This is the last catchup post to get this blog up-to-current. The timing is serendipitous, the first SHRM paper is coming due and the instructions were to digest the first four weeks of material. So here’s a great chance to go over that.

Week one

Strategic Human Resources Management Are We There Yet?, Becton and Schraeder (2009)

• SHR is concerned with the contributions HR strategies make to organizational effectiveness, and how these contributions are accomplished
• SHR expands the traditional role of HR from bureaucratic to strategic
• SHR can be more involved in transformations using change management techniques
  • can fulfill an important role in change management by helping upper management understand the fear of change and the negative reactions to it
• HR management tends to hold a micro view of the organization and HR managers are viewed as somewhat insular, focusing solely on day-to-day operations
• HR planning is important in its own right, must be done in concert with org’s overall planning process
• importance of a need for a “fit” between HR strategy and overall business strategy
• many HR professionals may not have adequate understanding of business concepts that are critical for acceptance as a strategic partner.
• HR professionals should look to develop additional skill sets such as critical thinking, strategic planning, project management, organizational analysis, consulting, and change management
• HR practitioners are somewhat short-term in their focus. In contrast, SHR requires a long-term focus
• HR can help demonstrate its value to the organization while tracking how well the organization is implementing various policies, systems, and initiatives
• HR professionals should take the initiative to add value to the organization over and above their transactional and administrative functions. By stepping up and adding value first, HR professionals can strengthen their status in organizations
• HR’s shift to SHR is essential for both the viability of the field and for organizations everywhere. Research shows that SHR practices are positively associated with organizational performance indicators

Week two

Toward a new HR philosophy, Allen (2015)

• the gap between HR’s aspirations and actual role persists
• When HR sees itself as manager, mediator, and nurturer, it further separates managers from their employees and reinforces a results-versus-people dichotomy
• Mindful both of problematic patterns in other organizations and of a CEO deeply averse to traditional HR, I have tried to build a different model. Our approach is based on a few core principles:
  • Managers, not HR, should define, live, and develop the company’s leadership.
  • Managers, not HR, should do the hard work of managing people—hiring, evaluating, rewarding, and disciplining employees—and managers should be evaluated on their results.
  • Employees, not HR, should “manage up” and take responsibility for solving problems directly with their managers.
• symbolic but important step of renaming our department People and Organization Development
• leadership development should always be a top priority for HR,
• leadership characteristics we esteem are not unusual:
  • integrity
  • intelligence
  • “thinking like an owner”
  • innovation
  • ability to inspire others
• apply the same leadership principles to every stage of the employee life cycle
• Leadership is also something we expect of all our employees
• We strive to make it clear to everybody that our leadership values are specific to our company. They are the rules we live by.
• we strive to ensure that managers make the critical HR decisions. Managers have to live with the results, so managers should be empowered and held responsible for outcomes.
• If HR constrains decisions too closely managers no longer have the freedom to obtain the results they desire.
• With freedom, of course, comes responsibility
• Goal is to help shape management decisions rather than make them
• We ask a lot of questions and share lots of data, but we don’t come up with the answers.
• Departments make compensation decisions. We make a particular point of not setting predetermined caps for jobs (in technology, for example) that provide a significant competitive advantage. Perhaps surprisingly, this approach does not fuel extravagant pay.
• We teach people-management skills not only to managers but also to employee
• philosophy that leadership skills are critical for everyone in the company.
• we look for very smart people with an interest in the field and a desire to enhance the company’s performance from a people perspective. International education, high test scores, emotional intelligence, and commitment matter more to us than resumes
• Creating a different kind of people function requires a shift in perspective. HR best serves the company’s interest by analyzing and sharing data, building skills, and developing leaders
• By taking what appears to be a less active role than other HR departments do, we are actually gradually achieving greater influence and greater success

People Before Strategy: A New Role for the CHRO, Charan, Barton, and Carey (2015)

• CEOs worldwide see human capital as a top challenge, and they rank HR as only the eighth or ninth most important function in a company. That has to change.
• time for HR to make the same leap that the finance function has made and become a true partner to the CEO - a Chief Human Resources Officer
• business will benefit from better management of not just its financial resources but also its human ones
• chief executive must have a clear view of the tremendous contribution the CHRO could be making and spell out those expectations in clear, specific language
• three activities we think are critical:
  • Predicting outcomes
    • company’s performance depends largely on the fit between people and jobs
    • Nothing overcomes a poor fit
    • CHRO should take the initiative to identify gaps in behavior or skills as job requirements change.
    • CHRO, with the CFO, should also consider whether the key performance indicators, talent assignments, and budgets are the right ones
    • Predicting success means weighing how well-attuned the manager is to outside pressures and opportunities, how resilient he would be if the economy went south, and how quickly he could scale
    • CHRO should also be able to make meaningful predictions about the competition.
    • CHRO should make comparisons unit by unit, team by team, and leader by leader
  • Diagnosing problems
    • CHRO is in a position to pinpoint precisely why an organization might not be performing well or meeting its goals
    • Look beyond obvious external factors, link the numbers with insights into the company’s social system
    • CHRO can help make the critical distinction between a leader’s misstep and any fundamental unsuitability for the job
    • focusing on individual leaders is only half the equation. also be expert at diagnosing how the various parts of the social system are working
    • Some CEOs look the other way rather than tackle conflicts among their direct reports. Problems arise when collaboration across silos doesn’t happen. No amount of cost cutting, budget shifting, or admonition will stem the deterioration. CHROs who bring dysfunctional relationships to the surface are worth their weight in gold
    • CHRO should also watch for employees who are energy creators and develop them. These are the people who get to the heart of issues, reframe ideas, create informal bonds that encourage collaboration, and in general make the organization healthier and more productive.
  • Prescribing actions to add value
    • CHROs should be prepared to recommend actions that will unlock or create value. Might include recognizing someone’s hidden value, moving someone from one position to another, bringing in someone to develop new capacity
    • reassignment of people along with capital reallocation is what really boosts companies
    • company might have such talent buried at low levels. Those individuals might need to be lifted three organizational levels at once rather than moved incrementally up existing career ladder
    • CHRO should be searching for people who could be future value creators and then thinking imaginatively about how to release their talent
    • Another way to unlock value is to recommend mechanisms to help an individual bridge a gap or enhance her capacity
• What not to do
  • CHRO’s new contract should define what she is not required to do. This helps provide focus and free time so that she can engage at a higher level.
  • transactional and administrative work of HR should be cordoned off and reassigned.
• Because compensation has such an enormous impact on behavior and on the speed and agility of the corporation, the best solution is for the CHRO, CEO and CFO to decide jointly
• performance should be measured by outputs that are more closely linked to revenue, profit margin, brand recognition, or market share
• To make the CHRO a true partner, the CEO should create a triumvirate at the top of the corporation that includes both the CFO and the CHRO
• The G3 will shape the destiny of the business by looking forward and at the big picture
• “G3 meetings are a pragmatic activity. When you’re sitting with the CEO and CFO, there’s no place for academic HR. It’s all about understanding what the organization needs to do to drive business performance and how to align those key variables.”
• Often missing from that long term planning process is exploration of the people questions: Will we have employees with the right skills, training, and temperament to achieve the targets
• Discussion of people should come before discussion of strategy.
• There should be no straight-line leadership promotions up the functional HR silo. Aspiring CHROs should have line jobs along the way
• Make it a requirement for people in the top three layers of the company to have successfully worked as an HR leader, and the function will soon become a talent magnet.
• It won’t happen overnight. Stating the new expectations for the CHRO and the human resources function is a good place to begin.
• None of this will happen unless the CEO personally embraces the challenge

The Employment Relationship and Inequality: How and Why Changes in Employment Practices are Reshaping Rewards in Organizations, Bidwell, Briscoe, Fernandez-Mateo, & Sterling (2013)

• employment systems have changed in ways that reflect an “open systems” approach
• Employee tenure has declined, downsizing has become more frequent, and the disparity between the pay of the top and bottom levels of the organization has grown substantially
• increasing numbers of contingent workers via arm’s-length relationships and outsource many previously core functions.
• little attention has been paid to how this has affected inequality
• Our review focuses on these distributional struggles by examining two questions: What has driven recent changes in the employment relationship? And how have those changes affected the distribution of rewards in society?
• detachment of workers from the external labor market meant that compensation systems became internally focused
• When the firm was not forced to adopt internal labor market structures during collective bargaining with unions, it enacted those structures unilaterally in order to preempt unionization
• The years since the 1970s have seen a resurgence of extraorganizational forces
• Characterized by an increase in the influence of external market forces.
• Stable long term employment has been replaced by more flexible arrangements that allow organizations to adapt to environmental demands for their goods and services by restructuring, downsizing, and outsourcing
• recent studies demonstrate substantial changes in worker tenure, especially large among those groups that were previously most isolated from market conditions—namely, men
• Rather than seeking to retrain or redeploy workers, firms have been abandoning them
• Analyses of layoff announcements indicate that layoffs have become less likely to occur in response to declining demand or poor profitability and more likely to reflect reorganizations and attempts to control costs. Employers have come to see the reallocation of workers into the external labor market as a normal business practice rather than a last resort.
• Employees’ exposure to the market has also increased due to changes in benefits practices. Changes in benefit format have transferred market risk from employers to employee. Shift from a “defined benefit” to “defined contribution”
• use of contingent work and outsourcing has also grow
• about 8% of workers across establishments are in some sort of contingent employment relationship
• temporary help employment increasing from less than a quarter of a million in the early 1970s to some 2.3 million at the end of the 2000s and accounting for nearly 10% of US employment growth for the period 1990–2000
• Such arrangements thus turn a hierarchical, firm–employee relation into a market-based, firm-to-firm relation
• growing concentration of certain occupations (e.g., computer programmers and janitors) in the business services industry
• Even as firms were allowing more market-based practices, expanding collection of workers’ rights protections were evolving that shielded some workers from the full force of the market. Regulations promoting equality for women and minorities continued to have a strong influence on employment practices
• many of those practices had by the 1980s and 1990s become institutionalized and accepted by courts as key ingredients for employers to demonstrate nondiscrimination
• recent decades have also seen a parallel shift in the focus of worker protections inside firms, a movement toward a recent decades have also seen a parallel shift in the focus of worker protections inside firms
• newer wave of programs and benefits instead reflect responses to pressure from social identity–based movements that directly petitioned organizational decision makers to make changes in their firms
• As we have moved from nationally-based manufacturing economies to a technology-enabled and services-heavy global market, the nature of work is much different from what it used to be. Governance must also be different
• organization of employment shapes “who gets what” and many stakeholders therefore try to influence employment arrangements to increase their share
• tremendous increase in resources that corporations have committed to influencing government from the late 1970s onward
• the rise, in political circles during the 1980s and 1990s, of economic neoliberalism
• As workers lost power relative to other groups, their ability to demand protections from their employers also declined
• starkest indicator of the shift in power from workers to employers is the decline in union membership,
• decline in union membership in the private sector, falling from about 25% in the mid-1970s to just below 7% in 2012.
• timing roughly coincides with employers’ increased push into the political arena and the election of a Republican president who was notably hostile toward unions
• decline of unionization could thereby explain from a fifth to a third of the growth in inequality
• last few decades have seen an increase among workers in new forms of collective action based on social identity rather than social class
• Some employment-related movements have sought to blend social identity and economic class
• investors as a class consolidated their influence on a wide range of corporate practices during the 1980s
• Governance structures emphasizing shareholder value were implemented during the 1980s and spread most rapidly after the 1987 stock market crash
• Today institutional investors hold approximately 60% of corporate equity
• Extant research suggests that the shareholder value movement legitimized many of the changes to the employment relationship discussed in the previous section
• “retain and reinvest” approach, which kept employees and profits internal to the organization, was replaced by a “downsize and distribute” approach
• When financial investors increased their influence on senior management during the 1980s, HR professionals began to articulate a shifting view of their role in the firm—namely, as a partner in the company-wide goal of creating financial wealth for investors.
• HR profession from the 1980s to 2000s also became involved with social identity–based movements in the advancement of diversity employment practices
• HR professionals well-positioned to reframe diversity and work-family practices in terms of the former’s interests.
• with the rise of investor capitalism, HR managers reinvented many employment practices under the concept of “diversity management”—a rational, business case–oriented focus justified by corporate effectiveness, not societal fairness
• HR professionals also reinterpreted existing diversity programs aimed at racial and gender equality, away from a basis in compliance with government regulations, and toward the business case for diversity’s contribution to firm performance
• professional associations were also active in shaping these changes
• Although macro trends associated with globalization, technology, and workforce demographics clearly set the stage for change in employment practices, we argue that the shift in power from unions to shareholders is also an important explanatory factor. In addition, we have highlighted the emerging role of new social identity movements that have affected employment practices related to targeted groups of workers. Other firm-related institutional actors, such as the HR profession, have weathered these changes by adapting their rhetoric and activity.
• research emphasizes in particular the challenges that the changing employment relationship has created for less-privileged workers
• Although some of these disadvantaged groups may have simultaneously benefited from institutional pressures on firms to adopt protective practices, it is unclear that those pressures have effectively counterbalanced the market.
• original literature on internal labor markets argued that compensation within firms aimed to balance demands for equity. move toward more market-based employment has reduced the influence of these organizational attributes on pay.
• with increased penetration of market forces, organizational characteristics have also become less important in setting pay
• premium associated with employment in a large firm declined by nearly a third from 1988 to 2003
• stronger evidence that ability and performance have become more important for setting pay
• distinctions between workers who were promoted versus hired into their jobs and between regular versus contingent workers.
• merit-based pay can increase ascriptive bias—especially when pay plans have not been formalized.
• paradoxical that an emphasis on meritocracy would promote bias
• Increasing likelihood that a worker will enter employment via external mobility also has consequences. workers entering their jobs through hiring earn more than those entering similar jobs through promotion
• other evidence suggests that this pay growth may partly reflect the lower initial pay of such workers
• As employment relationships have become more diverse, there is more evidence suggesting that the terms of a worker’s employment matters
• outcomes for contingent workers need not be bad and instead tend to be polarized: low-skill contingent workers usually do worse than regular employees but higher-skill contingent workers often do better
• formalized pay processes within internal labor markets tend to reduce disparities across different demographic groups. As workers are taken out of those formalized systems, there is concern that discriminatory processes may creep back into pay setting.
• changes to the employment relationship have also affected the overall level of wage inequality in the United States.
• growth of incentive pay could account for about 20% of the increased dispersion in (log) pay between 1976 and 1993 and for nearly all of the increase in inequality within the upper half of the income distribution.
• External hiring appears to have contributed less to overall inequality
• decline in employer-provided health and welfare benefits contributed to the rise of inequality during the 1980s and 1990s
• distribution of rewards within organizations depends not only on how people are paid within jobs but also on how they are matched to those jobs in the first place
• processes that allocate workers to regular employment versus contingent or outsourced employment are becoming a substantial determinant of rewards
• At the same time, institutional pressures to protect the rights of minorities and families have led firms to develop practices aimed at increasing the access of disadvantaged groups to jobs
• external hiring tends to favor workers with more visible credentials
• external hiring processes make heavy use of candidates’ social networks. important implications not just for hiring, but for post-entry social structure and careers
• network-based hiring favors the persistence of gender inequality
• racial minorities’ lack of access to certain kinds of social networks reduces their job prospects, though a study found that minorities face little difficulty being hired through networks when there are already minorities in the organization
• effects of allocation to contingent positions depend in part on how long workers remain in contingent work
• Although extant research suggests that the growth of market-based practices has often served to disadvantage women and ethnic minorities, recent decades have also seen firms implement practices aimed at reducing the historic barriers
• diversity management practices such as training or mentoring are seldom effective; the most effective efforts involve “establishing responsibility” by assigning affirmative action officers, establishing diversity managers or departments, and/or setting up a committee or task force.
• although work-family benefits have spread widely, utilization rates tend to be low
• In addition to affecting the distribution of rewards within organizations as just described, changing employment practices have also affected inequality by changing the relative share of wealth received by the firm’s various stakeholders
• share of workers’ wages in GDP fell from 60.1% in 1980 to 55.2% in 2011, while corporate profits increased from 6.1% to 9.2%
• What is less clear, though, is whether the growing income share of corporations relative to employees is a consequence of the practices documented here or, instead, a manifestation of the overall shift in power from workers to shareholders.
• it is difficult to find sustained evidence that layoffs have benefited shareholders
• evidence continues to accumulate that turnover—the corollary of such hiring—has damaging effects on business performance
• use of outsourcing and contingent work has benefited employers. companies disclosing a high reliance on nonstandard workers report higher subsequent profits and increased stock return
• modest evidence that the greater use of incentive pay has increased employer profitability
• While it is clear that employers have driven many of the changes that we have seen in employment relationships over the last thirty years, how much they have directly benefited from those practices therefore remains unclear
• Recent changes in US employment relationships have substantially redrawn the social contract between workers, employers, investors, and other stakeholders.
• organizations play a dominant role in shaping inequality within their own boundaries and, by extension, across society.
• A system perspective draws attention to the multiple levels of action and actors involved in the employment relationship
• the result of taking a systems perspective would not be the portrait of a single, monolithic system but rather a collection of clustered patterns
• we must answer several important questions about how different stakeholders affect organizational employment practices—especially as regards the influence of investors and HR professionals.

Week three

Motivating the knowledge worker, Frick (2011)

I took note that the list of the top negative factors in this article placed ineffective technology at number six. That got me thinking about how my peers in the nonprofit technology community talk about transforming IT from a service within a business to a partner in the success of the business. And subsequently realized that there’s a parallel between that goal and the transformation of HR that we’ve been studying in this class.

• Knowledge workers are a growing sector of the workforce and are the backbone for entire federal agencies.
• individuals who self-select into government service are motivated be a more intrinsically motivated set of factors
• Distinction between employee motives and work motivation. Motives are the rewards workers would like to receive. Motivation is defined as the drive workers have to perform their jobs well
• A significant weakness in civil service is the inability to weed out inferior performers
• Job security is the tradeoff for a lagging pay policy
• a study to gather the opinions of a group of independently identified, high-performing federal civilian employees developed a rank-ordered list of factors that may be most effective in establishing an environment that motivates high-performing knowledge workers to maintain high levels of performance.
• This research identified a set of conditions that are effective in cultivating a state of positive motivation among knowledge workers of the federal workforce
• knowledge workers are not subordinates; they are ‘associates.’ For, once beyond the apprentice stage, knowledge workers must know more about their job than their boss does—or else they are no good at all.
• finding a single model to portray how all people are motivated has proven to be extremely difficult.
• At least 34 principal theories of motivation have some application to business. Most are contradictory.
• Salary (base pay) has a short motivational time span
• We tend to promote people to their level of incompetence because we still think that the most creative way to reward excellence in a role is to promote the person out of it.
• “The theory of public service motivation (PSM) suggests public employees are more likely than private sector employees to hold pro-social values and seek opportunities to help others benefit society”
• Attraction to policy making, commitment to the public interest, compassion, and self-sacrifice are all identified as key components
• factors that are most influential are intangible, emotion-based, and intrinsic
• five most influential negative factors are principally influenced by external actors
• This group of federal employees expressed a preference for intrinsic (internal) factors.
• This result was unexpected by the author, who expected factors consistent with Equity Theory to dominate. However, the expected key words, e.g., fairness, equality, justice, deserved, were scarce in the responses. Either the current environment is equitable or equitability is not a significant factor.
• The results of this study also support the assertion that Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, Herzberg’s Two-factor Theory, and McGregor’s Theory X/Theory Y are highly relevant
• strategic leaders should eschew the common approach of attempting to develop programs and policies to motivate the workforce. Leaders cannot force motivation. Leaders can mold an environment that allows workers to motivate themselves.
• The traditional management approaches that appeared effective for the assembly-line workers of yesteryear are counterproductive when applied to the knowledge-based workforce. The monumental challenge for today’s leaders is to abandon the management practices of the last 50 years
• The recipe for “doing more without more” is a simple one—one part solid, insightful leadership and two parts “getting out of the way.

Employee satisfaction, Schramm (2003)

• Changes in demographics and a shifting industrial base will have a considerable impact on job satisfaction in the future
• HR practitioners can meet this challenge by preparing for the future and by focusing on areas where they can make a difference
• Job satisfaction means different things to different people depending upon their age, gender or other demographic differences
• For older workers, job security tops the list
• For women, work/life balance. As gender roles become more fluid, this could change. Unlikely to decrease in emphasis.
• High levels of educational attainment mean that companies looking for skilled workers need to be able to attract women
• Little research has been done on what attracts highly skilled immigrants
• Employees in the service sector were most dissatisfied
• Health industry, high growth but low satisfaction
• Company size plays an important role in job satisfaction. People appear to grow less satisfied as the size of the organization increases.
• It is important to project what your workforce is likely to look like in the future and use that to prepare.
• Four issues which come up frequently in studies on job satisfaction:
  1. communication with management
  2. work/life balance
  3. relationship with immediate supervisor
  4. career development
• stability and security of a permanent position seems to be what most workers want right now
• successfully addressing even a few of these issues could make a real difference in job satisfaction in your organization

Turning the ship around with a four-generation crew, Schoch (2012)

• four generations of employees are now working side-by-side
• Traditionalists (greatest generation)
  • grew up in a time of war, so they like to keep the peace
  • frugal
  • have lived long enough to think their advice is valuable, and sharing it
• Baby Boomers
  • Boomers believed in power to the people, and they have maintained that power. Their sheer number made them a force to be reckoned with
  • work ethic is strong, and they often keep their heads down to get it done
• Gen X
  • Gen X is half the size of the Boomer and Gen Y generations
  • independent, resourceful, self-sufficient, and less trusting
  • not impressed with authority.
  • keen on developing new skill sets to maintain marketability
  • work hard and play hard
  • Family life is very important
  • very good at networking
  • more likely to be interested in higher salaries
  • tend to be the least idealistic of the four generations
• Gen Y (Millenials)
  • complex, creative, contradictory, impatient, entrepreneurial, mobile, and like instant rewards
  • People are more important than money
  • idealistic
  • have not found their one consistent ideal, but when they do, they implement it with a passion
• When implementing organization-wide changes, important to include representatives from all generations
• some managers identify a non-generational group, sometimes referred to as “Generation C,” which has embraced technology as the solution to most work process issues. Traits are:
  • adept at communication
  • creative at using tools
  • cognizant that learning curves should be used as a challenge
  • ageless, view technological advancement as inherently progressive
• Some individuals learn faster through visual stimulation, others learn better by listening
• training programs need a variety of media with a consistent message
• Pushback will be encountered, but maintain your ground with the understanding that every generation has its underlying stress