tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-82771291012421634172024-03-05T12:08:38.836+00:00Graeme Martin's HR and People Management BlogThis blog is intended to provide you with useful information, links and ideas on HR, people management, organizational change and leadership. It will also provide you with insights into our current research into practice and activity at the University of Glasgow's Centre for Reputation Management through People. We hope it will be a useful resource for HR practitioners, line managers and students. Please contribute to help make this site more useful for all readersGraeme's HR Bloghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14734917634350985679noreply@blogger.comBlogger77125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8277129101242163417.post-1817799922303387472010-10-24T04:51:00.001+01:002010-10-24T04:54:23.083+01:00Corporate Reputations and Management Practices<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">I'm taking part in a forum on Corporate Reputations and Management Practices as part of an initiative organized by Macquarie University where I'm based for a brief period. As part of my presentation, I'll refer to another recent session in Edinburgh in which I participated on the impact of new human rights developments arising from the Ruggie Report. This report and indeed much of the discussion was relatively new to me but is likely to have major implications for multinational corporations and is already the subject of business school research.</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">You can find out a little more about it from the following Warwick University website, which has the details of the Edinburgh conference and the 'Edinburgh Declaration'. For those of you interested in corporate responsibility and for those of you managing in multinationals this is essential reading. </span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">http://www.business-humanrights.org/Documents/NHRIsConference2010. </span><br />
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</span>Graeme's HR Bloghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14734917634350985679noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8277129101242163417.post-61730953672471942762010-10-24T04:06:00.002+01:002010-10-24T04:09:28.614+01:00Corporate Reputation by Ronald J. Burke, Graeme Martin and Cary L. Cooper<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">We have a new book on Corporate Reputations coming out early next year on corporate reputations, which you may wish to consider for your library. </span><br />
<strong><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Contents: </span></strong><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Part I Importance of Corporate Reputation: Corporate reputations: development, maintenance, change and repair, Ronald J. Burke; The meaning and measurement of corporate reputation, Gary Davies; Measuring the impact of corporate reputation on stakeholder behavior, Manfred Schwaiger, Sascha Raithel, Richard Rinkenburger and Matthias Schloderer. </span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Part II Developing a Corporate Reputation: Reputation and corporate social responsibility: a global view, Philip H. Mirvis; Organizational identity, corporate social performance and corporate reputation: their roles in creating organizational attractiveness, Kristin B. Backhaus. </span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Part III Managing a Corporate Reputation: Employer branding, the psychological contract and the delicate art of expectation management and keeping promises, Kerry Grigg; managing corporate reputations, strategic human resource management (SHRM) and negative capabilities, Graeme Martin, Paul Gollan and Kerry Grigg; From applause to notoriety: organizational reputation and corporate governance, Charles McMillan; The role of the CEO and leadership branding – credibility not celebrity, Julie Hodges; The role of the news media in corporate reputation management, Craig E. Carroll; The impact of Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 on corporate reputation: benefits, problems and prospects, Martin Reddington and Helen Francis; Re-creating reputation through authentic interaction: using social media to connect with individual stakeholders, C.V. Harquail. </span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Part IV Reputation Recovery: Corporate governance and corporate reputation: a disaster story, Thomas Clarke; Corporate rebranding, Dale Miller and Bill Merrilees; Repairing damages to reputations: a relational and behavioral perspective, Moonweon Rhee and Robin J. Hadwick;</span>Graeme's HR Bloghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14734917634350985679noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8277129101242163417.post-1500023751428806922010-10-24T03:47:00.000+01:002010-10-24T03:47:46.618+01:00New Assumptions about Strategic HRM?<div class="MsoNormal">I attended the Strategic Management Society annual Conference in Rome where I went to find out about what strategy academics have to say about HRM as a source of value creation. And I’m pleased that I went if only to confirm what I’ve said in other blogs about the search for new business paradigms. Like many of the other management scholars, strategy academics have fallen out of love with business and with some of their most treasured assumptions about shareholder value. This was evidenced by two new special interest groups that have formed in the Strategic Management Society on human capital and on stakeholder theory.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">The opening plenary session given by some of the most prominent strategy academics - Jay Barney, Russ Coff, Ed Freeman and … - raised lots of questions and some answers on the topic of ‘where strategic thinking in business needs to go’. Jay Barney, the man most associated with what has become one of the most discussed ideas among management academics – the resource-based view of strategy (RBV) – outlined some of the assumptions/ predictions it has made with respect to human capital. One of the most important is that firm-specific, as distinct from general (or transferable), human capital is a potentially great source of competitive advantage because it can be valuable, rare and inimitable. This is why firms seek to engage employees to secure their identification and willingness to ‘go the extra mile’. It also explains why firms are much more eager to train employee in the routines, processes, and ways of ‘doing things around here’ and much less eager to give them a more general education, such as an MBA, which they can use for their own advantage and for the advantage of other firms. This last point, however, highlights a problem for the RBV: rational employees recognise that they do not benefit as much as firms from investing in their own firm-specific human because of what is called asymmetric power relations. Basically, this refers to the lack of power and knowledge of individuals in relation to firms. Thus, we are left with a distribution problem: after all costs are paid, who should benefit from residual profits and how should this residual amount be shared?</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">The traditional answer, which has underpinned strategic management theory and corporate governance since the 1980s, is the normative theory of shareholder value. Employees are paid a wage for their investment in general human capital in the firm and may gain in some of share ownership if they in invest in firm-specific human capital, but the shareholders have sole ownership rights and thus the only legitimate claim on residual profits. Firms in the 1990s did try to limit their investment in firm-specific human capital by retrenching into employment contracts that were largely transactional rather than relational – the so called ‘employability contract’. This, more or less stated that firms were unable or unwilling to guarantee the old style contract based on job security and firm-specific careers, but were willing to help employees develop skills (general human capital) that they could use to make them more employable in the future in return for their temporary demonstration of high commitment. However, such psychological contracts have not proven successful, especially in attracting and engaging knowledge workers and senior managers, who often have high levels of general human capital and are capable of bargaining away much of the residual profits that would normally accrue to shareholders. This is best exemplified by the case of premier league professional footballers and many CEOs and other star employees (who are both unique and capable of adding high value).</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Russ Coff suggested the answer lay in developing a different theory of strategic management, one that is based on stakeholder theory rather than shareholder value. This was hardly revolutionary stuff, but was positioned as such by these eminent strategy academics. It was left to Ed Freeman, who has a new book coming out on stakeholder theory, to put the argument for a different view of what might count as useful theorising about strategy and where it may need to go. His time seems to have come, especially given the weakening position of the US in the global economy. <br />
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I’m still stunned, however, over how large the gulf is between assumptions made by American scholars and those made by their (particularly continental) European counterparts. However, we should be grateful for small mercies.</div>Graeme's HR Bloghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14734917634350985679noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8277129101242163417.post-17961602140598653142010-08-14T11:04:00.003+01:002010-08-15T10:11:28.272+01:00A Final Blog from the AOM: New Developments in Strategic Human Resource ManagementI’m about to begin writing a new book exploring the links between HRM and business strategy, a conjunction of ideas which has been at the core of my work for the last few decades. So, I was pleasantly surprised to see that the AOM conference had some core tracks on this subject, the main participants of which have organized an interest group - rather unfortunately in my view - labelled ‘strategic human capital' (are we really interested in human capital or even human resources, or should we be more interested in resourceful humans?). The first conference stream dedicated to research in this field is due to take place at the Strategic Management Society annual conference in Rome in September and fields an impressive array of American scholars, including Dave Lepak, Pat Wright and Russ Coff.<br />
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During the AOM conference there were some excellent papers mapping out the field and addressing the question of what it means to be strategic in HRM. Shad Morris used this session as an opportunity to explore how organizations manage their star performers and attempt to expropriate value from them to create firm specific human capital - a very tricky problem because stars often have an inbuilt incentive and the power to expropriate value from the companies with which they deign to work to build their own general human capital. Another paper by Dana Minbaeva from the Copenhagen Business School HR team explored the bridge between the macro-micro divide. This may sound like academic jargon but is an extremely important issue for practitioners to understand. It is not enough to have a set of so called best HR practices in place to ensure desirable individual and group attitudes and behaviour; we also need understand how these practices are implemented, the signals they send out and how these signals are perceived by individuals in particular contexts. This signalling theory approach, of which we have written about in a new book chapter, was demonstrated in another paper entitled ‘ Why are job seekers attracted to socially responsible companies? Testing underlying mechanisms’ by David Jones and colleagues from the University of Vermont. One of the insights generated by this paper is that it is not CSR in itself that attracts potential employees, but the inferences that such people make from the signalling cues of such policies. In this paper, environmental oriented CSR policies did not have as big an impact on the attractiveness of an organizational to potential employees as those policies focusing on being community-oriented i.e. signals from the corporate citizenship elements of the CSR policy were picked up by potential applicants as ‘they treat the local community well, so they must treat employees well’ and 'if they treat there employees well, I will apply to this organization'. <br />
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The third and fourth papers, however, provided even better insights into how we can conceive strategic human resource management. A presentation by Lisa Hisae Nishii outlined a process theory of SHRM. The main contribution of process theory lies in explaining how the success of HRM is very much down to the <em>implementation</em> of policies, especially in meeting the valued expectations of employees, i.e. meeting psychological contract expectations. We provided a similar explanation in 2001 in a paper entitled ‘Transforming multinational enterprises: towards a process model of strategic human resource management change’ in the International Journal of Human Resource Management, but it will take someone of the stature of Pat Wright to get this idea into practice. The final and probably best paper was presented by Robert Kaše from Ljubljana. His was an attempt to map out the relationship between HRM and organizational outcomes using a social network perspective. Robert’s ideas would be the most difficult to put into practice because they highlighted the complex and multiple relationships inside and outside of organizations which have to be understood before we can predict with any certainty the impact of HRM policies. However, to get an accurate picture of HRM in organizations, such complex understandings are needed. One of the few examples I have seen of this kind of social network mapping is IBM’s attempt to capture the informal communications patterns which only become evident through tracking online social network communications. Such an activity is only made possible because the company has access to the IP addresses of all users of the company’s social networking software and can trace their communications. The patterns that emerged showed the importance of ‘mavens’ and ‘connectors’ who were critical to knowledge creation and sharing in the organization, so allowing IBM to create organizational structures which built on the bottom-up informal organization structures rather than on the top down formal structures.<br />
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If anyone is interested in these papers, which are unlikely to be published for a year or two, the authors may be willing to share their work with you if you email them. Most can be found using a Google search.<br />
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However, no matter how many times I attend the AOM conference – I’ve been going for a dozen or so years – I’m always amazed by the differences between business and management and HR on this side of the pond from what goes on in the USA. One example that rammed this point home to me this year was the statement by one of the leaders of the new strategic human capital interest group that I began this post with. He proposed a ‘revolutionary’ idea that US scholars and practitioners took the shareholder value perspective as given, arguing that this assumption needed to be questioned for the field to move on. Quelle surprise! I felt obliged to point out to the largely US audience that shareholder value was not a given outside of the USA, especially in some parts of Europe and Asia, and that we had recently written a 'not so revolutionary' paper on four configurations relating different corporate governance assumptions (shareholder value, stewardship theory, stakeholder theory and context-bound theory) to different sets of ethical and strategic assumptions, and through these to particular strategic HR policies. I also felt obliged that this notion was not even revolutionary among scholars in the USA. In a manner reminiscent of the love affair with Japanese management in the 1980s and 1990s, Peter Cappelli from the Wharton School and his Indian colleagues have just produced a piece of research in the Academy of Management Perspectives extolling the virtues of an Indian approach to management and what US firms can learn from them. The single most important feature they found of corporate governance among Indian companies was the ‘determination to balance the interests of the firm’s diverse stakeholders’. Being a representative of shareholders came only fourth on a list of priorities for business leaders. First was acting as a guardian for the mission driven strategy, which embodied social as well as economic goals, second was as guardians of the firm’s culture, and third was as acting as guide or teacher for employees.Graeme's HR Bloghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14734917634350985679noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8277129101242163417.post-76115960657023231552010-08-13T12:04:00.005+01:002010-08-21T07:02:24.467+01:00Making Academics More Relevant: Useful ResearchPerhaps the most important session I've attended at the AOM conference featured six of its 'biggest hitters', including past presidents and genuine world class researchers who have made a significant impact on practice <em>and</em> published in top tier journals. Their messages deserved a larger audience and I'm sure they will get it in the near future through their new book, 'Useful Research: Advancing Theory and Practice', edited by Susan Mohrman and Ed Lawler. <br />
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The title of the book invoiced its key message and also the impassioned pleas by the presenters for academics to focus on doing more useful research which has an impact on practice (as well as theory) and for the top tier journals to reflect use value to practice in their review processes and acceptance rates. On this last point, some revealing statistics were laid out. For example, in the Academy of Management Journal, probably the top of the top tier, only 16% of articles were based on qualitative case study research - the kind of research closest to practice and most likely to influence practitioners. Apparently, however, this rates as a significant improvement on the 6% that made it a few years ago!<br />
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All six presenters grounded their talks in the notion of academic knowledge chain or system, a development of the Mode 1 and Mode 2 distinction of a few years ago. Upstream activities included <strong><em>Pure Research</em></strong> in the traditional disciplines of business and management, e.g. economics, sociology, psychology, philosophy etc., which provide the theory for the<strong><em> Traditional Organizational and Management Research</em></strong> that appear in the so-called top tier journals. Downstream activities include the development of <em><strong>intermediate bridging knowledge</strong></em>, which is really a form of 'knowledge for sale' to practice - very much the province of consultants, professional bodies such as the CIPD, and the writers of textbooks - and <em><strong>Practice-oriented Knowledge Products</strong></em> including talks and keynotes to practitioners, teaching through executive education, blogging, writing in practitioner journals, newspapers, TV and radio, etc. The main message of the presenters was that business schools should require at least some of their (senior) academics to operate in these critical downstream activities as well as the upstream ones. By engaging in 'engaged research' <em>with</em> practitioners - not just <em>on</em> them - academics benefit from grounding their upstream work in relevant problems and can make a significant impact on policy and practice. By doing so they lay claim to be genuine intellectuals in the traditional sense of that term.<br />
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All presenters were also highly critical of the current systems in elite university business schools whic rewards only publication in a limited range of highly self-referential top tier journals. As Andy Van de Ven, the doyen of engaged research has demonstrated, these journals have almost zero impact on practice and often little impact on science (some 60% of articles published in top tier management journals are never cited by other academics!).<br />
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Yet despite their arguments and positions of influence - not to mention the constant soul searching by the Academy over the last twenty years to make itself more relevant - we seem to be no further forward. The research assessment exercise in this country (the REF) with its near exclusive focus on publishing in top tier journals and the requirements for tenure in the USA have led to a 'trained incapacity' among the academic community which has made the divide even greater over the last twenty years. This divide has resulted in practitioners regarding most of us as 'skilled incompetents' at best and only good for teaching MBA courses and undergraduates (the main finding of some research I conducted with a colleague a few years ago on the views of the Scottish business community of the Scottish business schools). <br />
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Will books such as this one and the constant exhortation of senior academics in business schools that featured in this session change the system? I doubt it: what gets measured gets managed, and the new research evaluation framework for the British universities shows no real desire to measure impact, despite its ambitions to be more impactful. Maybe the new (much reduced) funding regime will though?Graeme's HR Bloghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14734917634350985679noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8277129101242163417.post-83904221018242357062010-08-08T16:47:00.006+01:002010-08-08T16:57:09.846+01:00Just How Important is National Culture in Explaining the Effectiveness and Transfer of HR Practices in Multinationals?The second of these two quick posts reflects on some excellent work in the Handbook of Research on Comparative Human Research Management edited by Chris Brewster and Wolfgang Mayerhofer and to be published by Edward Elgar in April 2011. Those HR readers who are involved in managing in multinationals should read this book if you are concerned about the global-local problems. and developing employer brands. <br />
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The chapter by Barry Gerhart looks like being a standout in this respect. We've been trained as scholars and practitioners to emphasise national cultural differences as a constraint on transferring practices across cultures, in part because of the influence of work by Hosftede, Trompenaars and others on dimensions of national culture. These ideas have been at the core of teaching on international management courses, as most MBA students would know. Barry has spent a number of years re-examining the evidence produced by Hofstede in particular and reflecting on the messages this work has sent out. He does not deny that national cultural differences exist, but argues (1) that you cannot equate culture with nation states and (2) that it is not national dimensions of culture that are the major constraints in transferring practices but organizational cultures, or industry cultures. According to Gerhart, Hofstede used poor standards of proof and over-interpreted the importance of national cultural variables to the point that they seem to play less and less importance in constraining the ability of corporate HR departments to develop corporate identities and employer brands. Instead he proposed that those firms which buck the shibboleths associated with transferring invidualist HR practices such as performance related pay, performance appraisal, etc, will actually gain a competitive advantage over those firms which follow the received wisdom in this field.Graeme's HR Bloghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14734917634350985679noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8277129101242163417.post-39737155643965142892010-08-08T16:18:00.003+01:002010-08-21T07:05:19.329+01:00Healthcare HR at the AOMOne of two quick posts on excellent workshops at the AOM, both of which have important lessons for readers of this blog.<br />
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The first is about the influence of context and the disconnections between managers and employees over the effectiveness of HR practices. Jaap Paauwe introduced a session that featured Louise Fitzgerald from Manchester Business School, Corine Boon from Amsterdam University and David Guest from Kings College. Louise's work raised the importance of receptive contexts for change in that most complex of industries. Her research over the past number of years has shown that transferring 'best practice' from the commercial sector to healthcare and even within the the healthcare sector itself is fraught with problems, e.g. lean service delivery and HR best practices. Context matters a great deal, and if ever we needed lessons on this two of the most important dimensions of receptive contexts were (1) the relationships between managers and clinicians and the relationships among clinicians themselves, and (2) the extent of distributed leadership and willingness of clinicians to engage in leadership. However, she also pointed out the impact of senior leadership actions on shaping such contexts, which is a lesson that most recent research has shown. You need both transformational and distributed leadership to make things work.<br />
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The second point on the impact of HR practices on change was made by Corine Boon and re-inforced by David Guest's research in healthcare. It is not the fact that HR practices exist but the signals they send and how they are perceived by employees that is important in predicting performance. The correlation between managers reporting that they had such practices in place and the views of employees on their effectiveness was very low (0.25). David Guest argued that there was a general lack of a strategic perspective on HR among his healthcare organizational sample, and a 'huge gap between what was intended and what actually happened' in HR. He further proposed that the adoption of so called best HR practice was linked to low performance, a finding that is not without parallel in the private sector. If everyone is doing the same thing, where is the advantage in that?<br />
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So beware of poorly researched case studies reporting only managers' views on the existence of best practices and beware of the airport books promulgating these views. You have to understand the context in which these practices are adopted, how these practices are implemented, they signals they send and how effective they are perceived to be by staff. Simple but powerful lessons.Graeme's HR Bloghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14734917634350985679noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8277129101242163417.post-83756326480922196832010-08-08T14:11:00.001+01:002010-08-08T14:13:38.976+01:00Engaging Encounters at the AOM on Talent Management and EngagementI'm posting from the annual conference of the Academy of Management in Montreal, where I took part in a workshop organized by a close colleagues of mine, Kerry Grigg from Australia, who has recently crossed the academic-practitioner divide. Kerry's intention in this workshop was facilitate a discussion on the problems that many academics have in engaging with practitioners by bringing together four practically-oriented academics and forty plus practitioners, practitioner/academics and academics new to the profession. My thanks go to her for the excellent facilitation and thought that went into this engaging encounter, which provoked some excellent interaction with the audience and allowed me to work (again) with <a href="http://www.lums.lancs.ac.uk/profiles/paul-sparrow/">Paul Sparrow</a> from Lancaster and <a href="http://www.filron.com/efarndale/">Elaine Farndale</a> from Penn State and Tilberg, and to work with for the first time with <a href="http://ceo.usc.edu/research_scientist/boudreau.html">John Boudreau</a> from the University of Southern California, whose books have also featured on this blog.<br />
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Although this divide has been explored a number of times in the past, we don't seem to be much closer to a resolution. The increasingly dominant publish or perish culture that dominates the lives of academics working in business schools in the USA and UK has had the paradoxical effect of creating disincentives for academics to get too close to practice. For example, it is difficult to get published in top journals using (a) the research methods most valued by practitioners, i.e., single case studies, qualitative research, action research etc., on (b) the topics of the day of most interest to practitioners, talent management and engagement being such two examples. Practitioners, on their part are usually looking for results that are 'roughly right but fast' and wish to use these results to secure some kind of competitive advantage, either for their organizations or in career terms. At minimum they do not want to be disadvantaged as a result of their links with academics, which can be the case when results are unearthed that show these practitioners, or more likely their senior managers, to be part of the problem rather than the solution.<br />
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What came through strongly in terms of advice was the need for younger academics to do a major risk assessment before tying their careers to research that can go dangerously wrong, so preventing them from publishing. They need to recognise that they are entering into an exchange relationship, in which both parties have to gain for the relationship to flourish. This means that the 'terms of trade' have to be made explicit at the beginning of the relationship, and the lines in the sand clearly delineated. What happens if the results of the research show that organization or key individuals in a bad light - which is often the case in engagement research? Typically this exchange is best approached in a gradual manner, perhaps through pilot studies that allow both parties to learn about each other and about the benefits of working together. <br />
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What has also to be made clear is the distinction between a consulting and a research relationship. At their best, academics can produce consulting advice to organizations on par or better than anything produced by the major consultants - for example, providing insights into the nature and factors influencing employee engagement, or the alignment between HR and strategic advantage. Consulting (and executive educations) can also lead to follow up projects with major academic spin-offs. Consulting, however, is based on a different kind of relationship, which places academics in a role of service providers and that needs to be recognised by unwary scholarly entrepreneurs. The advice from the panel for less experienced academics was to ensure they and the service commissioners understood the distinction and for both parties to be ready to walk away if the terms of engagement didn't feel or look right.Graeme's HR Bloghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14734917634350985679noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8277129101242163417.post-4612274398264241922010-07-20T10:00:00.001+01:002010-07-20T10:13:41.788+01:00One of the Book of (Last) Year: Management by the MarketsI'm doing some work with colleagues on HR and governance and writing another paper on HR and the global financial crisis. Both projects have been influenced by my book of the year (which came out last year - takes me a while to get up to speed) and some academic papers that have shaped its formation. The book is by Gerald Davis and is entitled 'Managed by the Markets: How Finance Re-shaped America' published by Oxford University Press.<br />
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As Jeff Pfeffer described it and I agree, this book is an intellectual <em>tour de force</em> account of the American economy by a sociologist who is as comfortable with financial economics as he is with history. To quote, his core argument is that 'financial markets have shaped the transition from an industrial to post-industrial society. For most of the twentieth century, social organization in the United States was shaped by the gravitational pull of the large corporation. It is now oriented around financial markets to a degree that was unfathomable until it was revealed by a global economic crisis' (p. 1). Given the UK's dependence on the financial services sector, the argument applies with almost equal force to this country, though with a few differences.<br />
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Davis provides compelling evidence of rise of shareholder value as a mantra for corporate governance and the decline of the traditional corporation. This was associated with increased stock ownership in the early 1980s, mainly resulting from George W Bush's plan to privatise Social Security so ending defined benefit pensions. What emerged was what Davis describes as a <em>portfolio society</em> in which 'free agent' individual investors began to treat themselves, their homes and their colleagues as human and social capital with a view to securing financial returns on their investments. This was evidenced by the huge take up of 401 (k) pension plans and the purchase of investment properties (not just second homes) that individuals felt free to walk away from if their speculations turned sour. It also resulted in the growth of the bond market and the growth of the shadow banking sector, which forced changes in behaviour among the traditional banks, most notably the growth of investment banking. The rest as they say is history. <br />
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Davis concludes with some speculations on a 'society of investors', in which everything and everyone is commoditised, a continued decline in the power of corporations and a rise in importance of the financial services industry - broadly defined. These developments will have important implications for employees, with a continued decline in the potential for them to form long term 'resourceful human' attachments to corporate 'feudalists'. Instead they are likely to treat themselves (and be treated) as 'human resources' or 'human capital', which will lead to a further erosion of employee engagement levels, commitment to and identification with individual employers. It will also lead to less mobility, more inequality, educational insecurity (already happening in this country) and the end of the corporate safety net (again already happening). Is this what is driving David Cameron and Vince Cable to reduce the reliance on increasingly dangerous financial services?Graeme's HR Bloghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14734917634350985679noreply@blogger.com14tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8277129101242163417.post-25980370044173721862010-07-11T10:26:00.001+01:002010-07-11T10:28:01.075+01:00There's Something Interesting Going On at the Academy of Management for PractitionersIt's nearly time for the annual bash at the Academy of Management. For those readers not familiar with this annual event, it is probably the biggest and most important event on the academic management calendar. However, very few practitioners attend, which is a great shame because if you attend the rights sessions it really does deliver some excellent, well researched ideas of great value that you are unlikely to get from going to much more expensive practitioner events. As an example from the last two years, there were ground-breaking sessions on employee engagement and management consulting, which went far beyond the usual fare at SHRM/CIPD events.<br />
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One of the reasons guess that practitioners don't go is because of the divide between academics and industry. Many of the sessions at the AOM display this in spades, especially those following the traditional hypothesis testing approach of old and safe ideas (nothing new here), which get wrapped up in statistical proofs and arguments that few people understand. However, when you get good academic work aimed at theory generation or providing solid evidence on management fads, there is nothing so practical (as good theory!).<br />
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With this in mind, two practitioners with an academic backrgound are putting on a symposium with some practically minded HR academics (including this one) to help bridge this gap. If you can't attend, please do follow <a href="http://aom2010engagingencounterspdw.blogspot.com/2010/07/welcome-to-our-aom-2010-engaging.html#comment-form">the blog</a> for the event. You can participate from afar and help us in our quest to become more relevant while remaining rigorous.Graeme's HR Bloghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14734917634350985679noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8277129101242163417.post-83607451381897051182010-03-24T06:07:00.002+00:002010-03-24T06:15:21.927+00:00Senior Leaders, Organizational Performance and Sir FredWhen I'm doing presentatations on leadership, I often like to throw in the quotes from Jeff Pfeffer and Robert Sutton's well known book, 'Hard Facts, Dangerous Half Truths and Total Nonsense', which summarises the academic evidence on the (lack of) impact of senior leaders on organizational performance. <br />
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<div style="text-align: center;"><em>'Scholars who conduct and evaluate the best peer-reviewed studies argue over how much leadership matters and when it matters most. But when they set aside their petty differences, most agree that the effects of leadership on performance are modest under most conditions, strong under a few conditions, and absent in others. </em></div><div style="text-align: center;"><em>'Studies from leaders from large samples of CEOs…, university presidents to managers of colleges and professional sports teams show that organizational performance is determined largely by factors that no individual - including a leader - can control’. Pfeffer & Sutton, 2006 (p. 192)</em>. </div><br />
However, they do make the point that senior leaders that senior leaders can have an enormous negative effect, especially on reputations!<br />
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In the august Academy of Management Journal this month, there is an excellent article which explains why Sir Fred Goodwin may have be one of the few leaders to have had a strong effect, positively and negatively on RBS - he went from hero to zero in a few years, like many of his counterparts in the banking crisis. For those interested, the reference is Li, J. & Tang, Y. (2010) CEO hubris and firm risk taking in China: the moderating role of managerial discretion, Academy of Management Journal, 53: 45-68.<br />
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Popular views of the impact of leadership are that CEOs have a big effect on firm performance, partly explained by our need to attribute relatively simple causes to complex issues. The underlying theory and data that Pffeffer and Sutton are referring to, however, comes from two different stables of research - popular ecology and neoinstitutionalist theories - both of which argue that CEO and senior leaders can have little effect on firm performance, except under certain conditions, because of overwhelming external forces such as market pressures, etc. The two Chinese authors point to recent attempts to reconcile these views through something called 'Upper Echelon' theory, which highlightlights the role of managerial discretion. In bringing this idea together with the notion of managerial hubris - the exagerated belief that some managers have about the their own judgements against objective standards - they help us understand the dark side of management. For example, they point to research which shows that CEO hubris is associated with paying over the odds for acquisitions, and that cross-border acquisitions are often driven by managerial hubris. Which brings us to Sir Fred Goodwin's impact on RBS's failure.<br />
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Li and Tang demonstrate in a Chinese context that CEO hubris is postively related to firm risk-taking, which is facilitated by the market context to support risk, the complexity of the market, room for opportunities to take risk and the degree of market uncertainty. When the context is munificent, when there are opportunities and when information is ambigious, overconfident CEOs can, and do, feel compelled to take greater risks. At the organizational level, there are also key constraints on CEOs, including the age of the firm, its size, its resources and the governance structures of the board. If a CEO has greater control over the board and has resources, s/he is more likely to act on the basis of hubris in making risky decisions. What is evident from the RBS case is that most of these factors were evident, so providing a better good explanation than some of the woolier theories of semi-detached, narcisisstic leadership and its negative effects. What do readers think?Graeme's HR Bloghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14734917634350985679noreply@blogger.com36tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8277129101242163417.post-20893238759382260692010-03-06T07:29:00.004+00:002010-03-06T07:40:03.829+00:00Employee Voice and Engagement<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">A very good colleague of mine, Paul Gollan, from Macquarie University in Sydney has been writing and researching on employee voice for a number of years, assessing whether employee voice has a positive impact on participation and through it, key outcomes for organizations and employees. The usual distinction made in this important stream of literature is 'between direct communication, upward problem-solving, or representative participation. The first two of these are essentially direct and individually focused, often operating through face-to-face interactions between supervisors/first line managers and their staff. Some take the form of informal oral or verbal participation, while others are more formalized in the form of written information or suggestions. The third form centres on the role that employee or trade union representatives play in discussions between managers and the workforce, via mechanisms such as joint consultation, worker directors or collective bargaining in the form of problem solving communications' (Budd, Gollan & Wilkinson, 2010).</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">Paul and his colleagues have just produced a </span><a href="http://hum.sagepub.com/current.dtl"><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">special issue on this topic for the journal Human Relations</span></a><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">, which has some excellent articles in it. He is also running a </span><a href="http://www.lse.ac.uk/collections/EROB/pdf/VV%20Report%202008%20-%20final.pdf"><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">seminar series this month at the LSE</span></a><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"> which looks excellent (and, he tells me, is free!), where he will also launch a new book on this important strand of work.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">Among the best (for me) papers in the Human Relations collection is one by Kim, McDuffie and Pil, who write about the impact of different kinds of voice and engagement in the automative industry, and their impact on productivity (see the last post). The results of this study are complex but generally support the importance of employee voice as an engagement strategy, so resonating with the findings in the earlier post on Steve Wood's research. Here's a summary of the Kim et al paper by the editors - no need for me to do it. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">'Turning from the determinants of individual participation in voice mechanisms to the effects of employee voice and participation, Jaewon Kim, John Paul MacDuffie and Frits Pil (this issue) analyse the effects of team voice and worker representative voice, as well as their interaction, on labour productivity in ‘Employee voice and organizational performance:</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">'Of particular note, this research centres on teams’ influence on key work-related issues and worker representatives’ influence on collective voice issues rather than simply assessing the presence of teams or unions. Drawing data from automotive assembly plants from around the globe, the findings reveal that when examined solely, neither channel of voice has a significant effect on labour productivity. Rather, the influence of team voice and representative voice on worker efficiency depends on the interaction between these channels of voice. These findings challenge the conventional assumptions of advocates of both direct and indirect voice because neither type of voice on its own consistently predicts better labour productivity. Significantly, even when the two forms of voice are combined, these findings suggest their relationship with labour efficiency is complex because the positive effects of one type of voice are partly offset by them being partial substitutes. Consequently, the two forms of voice can interfere with, or neutralize, each other’s positive effects on productivity. The findings suggest that this occurs more frequently than the mutual reinforcement some might expect. However, consistent with recent European policy-making on employee participation and voice, the combination of both forms of voice does ultimately have a positive impact on performance and productivity. Overall, the findings therefore reinforce the importance of increasing various forms of employee voice for greater positive organizational outcomes'.</span>Graeme's HR Bloghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14734917634350985679noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8277129101242163417.post-75745337007656812722010-03-06T06:21:00.005+00:002010-03-06T06:47:38.891+00:00Solid Evidence that HRM and Engagement can WorkAs HR academics and practitioners we are consistently looking for good evidence that HRM actually works - that the adoption of high performance work practices pays off in terms of ley measures of performance, such as productivity, quality, customer service, etc. We need such evidence to build our respective cases, and there has been quite a bit of it around for the last twenty years beginning the Mark Huselid's large-scale statistical studies in the 1990s. Often, however, the academics have have failed to look at this issue over long periods of time, so demonstrating consistent and long terms effects of the use of high performance work practices and related engagement strategies, which, if done well, would represent something of a gold standard of proof that investment in HRM actually works.<br /><br />This morning I and quite a few of my HRM academic colleagues were sent the results of a paper that goes some way to delivering such proof, though they are more modest and, like good academics, highlight their study's shortcomings. The work comes out of the Institute of Work Psychology stable at Sheffield University, run by Stephen Wood. Here's his summary of the paper and its contribution in the email he sent out.<br /><br />'My colleague, Lilian de Menezes, and I examined the integrated use in British manufacturing of a set of lean management practices in which employee empowerment was a major component over 22 years. We found in all 22 years that those firms that used the <em>integrated lean approach </em>(my emphasis) has higher levels of productivity (measured by value-added). In addition, we found that the pioneers of the high lean approach continued to outperform even those that subsequently adopted it. These later adopters gained the performance advantages associated with the integrated approach, but their productivity growth was not sufficient to catch up with those which had adopted it earlier. This shows that the <em>employee engagement</em>, so central to lean production, achieves its aim of continuous improvement.<br /><br />The practices included in the study are: empowerment, intensive training and development, team work, TQM, Just-in-time, integrated computer-based technology, and supply-chain partnering<br /><br />The study was financed by the ESRC and will appear in: L. de Menezes, S. Wood and G. Gelade, ‘A longitudinal study of the latent class clusters of modern management practices and their<br />association with organizational performance in British manufacturing’, Journal of Operations Management'.<br /><br />Lilian, Steve and Gerry acknowledge the limitations of their study, suggesting that gold standard proof would need to consider not only productivity data but also evidence on quality and lead times in manufacturing. Nevertheless, this study represents an important step forward and substantial argument for integrating engagement strategies - team working and empowerment - with lean techniques. Given the widespread adoption of the latter in healthcare in the UK, maybe its time to puut in place a similar study to test the impact of these large scale and somewhat controversial initiatives.Graeme's HR Bloghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14734917634350985679noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8277129101242163417.post-58488512379609662082010-02-18T05:09:00.006+00:002010-02-18T05:50:25.567+00:00Back in the Frame and Following up on EngagementI’ve had a (partly enforced) break over the holiday period (and beyond), due to some many writing deadlines, being overseas and being laid low for a few weeks (first time for me), so I'm likely to be a little ring rusty in the blogging sense. Anyway I would like to follow on with the post from November regarding engagement. In that post I was critical of the Macleod report’s discussion on the subject because it lacked the necessary rigour to make engagement a useful practitioner tool that would stand real scrutiny. Susan Hetrick and I first raised this issue of engagement in our 2006 book on corporate reputations and HR, suggesting it was little more than consultancy re-packaging of old ideas designed to refresh their HR product portfolio. Since then, I’ve come around to the idea of engagement, in part because it is so big in practice. So I’ve been working on developing a model of how leadership and high performance HR work systems influence different components of engagement to produce critical business and public sector outcomes. This model will be published in a forthcoming chapter on employer branding (with Saskia Dyke from Switzerland) and another in an article on leadership branding (with Julie Hodges from Durham). Susan and I will also be using it as the basis for a forthcoming financial services presentation.<br />Co-incidentally, two prominent HR academic colleagues of mine, <a href="http://psuwcfacdev.ning.com/video/elaine-farndale">Elaine Farndale </a>from <a href="http://www.uvt.nl/webwijs/show/?uid=farndale">Tilburg </a>and Paul Sparrow from Lancaster have been working on engagement, both of whom have made major contributions to the literature on the topic and have influenced my thinking significantly.<br />I’ve mentioned Paul’s work before and his <a href="http://www.lums.lancs.ac.uk/research/centres/hr/">Centre for Performance-led HR </a>at Lancaster University. Along with Shashi Balain, he produced a really insightful contribution to the notion of engagement in a white paper. As part of that contribution, Paul and his colleagues have also made a series of <a href="http://www.lums.lancs.ac.uk/media/cphr/">short videos </a>summarising their work. These are really worth looking at.<br />However, to my mind Elaine’s work on engagement with colleagues from Tilberg, represents a major breakthrough in bringing some rigour and evidence to the topic and anyone seriously interested in engagement should contact Elaine to get a hold of this paper by Bejier, Farndale and Van Veldhoven . For me , the most important contribution has been to define two different foci of engagement – work engagement, which I’ve already written about on this blog, and organizational engagement, which is what most consultants typically refer to as employee engagement. It also makes a key distinction between state engagement (attitudes and emotions which people hold to work and their organization) and behavioural engagement (actions that employees report taking to display engagement with their work and the organization). For example, many professionals are engaged in their work but not the organization, often to the point of over-engagement or burnout. Conversely, managers can become over-engaged (or over-identified) with the organization, which can lead to a form of collective blindness, intolerance of others who are not ‘organization men’ and a failure to privilege professional and moral values in decision-making. This is a topic that Elaine, Japp Paauwe and I hope to be discussing at a forthcoming symposium on HR’s contribution to corporate governance at the Academy of Management in August – the ‘darkside of engagement’ – something most of us can recognise but which has rarely featured in the practitioner literature..<br />Currently, we’re working on expanding the range of engagement foci – what people at work engage with – to show how they are distinct but related. For example, in healthcare and financial services, it is clear that people are engaged or can become disengaged with the industry, which is very important in explaining recruitment and retention. It is also clear that people can be more or less engaged with each other in the performance of their work, which is related to team-working and distributed leadership, both critical drivers of effective performance.Graeme's HR Bloghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14734917634350985679noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8277129101242163417.post-38064680213187792742009-11-20T13:38:00.007+00:002009-11-23T14:29:39.944+00:00Much Shorter Reflections on the CIPD Annual Conference and EngagementPicking up on the previous blog, a key theme of conference was employee engagement, which ran through a number of sessions I attended. Perhaps the most important was the presentation of the MacLeod Report by no less than David MacLeod himself and Nita Clarke. I've previously expressed a <a href="http://graememartinshrblog.blogspot.com/2009_07_01_archive.html">mild form of disappointment with this work </a>during an earlier blog on Saturday 18th July, to which I want to return in the spirit of critical friendship. David McLeod encouraged this during his presentation, so I'll try to oblige.<br /><br />To focus on the positive, firstly, these two advocates have turned into evangelists for their work and cause, and this can only be to the benefit of the British economy and for HR professionals seeking ways in which they can add strategic value. Secondly, they have also enlisted and marshalled an impressive set of fellow travellers and evidence to support their cause. Thirdly, they have produced a highly readable and informative report, which they outlined with vigour and dedication during their presentation.<br /><br />However, they still have not yet nailed down the concept for my liking, nor shown how this consultancy-generated idea is an advance on what academics have been talking about for years. Indeed, listening to the presentation, a harsh reading might question - what's new! If you have any sense of history in the field, you could justifiably argue that the same message and mode of enquiry has re-surfaced at least five times in since the 1920s and 1930s, beginning with the reporting of some dubious human relations experiments by the arch-evangelist, gifted self-publicist and, some would claim, charlatan, Elton Mayo (I've written about this in the Managing People book) and most recently popularised by Peters and Waterman in the early 1980s when they began the culture-excellence movement with some sketchy research on so-called excellent companies. As many readers will know, half of these excellent companies experienced a significant fall from grace five years after they did their initial research. You can guess where I'm going with using only 'excellent' case study companies as the basis for providing long term predictions - not very clever, and a trap the McLeod report is in danger of falling into.<br /><br />That said, just like In Search of Excellence, we should be careful of throwing out the baby with the bathwater, as some academics did and are likely to do with the MacLeod report. Instead, we should be building on its positives and its capturing of the zeitgeist. What David MacLeod needs to do, contrary to his dismissal of fifty-plus definitions as a way of avoiding the problem, is to begin to get some definitional clarity on the concept. For it is only by doing so that we will be able to measure engagement's impact and understand its drivers. Paul Sparrow's group at Lancaster are beginning to do just that; so are we in some forthcoming papers, where we have begun to disentangle the conflation of engagement into four related but distinct sets of ideas about what workers can engage with (and, just as important, measure them with valid and reliable scales with known drivers and outcomes) .<br /><br />In the corporate reputations book I examined a number of consulting approaches to the concept and found them to be inconsistent in what people were supposed to be engaged with and just plain wrong in confusing correlations with prediction - are engaged workers likely to create high performance organisations, or are high performance organisations likely to create the conditions for engaged workers?. These are not just academic niceties but have important practical implications. Unfortunately, David MacLeod's presentation gave the impression of falling into into both traps.<br /><br />To conclude, we are now at the stage that engagement is too important a concept for academics to dismiss as yet another consultancy-generated fad. It has a lot going for it and needs to be treated a little more rigourously; otherwise the MacLeod Report will loose a lot of its relevance - just like its predecessors!Graeme's HR Bloghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14734917634350985679noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8277129101242163417.post-8794913034655382532009-11-19T08:30:00.008+00:002009-11-20T17:46:05.300+00:00Reflections on the CIPD Annual Conference and The Future of HRI've just spend an enjoyable and highly informative two days attending the CIPD annual conference in Manchester as one of their guests. The invitation to spend time with the senior team of the CIPD was, in part, a result of my involvement as a judge on the technology and HR awards. So, first of all, I've want to congratulate the team at <a href="http://www.ichotelsgroup.com/">Intercontinental Hotels </a>for their leadership learning portal and two extremely able guys at <a href="http://www.bedsandbars.com/about.php">Beds and Bars</a> - both of whom read this blog - who have created something new and practical in the field of e-HR and Web 2.0 with very limited resources and good use of iPhones.<br /><br />My involvement, along with some good academic colleagues, was also to provide academic input and feedback into the CIPD's future initiatives and suggest ways in which the academy and HR professionals can get the best from each other. Again, this was a very welcome and excellent initiative on behalf of the CIPD. So with this last point in mind, I suggest that one of our most important jobs is to act as 'critical friends', though there are additional roles for us in helping contribute to 'thought leadership' (I'm not keen on that term), as advocates of rigour as well as relevance in producing actionable knowledge about HR , and in helping ask the right questions for the CIPDs future research and knowledge agenda. On this last point, for the most part we're typically dealing with 'wicked' problems for which there is no real solution, programme or end point; instead we are only able to resolve inevitable tensions, especially at the strategic level (see earlier post on leadership and negative capabilities) by distributing ownership to those people who have either a better grip on the issues or who have to live with the consequences.<br /><br />So with the critical friend role in mind, I would like to offer some comments on two very important initiatives launched by the CIPD and one that they actively support. The first was the launch of the <a href="http://www.cipd.co.uk/hr-profession-map/?dropdown=sitemap">HR Profession Roadmap</a>, which is one of the most important exercises in competence mapping and building HR capability ever undertaken - at least as far as I'm aware - (<a href="http://www.cipd.co.uk/hr-profession-map/?dropdown=sitemap">download here</a>). The launch breakfast meeting was poorly attended because of heavy rain in Manchester but deserves greater publicity (which I'm sure it will get) because of its potential impact on shaping thinking and practice in HR and building current and future capabilities of the profession. My advice is that any organisation seeking to build HR capacity, and there can't be many not seeking to do so, would be well advised to take advantage of the thinking, frameworks and evidence produced by this project team. I'm working with a number of organisations on capacity building in HR projects and I know I'll be using these standards to help build strategic leadership capacity among senior HR people. Which is where I want to begin my critical friendship!<br /><br />In a piece of work we completed recently on developing a model of strategic leadership for HR directors in NHS Scotland, we cautioned senior HR directors on the limitations of 'atomistic lists of competences. To paraphrase Henry Mintzberg, even when joined up in a circle (or triangle or other geometric shape)', competence models do not provide testable models of relationships among the complex range of factors that produce effective strategic leadership in HR. This is an important cautionary note for practitioners because it is really only by devising <em>causal models</em> (or, dare I say it, theories) of effective leadership that you can truly evaluate the impact of competences, knowledge, attitudes, EQ/ IQ etc) on performance. These causal models should show how,why and what people bring to a job, the styles of leadership they choose, the attitudes and behaviours they demonstrate, etc., result in effective performance (itself a contestable issue). In addition, practitioners also need to understand the complex range of so-called <em>moderating</em> factors which influence this line of sight. By moderating factors I mean how market or stakeholder context, business models of how to create value, values and leadership aspirations, HR architectures, and the capacity of the HR team to create and leverage networks for innovation, combine to influence the process of strategic leadership in HR.<br /><br />Sarah Miles, Organizational Effectiveness and Development Director, and her team at the CIPD have done an excellent job in bringing us so far with the new mapping exercise but were ready to admit they don't have all of the answers. If they are able to build on what they have achieved so far by devising better causal models and setting out the full range of contextual factors organisations need to take into account when implementing them, they will do the profession an even greater favour - a direction we're certainly travelling in.<br /><br />The second major initiative, discussed by Jackie Orme and Lee Sears at the conference and on a <a href="http://www.cipd.co.uk/podcasts/?dropdown=sitemap">recent CIPD podcast</a>, was the results of the <a href="http://www.cipd.co.uk/research/_next-gen-hr?IsSrchRes=1">Next Generation HR </a>Study. Again this initiative is extremely important because it aims to build a picture of future strategic leadership in HR based on research into what leading firms in the UK are thinking and doing. You can read about it in People Management in the November 19th edition or download reports/listen to discussions from the above links, but basically the project has highlighted three trajectories along which organisations are moving - creating greater organisational agility for sustainable performance, (re)building a culture of authenticity and trust, and demonstrating a balanced approach to risk management.<br /><br />Again, I'm really pleased to see this work because it is important for the profession to understand its role in resolving the tensions created by shaping the <em>innovation</em> or 'agility' agenda while focusing on the <em>legitimacy</em> agenda. We've been researching and writing about these agendas and tensions for some time now, and these have been the subject of a number of posts, our book on corporate reputations and HR, a forthcoming one with Ron Burke and Cary Cooper on corporate reputations, some academic papers, and a new chapter on HR's role in contributing to better staff, innovation and financial governance. Our approach has been to discuss them in terms of the <em>wealth creation</em> role of corporate governance (innovation by doing different things and doing things differently) while managing the <em>wealth protection role</em> of governance (developing corporate reputations for being excellent and trustworthy employers, providing effective and ethical leadership and governance, and exercising corporate social responsibility).<br /><br />In other words, both the CIPD and our agendas seem to converge on issues that strategic HR leaders need to address, which is both comforting for us and, if they ever needed it, a degree of validation for the CIPD Next Generation project. Furthermore, I suspect our agendas are likely to become even more important because HR has not only to find ways of adding <em>strategic value</em> but also contributing longer term <em>reputational value </em>to the nowadays somewhat tarnished business sector and its senior leadership teams (at least in the eyes of many). It also has to find ways of contributing to public value in an under-threat public sector, which is having to deal with decreases in public spending because parts of the financial sector have been unable to manage the tensions between the wealth creation and wealth protection roles of governance.<br /><br />I'm going to leave the third sets of comments on the engagement agenda and the McLeod report to a separate post. This one is getting far too long!Graeme's HR Bloghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14734917634350985679noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8277129101242163417.post-77132423437595832382009-11-14T06:43:00.005+00:002009-11-17T07:01:44.473+00:00Putting People Back into HR StrategyMy apologies for the time I've had off from posting. I'vebeen very busy participating in some events which have provided me with excellent examples of how to 'put people back into strategy', the subject of some recent posts<br /><br />I've recently written a paper with Paul Gollan and Kerry Grigg on HR strategy, suggesting that a <a href="http://www.strategy-as-practice.org/">strategy-as-action </a>approach has much to teach us as practitioners and academics about strategic management in general and developing workable HR strategies in particular (see the <a href="http://www.strategy-as-practice.org/">strategy-in-action website</a>). Over the last couple of weeks I've taken part in two health service-related events which have demonstrated the benefits of a strategy-in-action perspective, although participants didn't use this label as such.<br /><br />The first was a large event run by the leadership team of Dumfries and Galloway Health Board, facilitated by an ex-postgraduate student of mine, Sharon Millar, and colleagues from the CIPD, Drs John McGurk and Jill Millar. This event was one of a series they have run aimed at developing workable strategies for building dynamic capabilities in the health board as it moves closer towards partnership working. What was impressive about this process was the volume, intensity and numbers of people involved in the leadership and strategy-making process. In other words, the emphasis at this event and the others which preceded it was very much on strategising and human resource development as much as strategic content.<br /><br />The second was an event I participated in yesterday, run by the Allied Health Professions of Scotland to develop an integrated professional and educational strategy for a group of key workers in the NHS in Scotland. Drawing on a methodology to creating a consensus around the principles and content of such a strategy, it was fascinating to watch how they used inputs from internal and external speakers to develop a progressively more refined series of consensus statements. The process was driven by discussions during previous events where questions about what mattered to staff were posed by about 180 participants at all levels from all Allied Health Professions in all healthboards in Scotland. These questions were then turned over to 'experts' to write research-based papers on the issues raised by participants (of which I was one). During the actual consensus event at Murrayfield Conference Centre in Edinburgh, experts fed back their findings, which were fully discussed by the conference participants and their views were summarised in the form of a progressive series of consensus statements by a panel who acted as facilitators rather than directors of the process. Though the process may not be without its flaws, as a methodology of developing strategy for a group of rather disparate set of professional groupings - around which there was a strong need for consensus - it was a real lesson in how to put people back into strategy and in how to use the strategic journey to develop workable strategies that have much more chance of buy-in.<br /><br />There are important lessons from these events not only for organisations in healthcare, which are dominated by the need to gain the consent of influential professions to survive, but also for the private sector. For example, I'm currently being asked to think about how a large multinational organisation gain insight into values that stakeholders can understand, agree on and draw on to shape their future direction and current actions. I think there are lessons from these two projects that help address this question.Graeme's HR Bloghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14734917634350985679noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8277129101242163417.post-4115430976991805672009-10-10T06:32:00.005+01:002009-10-10T07:39:35.302+01:00Explaining Dissatisfaction with Senior LeadersI'm faced with a little problem on a major research project we are conducting, and that is how to understand why staff in a public sector environment find their senior leadership teams to be disconnected, more interested in politics and government targets and not particularly focused on clients. It's also the subject of a 'provocative' commentary I'm writing about on the need for a leadership 2.0 for <a href="http://www.skillsforhealth.org.uk/">Skills for Health </a>in the UK.<br /><br />As you can imagine, senior leadership teams see the problem quite differently from so called followers. They see themselves as caught up in having to resolve, often conflicting demands from a variety of stakeholders, including the increasing need to meet public value objectives, and having to make tough decisions about resource allocation, which inevitably clash with the single-minded aims of powerful professional groups such as physicians and other clinical grades.<br /><br />I’ve tackled this issue before in an earlier blog on a report Keith Grint and I did on the <a href="http://www.esrc.ac.uk/ESRCInfoCentre/Images/ESRC_PP_Scot_final_tcm6-32117.pdf">'wicked problems' of leadership in the public sector for the Scottish Government</a>. In that report, the issue of distributed leadership (DL) as an important new(ish) theory was raised as a possible panacea, and such is the head of steam behind it in organizations such as the NHS and other public sector bodies in the UK and elsewhere, it needs to be treated seriously, whatever it might mean. <a href="http://www.educ.cam.ac.uk/people/staff/gronn/">Peter Gronn</a>, an ex-colleague at Glasgow University, has written extensively about this issue, and he often provides the starting point for a stimulating conversation. And he certainly did that at an excellent symposium at the British Academy of Management in September on this issue, which attempted to get under the skin of DL through four insightful presentations that have caused me to re-visit my recent thinking on the subject.<br /><br /><a href="http://www.manag.brad.ac.uk/people/people.php?name=jmford">Jackie Ford </a>from Bradford University pointed out that DL has come to the rescue of our unrealistic implicit theories of hero managers in the public sector, point out from her research what most public sector senior managers often feel, i.e. frustration and inordinate levels of stress because they have so little autonomy as a result of agendas being set for the over which they have no control. Leaders, as it were, become arenas for competing narratives and expectations, which they often seek to deflect by laying off responsibility to the centre, or, increasingly look to the language and promises of distributed leadership to others throughout the organization to help them resolve.<br /><br />This was pretty much the message of <a href="http://lea.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/5/3/299">Jon Gosling and Richard Bolden </a>from Exeter following their recent research into leadership in Higher education. They found that distributed leadership existed in the sense that certain responsibilities and decision-making authority were delegated but only within bounds, and that power remained at the top, often linked to control over key resources. They argued that there were four dominant discourses of leadership and DL – as an alternative to management and administration (re-labelling), as a bridge between previous collegial styles and new theories of executive behaviour, as a reality (or appearance of reality) towards encouraging responsible followership, and as a rhetorical device to draw attention to some problems and solutions but mask others.<br /><br /><a href="http://business-school.exeter.ac.uk/staff/profile.php?id=190">Annie Pye</a>, also from Exeter saw ownership as an important missing link, reflecting Barbara Kellerman’s call for responsible followership as a way of thinking about distributed leadership, often operationalised in simple ways such as going the extra mile to help others or offer suggestions on how to improve things. However, in the private sector at least, this was less likely to be the case (unless you worked for a John Lewis organization that shared responsibility, ownership and rewards among all staff) because of the increasing gap between upper and lower eschalons.<br /><br />The session was opened by a good colleague of mine, <a href="http://www.lmu.ac.uk/lbs/staff/staff_profiles/paul_iles.htm">Paul Iles</a>, from Leeds Metrapolitan University. His contribution was to set out some useful two-by-two matrices for comparing and contrasting the various features of leadership. Two of the most useful were to see leadership in terms of being a planned or emergent phenomenon and essentially an individual or collective phenmenon, with celebrity leadership and tradition leader development typically planned and individualistic while DL was typically emergent and collective. One of the best examples of this perspective of DL is work by <a href="http://hum.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/60/7/1065?rss=1">David Buchanan and colleagues </a>on the UK healthcare system, demonstrating that, under certain circumstances, 'no-one in charge' can lead to highly positive outcomes critical areas such as cancer care. However, another matrix has provided me with a perspective to criticise much of this work - that is to see leadership and the assumptions underpinning it either in rational-objectivist- unitary terms or in political/ pluralist terms. The first assumes that organizations among other things are essentially characterised by common cause and common spirit, amenable to rational solutions such as leadership and sophisticated HR. The second is more traditional in industrial relations teaching, seeing organizations made up of legitimate but competing interests, which frequently come into conflict, and are usually only resolved through compromise and negotiation to allow everyone gets something of their aims.<br /><br />I've recently used this last perspective to provoke an arguably more realisitic discussion on the potential of leadership in healthcare to incorporate doctors into management, a popular solution in the UK NHS but one fraught with difficulty. This is because many hold a pluralist perspective and seek to remain a 'loyal' but necessary opposition to ensure that patient care is not submerged in the welter of politically-inspired changes and financially-driven targets. More of this in a later post. The main point, however, is that much of leadership's popularity is rooted in optimistic but innappropriate assumptions about organizations. Criticisms of this arguably misplaced faith in unitarism used to be the recieved wisdom thirty years ago in a more pluralist Britain before Thatcher, when opposition to power was sees in a more positive light, and when social engineering through culture management, HR and the 'cult of the customer' to discipline employees was less prevalent. Are we about to return to these pluralist assumptions with calls for a new leadership 2.0? I don't think so, but the zeitgeist is changing. The 'romance with leaders' is definitely on the wain - even in football, the subject of a forthcoming post.Graeme's HR Bloghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14734917634350985679noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8277129101242163417.post-21782392709225115792009-09-17T07:08:00.007+01:002009-09-18T09:19:31.707+01:00Evaluating the Impact of HR by Evaluating the Signals they SendThere has been an enormous amount of academic and consulting research on the impact of so-called high performance work systems (HPWS) on organizational performance, which has generated great interest in complementary ‘bundles’ of usually high commitment HR practices, including comprehensive recruitment and selection procedures, incentive compensation, performance management, extensive employee involvement, training and career development . Much of this work has linked the mere existence of such practices, particularly when integrated with an organizations business strategy of business model, to positive organizational outcomes. This work has been used by by academics and maybe should be used by practitioners to evidence the credibility and impact of the HR function through the substantial benefits resulting from high commitment HR.<br /><br /><br />However, as anyone who has been the recipient of the mismatch between the ‘people are our most important asset’ and the actual implementation of such practices will tell you, it is not the existence of such practices that are important but the consistency and vigour with which they are implemented, whether or not employees actually expect and value what they deliver and whether their experience of these bundles of practices is a coherent, beneficial and fair one. This was the subject of a symposium we took part in at the British Academy of Management’s HR in Healthcare track, the papers in which were all characterised by a simple but powerful idea, initially put forward by <a href="http://www.buseco.monash.edu.au/mgt/staff/bamber-greg.html">Greg Bamber from Monash</a>. He drew on thinking from a chapter in a forthcoming handbook from Sage on human resource management which suggested that what is important about high performance work systems is not their existence but the signals they send to employees and whether these signals are interpreted by staff as strong - intense and consistent - or weak. This is based on so-called signalling theory: strategies, policies and practices are really signals and it is employee perceptions and behaviours resulting from these signals that really predicts organizational outcomes.<br /><br /><br />Our paper on the employer branding in the Scottish healthcare system could certainly be interpreted in this light. Like much of the other research in healthcare, re-interpreted into the language of signalling theory, we found that staff in healthcare often exhibit low levels of identification and/or engagement with their employers, despite the existence of well intentioned HPWS. This is due, in part at least, to the weak and mixed messages they receive from senior leadership teams, which sometimes see themselves as the 'meat in the sandwich' between at least two forces. The first are government initiatives and targets (often developed to satisfy the needs for politicians and the media to tell and sell simple stories to the general public and the media that shapes their interests). The second is the professional power of certain clinical groups to block their reforms. These mixed and weak messages were core themes of Greg’s paper on the key role of ward managers in fostering high performance and, indeed, as pointed out by Stephen Procter, the chair of the symposium, one of the themes of our own paper.<br /><br /><br />Perhaps the most demonstration of the impact of signals and HPWS was made by Jody Hoffer Gittell from the US, who has written extensively in the field of relational coordination for academics and practitioners (see her <a href="http://www.jodyhoffergittell.info/content/gittell.html">website for a full explanation of her ideas</a>). Jody's paper was, for me at least, one of the most impressive of the conference because of its rigour and relevance to practitioners. She and her colleagues put together a very well constructed study that demonstrated a strong and positive relationship between staff reports of their experiences of HPWS in healthcare and positive organizational outcomes, which included, among other measures, variations in patient experiences and actual results of a particular kind of surgical operation in different hospitals. The line of sight was not a direct one but mediated by staff perceptions and experience of other team members' levels of collaboration and relational coordination. Her findings suggested that a small increase in the experience and reporting of relational coordination among healthcare teams led to proportionately very large increase in patient outcomes. The importance of relational coordination, one key measure of social capital, however, was less apparent among physicians, who tended to be less impressed by the idea or were reported to be less involved by others in relational coordination. This could be put down to structural problems, ie. they operated across a number of hospitals and were less integrated into hospital-based teams. Or perhaps maybe because of their lack of professional training in such issues? One of the implications of the study is that by having physicians more integrated into the care teams in hospitals, so sending signals about the importance of relational coordination, such a change would pay off markedly in key patient outcomes.<br /><br /><br />These ideas have important practical consequences for HR and assessing the impact of HR. Not only should we concerned with the design of HR strategies and architectures but also the signals they send, how they are interpreted and what intervening factors influence the messages received. Our argument is that there are two key ones, which don’t require a great deal of rocket science to understand. The first lies in the skill, will and, importantly, the opportunity (removing blockages and introducing enabling structures) of line managers to implement HPWS. The second is for senior leaders to signal and follow through on the messages of HPWS and, increasingly, on higher values in more ethical, innovative and caring forms of leadership 2.0 (<a href="http://graememartinshrblog.blogspot.com/2009/02/management-20-talent-and-employer.html">see earlier post on management 2.0</a>).Graeme's HR Bloghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14734917634350985679noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8277129101242163417.post-7150198992757692082009-09-11T05:05:00.005+01:002009-09-11T06:10:11.960+01:00Employee Impact on Corporate Reputations and Web 2.0I spent a very pleasant day on Wednesday with the HR team of <a href="http://www.standardlife.com/">Standard Life</a>, one of Europe's major insurance and asset management companies as part of their 'Big Conversation' on the future of HR in the organization. It's great to see companies like this engaging in a serious way with outsiders who can bring something to their conversation to help them reflect on what they do and, hopefully, do things differently. The aim of the day was to help them enhance their own reputations and that of the company, and this was certainly what my co-presenter, Bill McEwen from the <a href="http://www.gallup.com/home.aspx">Gallup Organization, </a>did.<br /><br />One of the benefits that good consultants can bring to the table is often large data sets, which Bill certainly had at his fingertips. His theme was the relationship between employee brand advocacy and a range of customer satisfaction/ enagagement scores, which he demonstrated through close correlations. It was also interesting to see his data on the low levels of brand advocacy among government and financial services employees. However, perhaps the most powerful messages he put across were contained in two little stories. One was of the multiplicative effects of employee advocacy and engagement, e.g. great hotel buildings with disengaged employees equal zero customer satisfaction, according to Ritz Carlton's CEO. The other was the story of Dave Carroll, which appeared in Forbes magazine. To quote Bill:<br /><br /><em>'Dave Carroll was sitting in a window seat on a United plane at O'Hare airport in Chicago when he looked out and saw baggage handlers hurling guitar cases (Dave and his colleagues' guitars) through the air. He pointed it out to flight attendants; they responded with indifference. When he arrived in Nebraska, he found that his instrument had been smashed. After months of complaining to the airline and getting no response, he wrote and performed a song, "United Breaks Guitars," and </em><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5YGc4zOqozo"><em>posted it on YouTube</em></a><em>. It was viewed more than 3 million times in its first 10 days'</em>.<br /><br />Bill's point was that it was the United flight attendant indifference and the indifference of the follow up staff that has caused probably United a great deal in terms of loss of reputation - a great deal more than the investment in effort to promote better customer service among flight attendants and/ or the $3-400 it would have cost United to replace the broken guitars and prevented the posting.Graeme's HR Bloghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14734917634350985679noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8277129101242163417.post-8076056506876330122009-08-24T10:52:00.004+01:002009-08-24T12:03:28.086+01:00Talent Management, Football Teams and MetaphorsFollowing up on the last blog on investment in human capital and social capital, and the example of football teams, I was taken with a little article in this week's edition of the Economist (August 22nd, 2009, p. 32) on the economics of Real Madrid's strategy for re-gaining their competitive position in world football by recruiting a new clutch of gallaticos - a metaphor for what many companies have done in the past and, apparently, one that finds support in the Harvard Business School <a href="http://harvardbusiness.org/product/real-madrid-club-de-futbol/an/504063-PDF-ENG?N=4294932847+516180">study by Jose Luis Nueno of the soccer industry </a>in emerging markets such as the USA, Japan and China.<br /><br />For those people less engaged by football (soccer) than I am, Real Madrid have spent many millions this summer in re-applying a strategy first tried nearly ten years ago by their then president, Florentino Perez. He has has just been re-employed to help the club regain their former pre-eminent status in Spanish and world soccer from their arch-rivals Barcelona, who, interestingly, have followed much more of a 'grow your own', social capital approach to world domination of soccer.<br /><br />The Real Madrid strategy is not just based on the ability of the new gallaticos to turn their considerable individual talents into results but to generate merchandising revenue in the way David Beckham did during the first wave of this strategy. It is also based on the ability of Perez to convince banks in Spain to supply sufficient credit to a club operating in one of the worst hit countries in Europe in terms of GDP growth and decline. Finally, much lower levels of income tax on players coming to Spain than in other European countries helps explain that the real costs to Real Madrid in paying wages is lower.<br /><br />The point of the article is to contrast 'cheque book power' with Barcelona's largely 'home grown' strategy as a route to success. Metaphors, however, such as make or buy strategies are partial - they hide as much as they reveal. What the article fails to mention in Barcelona's strategy of building social capital not only through its attempts to create 'bonds' among the team by its development strategy but by its building of 'bridges' in the community it serves and the wider world through its ethical approach to promotion. So, like all, rather lazy, single factor theories of strategic success, of which sports team metaphors are among the most popular, are likely to be found wanting. Perhaps the secret lies in complementarity among different forms of capital investment. It certainly lies in developing better mid-range theories of success in industries like soccer; otherwise we will end up repeating this make or buy argument in football, which has a long history going back a century or so but has generated little light in what makes for sustainable success.Graeme's HR Bloghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14734917634350985679noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8277129101242163417.post-55199675682064353042009-08-18T06:06:00.006+01:002009-08-18T12:24:23.290+01:00Which Counts More for Performance: Human or Social Capital?We've been doing quite a bit of work recently (one of my PhD students, Stacey <span id="SPELLING_ERROR_0" class="blsp-spelling-error">Bushfield</span> and I) on the drivers of innovation in public sector organizations. These drivers are often described in tripartite terms - human capital (broadly individual competences), social capital (bridging and bonding capital, and trust) and organizational capital (the non-human capital left in the organization when people walk out of the door at night). And this is the basis of the model we are testing in the <span id="SPELLING_ERROR_1" class="blsp-spelling-error">NHS</span> in Scotland, which, like many industries, invests enormous sums of money on talent management.<br /><br />So, it is with interest I read about the recent investments in football stars in the English Premier League and the attempts by one of <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2009/aug/16/barclays-traders-big-bonuses"><span id="SPELLING_ERROR_2" class="blsp-spelling-error">Barclays</span> subsidiaries </a>to pay almost obscene amounts of money to recruit staff from US competitors. It seems that some organizations and industries' strategic recipes are based heavily on human capital and hiring in stars. And, where they go, others seem to follow.<br /><br />However, this strategy for banks and football teams and the unreflective imitation by others seems to fly in the face of good research as <a href="http://faculty-gsb.stanford.edu/pfeffer/">Jeff <span id="SPELLING_ERROR_3" class="blsp-spelling-error">Pfeffer</span> </a>has recently reminded us in citing a series of articles by Boris <span id="SPELLING_ERROR_4" class="blsp-spelling-error">Groysberg</span> from Harvard on the problems of hiring stars. He did so in his book with Robert Sutton on <a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/Facts-Dangerous-Half-Truths-Total-Nonsense/dp/1591398622">Dangerous Nonsense</a>, but here's a recent <a href="http://blogs.bnet.com/ceo/?p=2611">summary of his arguments</a> if you haven't read it. Worth reading and reflecting on because they demonstrate the importance of social capital and its interaction with human capital, which most most of us know about but some forget in <span id="SPELLING_ERROR_5" class="blsp-spelling-corrected">committing</span> the fundamental <span id="SPELLING_ERROR_6" class="blsp-spelling-error">attributional</span> error - attributing too much cause to individuals and not enough to the context. So why don't firms and football teams get it?<br /><br />I recently watched my local football team in the Scottish Premier League draw with and beat two English Premier league clubs (actually one was recently demoted, which tells you something). My club cost less than £500,000 to assemble in total, which was less than the cost of the cheapest player on the demoted side and about a <span id="SPELLING_ERROR_7" class="blsp-spelling-error">hundreth</span> of the cost of assembling both Premier League sides. Cheap shot or a cheap lesson here for talent management?Graeme's HR Bloghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14734917634350985679noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8277129101242163417.post-77817466841430974702009-08-13T22:40:00.007+01:002009-08-14T12:00:11.908+01:00Living the Brand at Abercrombie & FitchOn what has turned out to be a very long journey back from Chicago to Scotland, I found myself killing time in a New Jersey mall after an unplanned ovenight stop at Newark Airport. I chanced to go into <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abercrombie_&_Fitch">Abercrombie and Fitch's </a>store, by far the most popular in the whole mall as far as I could tell. For those less familiar with fashion retailing, A&F is a top casual luxury American brand popular with young college students, so I'm not really sure what I was doing in there. Just a few hours later, I was amused and interested to read in the airport lounge at Newark a <a href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/london/8200140.stm">BBC news a story about A&F in London</a>, which has just been found wanting in its application of its employer brand. A young, highly qualified woman, Riam Dean, had been 'forced to work in the stockroom after wearing a cardigan to cover her prosthetic arm'. The industrial tribunal which heard her case 'is satisfied the reason for the claimant's dismissal was her breach of the 'look policy' in wearing a cardigan. Throughout the hearing A & F's London flagship store management claimed they had an inclusive diverity policy.<br /><br />A couple of points emerge from this case. The first is just how important decisions taken by a local management team can impact on a brand. This item was number three in the national UK news, and may result, like the charges levelled against the Gap and Nike a number of years ago, in costing this company very dearly in terms of reputational capital. The second, slightly more subtle point, is that it illustrates the problems local managers have in interpreting the different strategic logics discussed in previous posts. I can well imagine an agonised discussion/debate taking place either in the head of the manager who took the decision to put the girl in the stockroom, or maybe between a group of managers/ supervisors in the store over the logic of distinctiveness (most fashion brands feel the need to have their staff 'live the brand' in terms of their appearance) and the logic of legitimacy.<br /><br />At 3.00 am this morning my colleagues who were also stuck in the airport with me (<a href="http://www.continental.com/web/en-US/default.aspx">Continental Airlines</a> certainly did not live up to its brand claim for satisfied customers) were debating the merits of sustainable management and corporate social responsibility. Our sleepy conclusions were that new standards of legitimacy will probably win in the end in spite of the edicts of Milton Friedmann on the unitary role of business, forcing firms to become more ethical in their approach to doing business. Not easy to square, but firms like A & F had better eat some humble pie to recover their reputation in the UK at least for being a 'cool brand'.Graeme's HR Bloghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14734917634350985679noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8277129101242163417.post-2411806092382377262009-08-11T18:36:00.003+01:002009-08-11T19:04:24.195+01:00New Perspectives on EngagementAnother wonderfully illuminating session from the AOM conference, which most consultants and HR managers interested in engagement would have found very beneficial. To my mind this session represented all that is good in academic research and made up for what I've not found in any of the consulting work on the topic. It dispelled commonly held myths about the 'engagement industry', helped define what engagement was, provided robust and logical models of the how and why of engagement, and provided some great evidence from extremely tight studies of 'how to get engagement and keep people engaged'.<br /><br />Here's a precis of their blurb (I've only changed the tense, changed a few pieces of academic jargon and added in a few parenthetical comments).<br /><br />'Because of claims from both research and practice that engaged employees result in competitive advantages for today’s organizations, researchers have focused a great deal of their attention on identifying drivers of engagement that could suggest levers for managerial control. The symposium presented four papers that expanded our understanding of key antecedents which help employees become and remain engaged in the workplace. The first paper, by Sabine Sonnentag et al., from Germany was a longitudinal examination of how job demands combine with off-the-job psychological detachment to predict employee engagement. Results suggested that periods of psychological detachment (mentally “switching off”) during non-work hours reduced or eliminated the negative relationship between job demands and engagement.<br /><br />The second paper, by Eean Crawford et al., from the University of Florida was a meta-analysis (a survey of surveys) that clarified ambiguities concerning the relationship of job demands with engagement in the job demands-resources model (this is definitely one that practitioners should get to grips with). Meta-analytic estimates revealed that job resources (autonomy, control etc) had consistently positive relationships with engagement, while job demands appraised as hindrances have negative relationships with engagement and, job demands appraised as challenges have positive relationships with engagement.<br /><br />The third paper, was by Jill Waymire Paine from Columbia (was an absolute gem). It examined multi-level data from five organizations predicting employee engagement in organizational change initiatives. Arguments for change and followers’ regulatory focus (whether they were risk taking optimists, or risk averse pessimists) were most predictive of employee engagement in change initiatives. This paper had really important implications of how leaders management change and keep people engaged while doing so, rather than inducing resistance or cynicism.<br /><br />The fourth paper, by Ronald Bledow et al., from the University of Geissen, examined daily fluctuations!!! in employee engagement and found that positive workplace events interact with social and personal resources to predict daily levels of employee engagement'. Again, this work brings into question the stability over time of a concept such as engagement.<br /><br />Link these papers to the one by Balain and Sparrow reviewed in an earlier blog and you begin to get a far better understanding of what engagement is than anything that I've come across so far. I'm certainly going to use them in my research and consulting, and others may want to do the same.Graeme's HR Bloghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14734917634350985679noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8277129101242163417.post-39570770190663358472009-08-11T00:16:00.008+01:002009-08-11T18:29:59.538+01:00More on Talent Management from the AcademyI'm doing a new chapter with a practitioner colleague of mine for a book on Global Talent Management edited by Hugh Scullion and Dave Collings, so it was with great interest I attended probably the best session for me so far. This was chaired by Paul Sparrow and summarised by Chris Brewster, with some top class presentations in between, all of which will feature in a special issue of the Journal of World Business later this year.<br /><br />I'm not going to try to summarise the papers as some can be found on various websites, including the opening literature review by <a href="http://www.rci.rutgers.edu/~schuler/mainpages/GTM.pdf">Randall Schuler from Rutgers and Ibraiz Tarique</a>. Of the four papers presented two were of most interest for me. The first was by Hugh Scullion, Paul Sparrow and Elaine Farndale on the the role of Corporate HR departments in global talent management. They argued that what they did and how effective they were depended to a great extent on the degree of corporate control or decentralisation of the organization, or in our terms, how the organization addressed the integration-responsiveness logics, which maps onto my earlier posts on this topic on Negative Capabilities. In trying to develop a framework for helping academics and practitioners think more systematically about global talent management, I think they have come up with something of real interest which is both empirically based and shows important connections among the four roles that corporate HR departments play or should play. These four roles are:<br /><br />1. Champions of Process - systems monitors, or in our terms guardians of corporate integration<br />2. Guardians of Culture - in our terms, ensuring integration and legitimacy through spreading the message of corporate values<br />3. Managers of Internal Receptivity - preparing the organization and its business units to facilitate and accept mobility among leaders, and<br />4. Managers of Networks of Leaders and Corporate Intelligence<br /><br />They argued employer branding was the binding tie between 1 and 2, with which I readily agree. We've discussed this in earlier posts as employer branding following a logic of similarity and legitimacy through help build and disseminate shared values. However, there are a couple of problems with the framework, one of which was picked up by Paul Evans, who pointed out the corporate HQ perspective they had on global talent management, a view evidenced by the frequent mention that decentralised multinationals experienced the greatest problems in implementing global talent management. This, of course, depends on where you are standing, because the interests of business units are sometimes in conflict with the interests of the corporation as a whole. And, as Paul Evans rightly mentioned, Web 2.0 technology is facilitating a much greater bottom up approach to talent management, which is not in the gift of corporate HQ to control. I would also add that our discussion of employer branding needing to reflect authenticity and privileging the local (see earlier post) also implies a perspective that global talent management is not something that corporate HR departments should necessarily control in the way they often do - in other words, decentralisation of some decisions on talent is not always a problem, rather the reverse.<br /><br />So, Paul, Hugh and Elaine, if you read this blog(I know we discussed that following the questions you may have to rethink your model a little) you may want to take into account some of these points in revisting your model. But even if you didn't it is certainly a help for HR practitioners in multinationals in giving them a useful framework to think about their jobs in relation to talent management.<br /><br />A second paper from some Finnish and Swedish colleagues presented by Kristina Makela which was also very interesting examined the question of who made it into the talent pool and why. Apart from the obvious reasons connected with performance appraisal, which was a rear view mirror, 'on-line' search', they found three explanations, which were more forward looking, 'off-line' reasons - cultural and institutional distance (the less that this was between corporate HQ and individuals, the more likely they were selected), 'homophilly' (the more like the existing talent pool, the more likely to be chosen) and network centrality (were they key nodes in the organizational networks). Some worrying findings here!Graeme's HR Bloghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14734917634350985679noreply@blogger.com0