My previous posts were mostly on marketing, but this recent article that I came across reminds me once again how important human resources management is as well.

The social science of the work place is very interesting in my opinion, and often times little changes or habits that we have may dictate our behavior, group dynamics, norms, roles and much more. Such as one issue that is bought up in this article that many people can

probably coincide with, is that who we sit with in our workplace effects our work behavior.

This article did not specifically bring up the word “leadership, influence or motivation”, but those key words are what the author is centering the article about. The very first class that I remember from high school was Social Studies 8. My teacher is an extremely approachable teacher and well spoken of. One of the very first things that I learned from his class was that if “people around you are successful, then you will become successful too”.

In a more pessimistic point of view, as quoted from my friend in COMM 101 Section 105, “it is a dog eat dog world”. In other words, people are greedy and selfish. At the end of the day, we only do things that serve their best interest because everyone else around us are our competitors, or enemies for a more violent tone. As explained in economics, we all have unlimited wants but limited resources, thus we have scarcity. So if one was to analyze this article with an economic perspective. This article would be completely false and something that we should avoid rather than approach. If we had a competitive advantage in being the leader, why would we want to recruit other leaders onto our team to compete with us?

Ironically, society works exactly opposite to what logic and common sense tells us. If we

sit with more enthusiastic and engaging people, then we will indeed be more efficient at our job and therefore bring in more profit. In essence, if we surround ourselves with successful people, we become successful as well.

Especially as a business student, as much as I do not wish to admit, my colleagues now, might be my competitor one day. I initially found it difficult to fully understand, acknowledge and execute what my grade 8 teacher once said, but now I am beginning to understand it. It might be hard to take the first step to sharing valuable information, but after the first step, the rest just follows in sequence.

Personally, I find HR to be a very interesting field of study, so hopefully this blog contains something that you can take away from. Those who ask for referent power will not get any because only those who deserve it will have that power.

Here is an example of a classmate on her analysis on the organizational change in HP. Often times human resource problems are non eminent and takes more than just plan research to figure out the problem and Yiyin here, dug deeper into the story.