HUMAN RELATIONS Interdisciplinary Theories of the

Corporate management, indeed all forms of institutional management, deal with human beings and their relationships to one another. This is true not only of personnel or "human resources" of organizations, specifically charged with the task of hiring, developing, and if necessary firing the people of an organization. It is true of every manager in an organization, and every activity that the organization carries out. After all, no process is totally automated. There is always a human being somewhere in the loop, dealing with other human beings.

Human beings are uniquely flexible (no other large land animal on Earth has a wider native habitat). They are also uniquely complex. They have drives, but not instincts as other animals do. As a simple example, all cats wash themselves in the same way. Humans wash themselves (or fail to) in an endless variety of ways. Likewise, cats deal with other cats in certain fixed ways, whereas humans deal with each other in endlessly varied and often unpredictable ways.

Thus, human relations in the broad sense are central to how all organizations operate. In fact, an organization is by definition a set of human relations. The study of these relations has, over the years, drawn from a variety of social sciences, including sociology, psychology, and even psychiatry. "Human Relations" is also used by specialists in management in a narrower way, to mean a specific school of thoug

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ucracy define themselves by its goals and their place within the organization. To be separated from the organization, fired, is to be cast adrift from their social world. (Retirement does not; a retired member of the family is still family.) Thus, the more nearly an organization takes on the characteristics of an "ideal" bureaucracy, the more strongly it generates this sense of belonging among its members, providing the motivation for them to do their best work for the organization. In the early 20th century, the focus of management theory was so-called scientific management, which dealt largely with physical work factors such as ergonomics. A series of experiments in the 1920s, the so-called Hawthorne experiments, showed that human intangibles, such as morale, often had more bearing on production than did the physical workplace and work organization (Kaninan, 2004). This lead to "Human Relations" theory in the narrow sense, as exemplified by the work of Abraham Maslow. Maslow theorized that human beings have a "heirarchy of needs." At the most basic level are food, clothing, shelter, and the like. As these basic needs are met, people shift their efforts to subtler needs, such as for friendship and self-esteem. As
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