Universitat Internacional de Catalunya
People Management
Other languages of instruction: English, Spanish,
Teaching staff
Subject to confirmation via email to:
Prof. Dima Aranki (dhaitham@uic.es)
Introduction
People Management studies how organisations attract, develop, motivate and retain the talent they need to execute their strategy. Where Organisational Behaviour the optional subject offered in the second year explains the psychological and behavioural mechanisms underlying individual, group and organisational conduct, People Management takes those mechanisms as given and asks a different question: what systems, tools and decisions allow an organisation to manage its people deliberately and effectively?
Within the Business Organisation Module, this course is the Application stage of the Human Capital thread. It translates the behavioural science of rganisational Behaviour (Y2) into the management systems of strategic HR, and it opens the VRIO question for people are your organisation’s people Valuable, Rare, Inimitable, and Organised to capture value? that Strategic Management (Y4) will answer through the full VRIO framework and the Balanced Scorecard. It is also Stage 2 of the module’s AI/Digital capability arc, addressing AI’s concrete application to the HR decisions this course is built around.
The subject is organised around the full employee lifecycle, from workforce planning and recruitment through to performance management, compensation, and the legal and ethical framework within which all of this operates. Because the subject is mandatory, it does not assume that every student has taken Organisational Behaviour; where the two subjects connect, the relevant concept is briefly reintroduced before being applied, so that all students reach the same operational competence regardless of their prior path through the module.
The subject closes with an integrative project that requires students to design a coherent people-management system for a real or realistic organisation, mobilising strategic, technical and ethical considerations simultaneously the same kind of integration that Strategic Management will demand in the final year, this time applied to the management of people as a source of competitive advantage.
Pre-course requirements
- Business Management (Y1): Porter’s Generic Strategies (applied in S2 for vertical HR alignment) and the Resource-Based View (the foundation of the VRIO arc engaged in S1 and S30) are assumed as prior knowledge.
Soft prerequisite (recommended)
- Organisational Behaviour (Y2 S2): motivation theories (Maslow, Herzberg, Vroom, Deci & Ryan, Pérez López), group dynamics (Belbin, Tuckman), psychological safety (Edmondson), and organisational culture (Schein, Lewin) are assumed as prior knowledge where explicitly tagged in the session programme. Students who did not take OB will receive a brief reintroduction at each relevant session — enough to proceed with the application work, but not a full substitute for the OB course.
Recommended prior exposure
- Digital Transformation (Y2 S1): HRIS, People Analytics, and AI in selection (S11) build on the digital transformation literacy developed there. Students who did not take Digital Transformation should review what HRIS and basic AI concepts are before Session 11.
Objectives
The subject aims to:
- Provide a strategic understanding of human resource management as a source of competitive advantage, not merely an administrative function opening the VRIO question for people that Strategic Management (Y4) will synthesise.
- Develop competence in the core technical processes of people management: workforce planning, job analysis, recruitment, selection, training, performance management and compensation design.
- Build awareness of the legal, regulatory and ethical framework within which people-management decisions must operate in Spain and internationally.
- Cultivate the ability to align HR practices with business strategy and with the behavioural insights introduced in Organisational Behaviour, applying rather than re-deriving them.
- Develop practical managerial skills structured interviewing, feedback delivery, conflict-sensitive communication that any manager, not only HR specialists, will need, and that Management Skills (Y4) will refine into professional execution.
- Foster critical engagement with emerging challenges in people management: digital transformation (Stage 2 of the AI/Digital arc), the future of work, and diversity and inclusion.
- Connect the intrinsic motivation science developed in Organisational Behaviour (Deci & Ryan, Pérez López) to the purpose-driven leadership logic of Dirección por misiones (Y3), through the compensation and engagement design sessions.
Competences/Learning outcomes of the degree programme
| TRAINING ACTIVITY |
| Case analysis Lecture Classroom practicum (solving problems/videos/text commentary/sheets) Individual study Project presentations and debates Solving problems in the classroom |
Learning outcomes of the subject
|
LO |
Learning Outcome |
|
LO1 |
Explain how HR strategy should align with business strategy, and evaluate the coherence of a given organisation’s HR practices against its competitive strategy. |
|
LO2 |
Design the core building blocks of a workforce plan, including job analysis, job evaluation, and headcount and succession planning. |
|
LO3 |
Design and justify a recruitment and selection process for a given role, including the choice of selection methods, with reference to their predictive validity. |
|
LO4 |
Design a performance management system appropriate to a given organisational context, and conduct a structured feedback conversation. |
|
LO5 |
Design a compensation and benefits structure that balances internal equity, external competitiveness and motivational effectiveness. |
|
LO6 |
Identify the basic legal obligations governing employment relationships in Spain, and recognise situations requiring specialist legal advice. |
|
LO7 |
Analyse ethical dilemmas in people management, particularly those raised by digital monitoring and artificial intelligence in HR decisions — applying the AI/Digital arc Stage 2 perspective. |
|
LO8 |
Integrate strategic, technical, legal and ethical considerations into a coherent, prioritised redesign of an organisation’s people-management system. |
Teaching and learning activities
Online
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| TRAINING ACTIVITY |
| Case analysis Lecture Classroom practicum (solving problems/videos/text commentary/sheets) Individual study Project presentations and debates Solving problems in the classroom |
Bibliography and resources
Dessler, G. (latest edition). Human Resource Management. Pearson. The assigned core text. Its chapter sequence workforce planning, job analysis, recruitment, selection, training, performance appraisal, compensation, and labour relations maps directly onto the subject’s session blocks, and it is written for management students broadly, not only HR specialists, which fits the mandatory and general-management orientation of this course.
Recommended reference
Armstrong, M., & Taylor, S. (latest edition). Armstrong’s Handbook of Human Resource Management Practice. Kogan Page. A more strategically framed and European-oriented reference, useful in particular for the strategic HR sessions (Block 1) and the labour relations and ethics block (Block 4). Recommended for students pursuing CIPD-aligned professional routes.