Post #4: Human Relations vs Human Resources

Human relations highlights the interpersonal and social needs of individuals. People like to relate themselves to something like a community or group to make them as an individual feel better. Ideas of empowering the worker through encouragement will increase the productivity level within an organization. A great example of this would be being a teacher or on a professional sports team. Like discussed in the second blog posting, my mother works as an administrator in the Illinois school districts overseeing many teachers and staff members. She practices a lot of human relations theories that relate to teamwork and practicing a strong efficiency model.

While the human relations approach is known for encourage employees to talk things through, the human resource approach encourages those steps to actually make it happen. The human resource approach evaluates how to get the task done by assigning roles and encouraging an individual to participate in goal orientated tasks. A theory associated with human resources is Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. This table starts with the bottom step recognizing the needs for food and shelter, all the way to the top of the pyramid exclaiming self-actualization. Psychology, safety, love, self-esteem and self actualization are the bottom to top ranking at which Maslow feels an individual needs to rate their life. When each of the lower level tasks are accomplished, it is easy to climb to the top of the ranks and fulfill self-actualization.