The Changing Role of the Personnel Manager
| Date | 01 January 1971 |
| Published date | 01 January 1971 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/eb055189 |
| Pages | 6-11 |
| Author | Charles A Myers |
| Subject Matter | HR & organizational behaviour |
PERSONNELREVIEW
The Changing
Role of the
Personnel
Manager
Charles A Myers
CHARLES A MYERS
Charles
A Myers
is Sloan Fellow Professor of
Management
at the
Massachusetts Institute of
Technology,
as
well as being the Director
of the
Industrial
Relations
section
of the
Sloan
School.
After
obtaining his PhD
from the
University of
Chicago
in
1939,
he
embarked
on an
academic
career,
first
as
an instructor in Economics
at
Beloit
College.
He
soon moved to MIT,
where
he
became Professor of
Industrial
Relations in
1949.
He
also obtained the Sloan
Fellows chair
in
1967.
In
addition
to
his academic
posts,
he
has also
undertaken
a number of
important public
posts.
In
1942 he acted as a special consultant
to the
Labor
Division
of the War
Production
Board.
After the War
he was
for two
years technical advisor
to
the Special
Policy Committee
on
Collective
Bargaining,
set up by
the
Committee
for
Economic
Development,
in
New
York. Between
1949-56 he was a
member of
the Social
Science Research Council's Committee
on Labor
Market
Research
and in
1969-70
he
was Chairman of
the National Manpower Policy
Task
Force.
His
main publications include
THE DYNAMICS OF
A LABOUR MARKET
(co-author George
P
Schultz),
THE IMPACT OF COMPUTERS ON MANAGE-
MENT
(ed.),
PERSONNEL ADMINISTRATION
(co-author Paul
Pigors),
and THE ROLE OF THE
PRIVATE SECTOR IN MANPOWER DEVELOP-
MENT.
The new challenges facing the personnel manager
were the theme of a paper I presented over seven years
ago to the Midwinter Personnel Conference of the
American Management Association. I began with these
observations:
"The central fact of industrial life in the second half
of the twentieth century is the accelerating pace of basic
scientific knowledge and its impact on technology. The
revolution in information technology through the advent
of the electronic computer is only one consequence. . . .
These rapid advances in our knowledge
have,
in turn,
accelerated the pace of change, which today confronts
management with new problems and has added new
dimensions to old
ones.
Is the average personnel execu-
tive equipped to help management deal with these
problems, or will he have to give way to the new
specialists that are already coming to the fore—the
experts in information technology, in the management
of research and development, and in manpower and
organisation planning?"1
Three years later, Professor Dalton E McFarland, in a
research report for the American Management Associa-
tion, concluded:
"In organisation design, manpower planning and
development, and electronic data processing, line execu-
tives are already by-passing personnel departments.
Meanwhile, personnel executives are not actively adopt-
ing objectives in these
areas,
nor are they trying to gain
greater acceptance of personnel's role in these areas
from members of top management. Moreover, chief
executives and operating executives do not seem sur-
prised that the personnel departments are being by-
passed."2
The theme of my remarks in this paper is that these
observations are too often true even today in the United
6
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