7LMP Leading, Managing and Developing People Assessment 1

Question:

In the CIPD exam you have three hours to complete the paper. Section A is a case study and in Section B you are required to answer five questions. The two sections are equally weighted – so you have roughly 1.5 hours to answer Section B. There are five questions on this paper, so aim to complete it in 1.5 hours. There is no word limit.

  1. In the UK, as in most countries, public sector workers are considerably older, on average, than their counterparts in the private sector. As a consequence, the next few years are going to see a substantial proportion of public sector workers retiring and drawing their pensions.
    1. Why do you think public sector workers are older on average than equivalent groups of workers in the private sector?
    2. What HR measures would you advise a public sector employer to take, if faced with the imminent retirement of a large number of staff in a short time frame?
  2. Benchmarking against others is a common method used by organisations for evaluating aspects of their performance. It is increasingly used by HR functions as an evaluation tool.
    1. What are the major advantages and disadvantages of using benchmarking to evaluate the performance of an organisation’s HR function? Justify your answer.
    2. Which organisations could your organisation’s HR function usefully benchmark itself against? What kinds of data would be most useful to use as part of the exercise and why?
  3. The authors of the CIPDs ‘Shaping the Future’ research report (2011) argue that an effective human resource management (HRM) function prepares for the long-term challenges that organisations are likely to face in the future. However, researchers found that, in practice, nowadays HR professionals tend to place ‘too much focus on the operational needs of today rather than the organisational imperatives of tomorrow’.
    1. Drawing on your own experience, explain why it has become particularly difficult for HR people to focus on longer-term issues in recent years.
    2. Assume you have been asked to put together a business case for more resources in your organisation to be devoted to ‘the organisational imperatives of tomorrow’. What points would you make and why
  4. It has often been observed that the most successful organisations invest a great deal in human resource development (HRD) initiatives of various kinds. For many the aim is to become an ’employer of choice’ and to that end a ‘best practice’ approach to HRD is adopted.
    1. Drawing on research, how would you define ‘best practice’ in the field of HRD?
    2. To what extent does your organisation meet ‘best practice’ standards in its HRD activities? Give reasons for your response.
    3. What changes would you recommend are introduced in order to improve HRD provision in your organisation? Justify your answer
  5. Writing about the prospects for HRM in the private service sector in 1995, Karen Legge noted that ‘a company which chooses to compete in a labour intensive, high volume, low cost industry, generating profits through increasing market share’ is inevitably going to find that it has to treat its staff as a ‘variable cost’ that has to be minimised. This leaves little room for investment in sophisticated HRM and HRD practices.
    1. To what extent do you agree with Karen Legge’s view that progressive HR practices are never likely to be widespread in the private service sector? Justify your answer.
    2. What alternative HR strategies are available to managers in private service organisations when faced with the need to minimise wage costs while also attracting and retaining effective performers?

Solution:

Over the last years, dynamics in labour market  have been one of the main objects of research. Literature on labour economics includes many researches concerning job shifts and the differences and similarities between the public and private sectors. However only a few of them pay attention to sector switchers, which demonstrates the lack of empirical research regarding public and private differences concerning the aforementioned dynamics.

Sector switchers as those workers who are moving from the private to the public sector or vice versa. Recent studies have indicated that workers switch sectors for many reasons. One reason is related to the occupation’s characteristics (Kaufman and Spilerman, 2012, Su and Bozeman, 2015) and to the wish to work in a specific sector (Eisenberger et al., 2017), and to personal values (Cohen, 2014)………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….Please contact us to receive all sections of this assessment in full based on your level of expectations and further instructions

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