History and Definition About Flexibility

Talent management plays a significant role in all aspects of management. Nowadays, the people are increasingly concerned the significance of talent management in the business world, especially in large enterprises. According to Susan(2016), talent management is the science to use human recourses for improving business value and to make it possible for enterprises and organizations to achieve their goals. CIPD (2006) state talent pipeline include of attracting, utilizing, developing, and rewarding, to make people perform forms a part of talent management as well as strategic business plan. The essay will focus on the flexibility in utilizition and discuss the potential impact on the employment relationship when good and poor practices respectively are adopted by organizations within this area of the pipeline.

History and Definition about flexibility

Flexibility in working life has been discussed for many years. In the early 1980s, the flexibility discussion in the UK focused on employers’ need for flexibility. In 1984, organization researcher Charles Handy wrote about the ‘organization revolution’ and John Atkinson (1984), developed Handy’s ideas, arguing that firms looked for three types of flexibility: functional, numerical and financial. As high unemployment and a weakened union movement made it easier to achieve a flexible labor market. (Atkinson 1984) Dan Jonsso (1988) stated the definition of flexibility: “flexibility is the propensity of an actor or a system to exhibit variation in activities or states which is correlated with some other variation and desirable in view of this variation.” He said that actors include individuals as well as business enterprises and other organizations, while systems include production systems, labor markets and corporate networks. Variation means variation over time or simply change and variation in a mix or diversity. According to Pilbeam and Corbridge,2010) flexibility in the workplace can be defined as: “ the ability of the organization to adapt the size, composition, responsiveness and cost of the people inputs required to achieve organizational objectives.” According to the labor contact in America, flexible workers include of independent contractors, on-call workers, temporary help agency workers and contract company workers. Flexible working can split into five parts: temporary work, part-time work, Talent leasing, independent short-term contract workers, self-employment. In addition, the talent leasing and part-time work contain remote or home-working, working flexible hours, job sharing, compressed hours and annualized hours. (Anonymous,2005)

Employment relationship

Employment relationship is the legal link between employers and employees. The person will get remuneration when he works or services under a certain condition. Through the employment relationship, there are reciprocal rights and obligations between the employees and employers. Employees should do something about attracting, utilizing, developing and rewarding for employers, and the employers also should follow the rule they agreed in contacts. Next part we will discuss the potential impact on employment relationship when good practice adopted by organizations within flexibility of the pipeline, and analyze to find how to do flexibility practice.