The human resource (HR) came out from the complexity of tasks and began in the twentieth century with the industrial revolution and renamed industrial relations. It served by as mediator of conflicts between organisational goals and management of people which was considered incompatible and irreconcilable. Back that time, a large of numbers of workers that had neither voice or rights were doing manual labour in a deplorable condition, included child labour, which widely used. As Collings and Wood (2009) said, HR was primarily concerned with how people were managed within organisations, focusing on policies and systems. Paauwe and Boon (2009) argued that HR departments and units in organisations were typically responsible for several activities, including employee recruitment, training and development, performance appraisal, and rewarding such as managing pay and benefit systems. However, the origins of HR were related to employment practices associated with welfare capitalism employers in the United States during the 1930s.
Many authors argued that this type of employer exhibited an ideological opposition to unionisation and collective employment relations. Beardwell and Claydon (2010), said this idea emerged as an alternative, welfare capitalism believed the organisation, should provide for the security and welfare of workers. Subsequently, the world experienced an economic recession, and then the companies were pushed for greater efficiency — new ideas, initiatives and theories such as scientific management emerged. Frederick Winslow Taylor (1915) came up with this theory where the managers were required to determine accurately from the science the correct time and methods for each job (time and motion studies). And for the workers, scientific management required them share in the prosperity of the firm by working correctly and receiving wage increases, give up their idea of time-wasting and co-operate with the administration in developing the science, accept that management would be responsible for determining what had done and how and agree to be trained in new methods where applicable.
On the other hand, the behavioural science movement established by Elton Mayo saw workers as human and not robots. According to Chiavenato (2004), the focus of human relations theory is on motivation, group motivation and leadership. This theory started development when productivity was the focus of the business. Elton Mayo began his experiments to prove the importance of people for productivity. Researchers believe that people desire to be part of a supportive team that facilitates development and growth. Likewise, the study identified employees work better if surrounded by suitable working conditions, payment systems, social factors and group dynamics.
The concept of human resource management (HRM) is recent; before that, there was the talk of personnel management. At the beginning of this traditional way of managing people in companies, there was no concern for personal relationship practices, only an interest in the technical aspects of salaries, appraisal, training and compensation of employees, which made of this, a function only of staff in the companies. According to Gill and McMillan (), the most significant development affecting the nature of HRM and the role of the emerging HR function was the growing of industrial relations, which means that was direct result of the increasing influence of trade unions.
When researchers started documenting ways of developing business value through the strategic management of the workforce, due to globalisation, company consolidation, technological advancement, and further research, HR now focuses on strategic initiatives like mergers and acquisitions, talent management, succession planning, industrial and labour relations, ethical considerations, diversity and inclusion. These, among other actions, contribute to the understanding of human resource management as a contemporary issue owing to their sustained evolutionary nature.
