LEARNING HR THROUGH CELLULOID

“A picture is worth more than a thousand words”

Dr Biswajeet Pattanayak (former Head, HRM-IIM, Indore) made headlines when he used ‘Lagaan’ as a case study in organizational behavior at IIM Indore. He is now famously called the ‘Lagaan Professor’. There are numerous incidents in movies which can be used to identify or even learn different HR perspectives. Movies work as course material because of their wide appeal. People easily understand movies, and if some business lessons can be taught through them there’s nothing like it.

To understand this subject better we can take certain examples from some movies and the HR Lessons they teach. Let’s start with ‘Ocean’s Eleven’, George Clooney makes a plan to rob the biggest casino in Las Vegas. The first thing he does is manpower planning and selects ten other people who are good in their respective field. Each one brings his expertise to work and what follows is full autonomy and brilliant team work to achieve the desired result. This is the best example of hiring the right people for the right job.

Hrishikesh Mukherjee’s ‘Golmaal’ is a good example to study Halo and Horn effect at play. When Utpal Dutt was taking interview he was clearly against elderly workforce and was finding faults in the youngsters. A candidate without a moustache, with a modern name and sense of fashion wasn’t considered for the job. This is Horn effect at work as the questions asked to them were only from their field of interest and nothing related to their competencies or abilities at work. When Amol Palekar enters the office in Kurta Pyjamaa and sporting a moustache, at that given moment Mr. Dutt gets impressed by him and Halo effect comes into play. One scene of Golmaal it’s also shows how to motivate people. Its common knowledge that rewards motivate people but it should be understood that rewards should be relevant to the achiever. In the movie when Devan and Amol were searching for a woman to act as Amol’s mother they come across Dina Pathak. She was a wealthy person and had everything in life. To make her agree to play the part they tell her that Amol has a sister who is of the age of her married daughter and that this could help her in feeling less lonely.

In the movies ‘Remember the Titans’ and ‘Chak de India’ the way coach Denzel Washington and Shah Rukh Khan respectively transform a group of individuals into a team that bonds and stays motivated until the ultimate purpose is achieved is a example of transformational leadership at work. Although ‘Remember the Titans’ was a period film and ‘Chak de India’ a contemporary one both display the skills and innovative techniques required for handling a multicultural team.

In one scene of Raju Hirani’s ‘Munnabhai MBBS’ when the protagonist Munna (Sanjay Dutt) sees a sweeper in a very angry and frustrated state of mind he goes to him give him a big hug and tells him he wants to thank him for his work as every one praises the doctor when a patient gets well but not him, since he is as much responsible for the speedy recovery of a patient as the doctor is because he keeps the hospital clean and hygienic. The fact of just giving respect to him and recognizing his work makes him happy. The same concept can be applied to real time situations by showing respect to each and every employee and making them understand how their role, however small it may be, is important for the organisation’s success.

Conflict Resolution and Negotiation are skills are common to all styles of working and most commonly viewed in offices. The movie which catches the essence of conflict and negotiation and how important it can be is shown in ‘12 Angry Men’. The movie shows how a jury has to decide the verdict of a murder case and they have to do it by consensus and not majority. In the start they have an opinion vote in which 11 out of 12 of the jury members find the convict guilty and the remaining one of the view that the convict was innocent. Conflict and Negotiation begins as one person tries to convince the others and all of them show hostility towards him. He goes on giving his view point sometimes very peacefully and sometimes in an animated manner and in the end convinces all the others that the convict is innocent. In this way he saves the life of the convict which shows the importance of negotiation.

Hence academicians must promote the understanding of management concepts through an entertaining and fun way through watching movies and analyzing them.