The movie The Social Network (2010) showcases two main characters, such as Mark Zuckerberg and Sean Parker, founder of Napster. Mark Zuckerberg is a central character and his played by Jesse Eisenberg. The film was directed by David Fincher, and it aims to illustrate how the founder of Facebook started his company. The given writing will primarily focus on Mark and Sean and how they approach various human management challenges based on their personalities and leadership styles.
Human Resources Development
Both Mark and Sean anchor their leadership styles in their personalities, but the former shows the more transformational type, whereas the latter is more transactional. At present, human capital is an essential component of production, the most valuable resource of any organization, and acts as an indicator of competitiveness, economic growth, and efficiency. Human resources management directly affects the company’s capitalization or value. The main difference is the fact that Mark understands the latter concept, which is why he strives to grow Facebook, whereas Sean only wants to gain maximum profit. The share of intangible assets of the brand is increasing alongside the intellectual potential of personnel, and personnel policy in the total assets of the organization. Composing the most important internal competence of the organization, human resource management is one of the factors that provide leadership in the competition, as it is put forward among the most important competitive advantages of the organization and becomes a guarantee of its success and survival in the face of increased competition.
It is human resources management that allows companies to move from a number of good, successful companies to the leaders in a particular market segment. This is the main reason why Mark does not wish to sell Facebook during its initial success, whereas Sean aims to build companies to sell. The development of the human resources management system is closely related to the use of intangible assets of the enterprise. A feature of intangible assets is their reproducibility, which is common in both Napster and Facebook. A well-built human resources management system allows the company to use the internal intellectual potential of its employees as a reproducible resource, which in turn contributes to increased economic efficiency and high-quality transformation of the company.
HR and Performance
The human resources management functions of multinational companies are extremely complicated by the need to adapt personnel policies and procedures to the differences between the countries in which each branch is located. In particular, the cultural differences of countries, differences in economic development and legislative systems may require an international company to adapt hiring, dismissal, training and remuneration programs for each state in which branches of a global company are opened. Both Mark and Sean founded companies, which operate internationally, and thus, international relation is a common aspect of their leadership (Sparrow et al., 2017). This manifests itself in their different approaches for retaining employees and developing them. National culture plays a major role in shaping the organization’s cultural values, and in turn, these values ​​interact with the needs, attitudes, and norms of individuals and groups. They will identify various patterns of behavior that contribute to both improving the organization’s effectiveness and reducing it. Values ​​borrowed from the corporate and professional culture of individuals have an additional impact.
Mark, as a transformational leader, actively engages with his employees and seeks to retain them as a valuable asset of Facebook. Sean also values his employees, but he mostly strives for productivity through the exchange. Human capital should be considered as an economical category associated with costs, revenue generation and growth of company productivity. It is interesting to see how profitable the financial costs of managing the human resources of Facebook are compared with the overall development and growth of the Napster. To do this, it is important to examine how human resources management in an international company differs from the human resources management in its country.
Employee Background
Cultural and economic factors, as well as management style and practice, primarily influence the identification of features of international human resource management. It is also important to take into account differences in labor markets and labor costs, problems of the labor movement, factors of relations in industry, national orientation and control factors (Brewster et al., 2016). In addition, international human resources management is characterized by more heterogeneous functions and a high degree of involvement of managers in the daily life of staff. This is reflected in the fact that leaders use a differentiated approach to the training of managers and a more significant influence of external factors.
Recognizing Employee Contributions
It is important to note that Facebook values any employee contributions, which why Mark does not allow non-contributors to be a part of the company. However, Sean does not appear to be interested in recognizing employee contributions because he only wants productivity and exchange. Human resources management affects the work of an enterprise in different ways (Noe et al., 2018). In the case of Facebook, management has a direct impact on the value of the company, as the share of intangible assets is growing. In the case of Napster, human resource management is one of those factors that increase competitiveness. In both companies, it is human resources management that allows companies to become leaders among enterprises of a certain segment. Human resources management can be considered from various points of view. For Mark, this is a method of developing and implementing carefully thought out and balanced decisions regarding the regulation of labor and employment relations at the organization level. For Sean, this is a managerial activity in which staff is seen as a resource for the successful functioning and development of the organization, as a factor in efficiency and growth, as a certain means to achieve strategic goals.
It is also important to consider the difficulties that international companies may encounter when forming an organizational culture and managing human resources. Serious problems are faced by all international companies in the recruitment process. Of particular importance here is the influence of cross-cultural interaction. For Mark, employees are carriers of their national culture, who bring their traditions, norms and values ​​to the organizational culture. They must be taken into account when forming a common organizational culture (Brewster et al., 2016). For Sean, certain costs also require the organization of the training process and staff development. The costs associated with teaching the language, culture, national traditions and customs of the country where the headquarters of the organization should be taken into account.
Training
In order to retain and develop employees, on Facebook, managers selected to work must additionally provide training for appropriate communication skills, which leads to an increase in the organization’s staff development costs. Similarly, training programs for production workers in host countries should be adjusted to the level of education provided by the local educational system. For example, Napster, like other large corporations, following the tradition of lifelong employment, does a lot to just hire the right people to its factories and offices. In such companies, it is important to collaborate with the education system, training and selecting future employees directly from the school bench. However, this approach is not applicable in all companies because local systems are often not ready for such partnerships with individual companies.
Labor Relations
In the process of developing the theory of human resource management, three approaches can be identified, such as humanistic, economic and organizational. Facebook operates within the framework of the first approach, where the organization is presented as a cultural phenomenon and is fixed on the human side of the organization (Bratton & Gold, 2017). Napster uses an economic approach which implies that the leading place in the enterprise is given to the technical training of workers, and not to managerial training. Mark also adheres to an organizational approach where a new outlook on staff was formed, which was considered not a labor resource, but a humanistic one.
Conclusion
In conclusion, the effective formation and development of market relations are largely determined by the formation of modern managerial relations, increasing the coordination of the economy. It is Mark’s leadership and management that ensures coherence, integration of economic processes in organizations, on the territory, or in the country. Managing people in these conditions is perhaps one of the most important areas of organization management. For Sean, the staff is the most important resource of any enterprise that is capable of continuous improvement and development. It is thanks to the management of human resources that the share of intangible assets of an enterprise increases, the organization’s competitiveness grows, and management also allows one to achieve leading positions in certain market segments.
References
Bratton, J., & Gold, J. (2017). Human resource management: Theory and practice. Palgrave.
Brewster, C., Houldsworth, E., & Sparrow, P. (2016). International human resource management. Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development.
Noe, R., Hollenbeck, J., Gerhart, P., & Wright, P. (2018). Human resource management: Gaining a competitive advantage (11th ed.). McGraw-Hill.
Sparrow, P., Brewster, C., & Chung, C. (2017). Globalizing human resource management. Routledge.