Likewise, the mushroom growth in new war-related production plants and hiring
of inexperienced workers created a huge need for training programs and staV.In
order to comply with government wage control programs and prevent strikes,
companies also had to implement new job evaluation procedures and systematize
and formalize their compensation procedures. And, Wnally, employee beneWt
programs proliferated during the war since beneWts fell outside the government’s
wage control program. The net result was a considerable expansion of personnel
programs and departments. Data provided by Jacoby ( 1985 ), for example, show
that only 39 percent of companies in 1929 with 1 , 000 – 5 , 000 employees had a
personnel department, while in 1935 – 6 this ratio rose to 62 percent and then to
73 percent in 1946 – 8.
The United States emerged from the Second World War as the undisputed world
economic leader. Much of Europe and Asia lay in ruins. Over the nextWfteen years
American industry enjoyed a golden age, Germany and Japan picked up the pieces
and started on a sustained industrial recovery, Great Britain slowly advanced in
absolute terms but declined in relative terms, and many nations in South America,
Asia, and Africa started to join the industrial world.
In a number of respects the two decades after the Second World War period saw
further advance in American HRM. Nonetheless, theWeld entered the 1960 s with a
pervading sense of low status and marginal importance.
In the 1920 s many large-sizedWrms still did not have any organized HRM
function; by the mid- 1950 s nearly every medium–large-size company had one.
Furthermore, these departments were adding staV, taking on new duties, and
growing in importance. AmericanWrms grew in size during this period, partly as
plant size expanded to take advantage of economies of scale and partly due to
mergers, acquisitions, and the rise of the conglomerate corporation. As Jacoby
( 2003 ) notes, the 1950 s was the era of the ‘organization man,’ symbolized by the rise
of mega-corporations, such as General Motors, IBM, and Sears Roebuck, and the
swelling ranks of middle management and white-collar technicians and staV. With
increasing corporate size came a need for more systematized and centralized
personnel practices.
Application of industrial psychology, industrial sociology, and ‘human relations’
to employment problems also emerged in the 1940 s as a hot topic and created new
opportunities for HRM (Wren 2005 ). The human relations movement grew out of
the pioneering Hawthorne experiments at the Western Electric Company, led by
Elton Mayo. Whereas most of the focus of industrial psychologists in the 1920 s had
been on narrow ‘technique’ applications, such as employee selection tests and the
relationship between work hours and fatigue, in the 1940 s the focus among
behavioral scientists shifted to more overtly psycho-social topics, such as the
relationship between morale and work eVort, interpersonal dynamics in small
work groups, and the role of non-Wnancial incentives. These topics had many
potential applications to HRM and spurred the founding of a new applied research
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