs, and action planning turns the forecasts into recruitment, training, redeployment or retrenchment programmes. Since scenario planning, action planning and demand and supply forecasts are each part of the process, no single option alone is complete.

Answer: D

The step that is not part of the recruitment process is selecting candidates.

Recruitment is the process of finding and attracting a pool of suitable applicants. It involves determining requirements (A), planning the recruitment campaign (B) and attracting candidates (C). Selection (D) follows recruitment and is the separate process of choosing, through tests, interviews and checks, the people who will be hired from that pool. Recruitment is often called a positive process because it increases the number of applicants, whereas selection is negative because it rejects most of them.

Answer: D

When an organisation outsources the responsibility for the end-to-end delivery of recruitment and selection covering all vacancies, the key names this arrangement as recruitment process and screening, option A. The other options, business process and screening and knowledge process and screening, describe other types of outsourcing (general business processes or knowledge-intensive work), and 'All the above' is wrong because only the first fits.

Answer: D

Performance measurement can be based on traits, on behaviour or on outcomes (results), and all three are used as the basis of measuring performance. Since each of the first three options is a part of performance measurement, the answer is 'All the above', option D. A system of appraisal that looked at traits alone, behaviour alone or outcomes alone would give a partial picture, which is why measurement uses all three kinds of criterion in practice.

Answer: A

A job description states the job responsibilities, the duties to be done and the working conditions under which they are done. It describes the job itself. Worth in terms of wage and salary comes from job evaluation, not from the description. Qualifications needed to perform the job belong to the job specification, which describes the person rather than the job. The options that mix in wage worth or qualifications therefore confuse the description with job evaluation or the specification.