In this paper, we study the concepts of normal functions and \(\varphi \) -normal functions in the framework of planar harmonic mappings. We establish the harmonic mapping counterpart of the well-known Zalcman-Pang lemma and as a consequence, we prove that a harmonic mapping whose spherical derivative is bounded away from zero is normal. Furthermore, we introduce the concept of the extended spherical derivative for harmonic mappings and establish several sufficient conditions for a harmonic mapping to be \(\varphi \) -normal. The results in this paper improve and generalize some recent results obtained by Deng et al. (Monatsh Math 193 (2020), 605-621) and Bohra et al. Monatsh Math. 206, 797–808 (2025).