Analysis of performance evaluation with demographic factors in human resource management

As the world begins to globalize, distances start to shorten and intercultural interactions begin to rise, the truths and falses in the business world have also begun to vary greatly from the past. While one of the most important factors climbing the management levels in the past may be experience, age or gender; today it is much more sought after having various overseas experience, able to effectively use the new technology and innovative qualities than having years of experience in the same company or position. This study is prepared to enlighten scientificly on the business world of the modern age considering the demographic factors age, gender and current workplace experience. In this context, various human resource management activities are firstly explained with the historical development of human resource management and the effect of demographic factors on employee performance, which is one of the factors that influence the human resources field. First of all, this paper explains historical development starting from personnel management era to human resource management involving similarities and differences between personnel management and human resource management. Although the comparison of personnel management and human resource management shows that; it is stated for personnel management "mechanical" and it is stated for human resource management "humanistic" in the literature and the differences of perspectives are discussed; it is underlined that it is very difficult to distinguish between these two concepts historically or processually with definitive boundaries. The reason for this is that the principles of the human resource management are based on the principles of the personnel management and the principles of the human resource management is developed and adapted to the modern world resepectively. Within the scope of the thesis, the employee work life cycle is examined with every aspect and function. These functions can be listed as below: - Employer branding, university and vocational college activities - Recruitment - Onboarding and orientation - Employee health and work safety - Administrative and social affairs - Industrial relations - Education management - Performance and career management - Job evaluation, benefits and compensation management - Personnel planning - Offboarding The human resource management functions, which are mentioned here, are influenced by other functions such as economy, technology, labor markets, organizational strategies and demographic factors. One of the most important factors of these factors is demographic factors. Demography in other words the structure of the population, observes in a particular country, city, business or institution the population density; the distribution of population and the statistical characteristics such as birth, death and marriage rate. At this paper, the demographic factors are described and the relationship between demographic factors and performance management, which is one of the human resource management applications, is examined with the help of the academic studies in the literature. Another indicator of performance is leadership behaviors and it is also created a leadership behavior model according to the literature survey. Through the model, the effect of demographic factors on the leadership behavior is investigated. For the analysis part of the paper, the employee information of an international automotive company located in Istanbul and an Anatolian city is used. In the research, it has been only considered the employees in other words those who do not have any managerial function. It has been decided not to give the company name and to use the data anonymously within the framework because of mutual written agreement with the company. The acceptability of the hypotheses presented in the thesis, is investigated in a 95% confidence interval with SPSS, a statistical analysis program used extensively in academic researches. In the analysis part; the effects of the gender, age range, and seniority range, which are defined as independent variables, on performance score and leadership behavior average are observed with a two-way MANOVA, which is multivariate analysis of variance. Performance score is scaled between 0 and 150 and is achieved by fives; taking into account how much the employee achieves his targets that determined at the beginning of the year. The average of performance score in department is determined to be maximum 110%. A 100% rating indicates that the employee reaches all of his targets that agreed at the beginning of the year. The leadership behaviors mentioned in the leadership behavior model are evaluated using a 5-point scale. This assessment shows the "how" part while reaching the targets which are set at the beginning of the year. According to the scale, 1: indicates slightly distinctive, 2: indicates occasionally, 3: indicates continuously, 4: indicates proactively, 5: indicates proactively and particularly distinctive leadership behavior. Subgroups of the independent variables are female and male for gender; 24 to 35 years, 36 to 45 years, 46 to 61 years for age range and 1 to 5 years, 6 to 10 years, and 11 to 28 years for the seniority range. Three basic assumptions in two-way MANOVA practice are tested and proved: each group comes from normal distribution, equality of variances and equality of covariance matrices. Subsequently, the effects of independent variables and their interactions on independent and dependent variables are examined with the help of hypotheses. According to the analysis results, independent variables and their interactions have no significant effect on independent and dependent variables. One of the reasons why the selected company does not have a decisive factor in the gender, age or seniority on performance note or average of leadership behavior alone; it has been suggested that the motivation that leads to success for every high performing employee may differ. As an example to this judgment could be that men are expected to perform better in functions based on physical workload such as production, logistics, after-sales services; however, there is no significant difference according to the gender variable and men and women can show high performance. This situation is tried to be explained with the help of literature researches. Moreover, in order to make a clear judgment on this comment, it has been revealed that the work should be specified based on every department and the interpretation of the results according to independent variables is required. In addition; similar to the gender independent variable, the reason that the seniority independent variable has no significant effect on the dependent variables is explained in a similar way. In the selected company, one third of the recruitments are made from long-term interns each year while the remaining part is from experienced or new graduates, which leads to a diverse employee portfolio within the company. It is mentioned that the new graduates who are new on the job can perform very well due to their career ambitions, learning desires and high adaptation abilities; however, experienced employees can know the business life, have the mastery and experience so that they can put a good performance with different motivations compare to the new graduates. When the interactions of demographic factors are examined together, it is found that they have some significant effects on dependent variables. For example, male employees between the ages of 24 and 35 who work in the selected firm perform better than female employees who are between the ages of 36 and 45. When the interaction of age range and seniority range variables has been examined together, another significant difference is found. Employees who have 6 to 10 years of seniority in the age range of 24 to 35 years perform better than those who have 6 to 10 years of seniority in the 36 to 45 age range and 11 to 28 years of seniority in the 46 to 61 age range. Even though the employees in the age range of 24 to 35 have the same or less seniority than the other subgroups mentioned above, it is explained that the reason is the more effective usage of technology in business life by Y generation. An example is given as the necessary work for budgeting in the finance department; Y generation can easily create a macro in Microsoft Excel program while X or Baby-Boomer generation can use Microsoft Excel program but with solutions that are more basic. However, it is emphasized that in the analysis the independent variables seniority range or age range do not have a significant effect on performance note and leadership behavior averages alone; and that shows other factors might be effective besides the generation difference. The lack of a direct effect between the dependent variables and the independent variables also correlated with the fact that the performance assessment was practically average-focused and that leadership behaviors are more directed towards managers and potential manager candidates. Finally, it is explained how the work can serve to other fields and how can the paper refer to other future works. In addition, proposals are made to develop the paper further. These proposals could be involving of further demographic factors in the scope of analysis such as involving marital status, foreign language knowledge, nationality, profession and computer usage level in addition to the demographic factors used in the study. Another suggestion is to add the data of different years to the paper and thus observe the differences between the periods. Another suggestion could be to customize this work on a departmental basis and compare the results among the departments. In addition, another possible development step of this work is to include the executive level as well, which has the managerial responsibility at the company, and the comparison of the findings obtained in this analysis with this paper. Finally, cross-sector comparisons can be made by examining the data of different sectors with the same independent variables to develop this study. This paper is carried out on a company that has different locations, involves various functions and is an international automotive company. Therefore; the method of analysis in this study and the interactions and the comparisons between the findings are aimed to be the reference to the researches to be carried out about the companies having these similar qualifications. For this reason, the results of the analysis presented in the analysis should not be taken as general outcome for all companies but should be evaluated by considering the criteria of the selected company.