Human Centered Organizational Culture

Global Dimensions

Maria-Teresa Lepeley, Oswaldo Morales, Peter Essens, Nicholas J. Beutell, Nicolas Majluf, Maria-Teresa Lepeley, Oswaldo Morales, Peter Essens, Nicholas J. Beutell, Nicolas Majluf

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000368895
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Organisational Development
• Index: Business

This book is part of the Human Centered Book Trilogy, the 2021 volumes of the Routledge Human Centered Management HCM Series. HCM books are pioneering transformation from the traditional humans-as-a-resource approach of the industrial past, to the humans at the center management and organizational paradigm of the 21st century. HCM is built on talent and wellbeing of people in the workplace driving work engagement, quality standards, high performance and productivity for long-term organizational sustainability in the global VUCA (volatile, uncertain, complex, ambiguous) environment.

This book was carefully crafted by recognized international human centered scholars fromfour continents. Although all organizations seek to have an optimal culture, unstoppable disruptions in the VUCA environment easily derail even the best efforts. Conventional assumptions of culture as a unifying organizational force are hardly defendable today. HCM maintains that culture is not only about cohesiveness and consensus but effective management of conflict and disagreements continuously testing the capacity of people to work together. This book is about organizational transformation positioning people at the center. Complementary chapters integrate as antidotes to overcome disruptions in the VUCA environment and the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic affecting people and organizations worldwide.

This and its two complementary titles Soft Skills for Human Centered Management and Global Sustainability and Sensible Leadership: Human Centered, Insightful and Prudent are timely readings for leaders, managers, researchers, academics, practitioners, students and the general public responsible for organizations across industries and sectors worldwide pursuing quality standards and organizational transformation to attain sustainability.

Part I

Human Centered Models of Organizational Culture

1The Human Centered Sustainable Quality Culture in Organizations

Maria-Teresa Lepeley

Why Organizations Need a Human Centered Culture and Quality?

In the article Creating a Culture of Quality, Srinivasan and Kurey argue that quality has never mattered more than today (2014). Indeed, although quality management (QM) and standards emerged over half a century ago, they were first used in manufacturing as a systematic method to attain continuous improvement to produce products without errors, waste and miscalculations to satisfy the needs of clients and avoid returns. But today quality is the most meaningful advantage organizations pursue across industries, sectors and in countries worldwide. It is for all to see that technology has strengthened organizations but overall has empowered customers to seek information and compare ratings of products and services about quality problems, and unhappy customers use social media extensively to broadcast complaints having a direct impact on organizations’ performance, competitiveness and sustainability.

These are some of the visible features of quality-seeking organizations. But quality is a complex construct with roots engrained in a paradigm shift required to ensure the success of the organizational transformation to meet the demands of the Information Age and the Knowledge Economy. In this environment, approaches of the industries that consider human being as just another organizational resource – which are perpetuated in the labels HR, HRM and SHRM – are no longer effective and are harming people in the workplace and obstructing quality attainment. HR is doomed and due for a major overhaul. This chapter discusses causes and effects leading the quality transformation and the consolidating Human Centered Management (HCM) and the Human Centered Organizational Culture (HC OC).

In my book Human Centered Management. The 5 Pillars of Organizational Quality and Global Sustainability (Lepeley, 2017), I provide a systemic model to support the organizational transformation from the humans-as-resources approach to the humans-at-the-center paradigm. HCM is built on QM principles anchored in human capital, and the talent of people in the organization deploys resilience and agility (Lepeley, 2021b) to secure wellbeing in the workplace as a precondition to satisfy the demands of customers to optimize benefits and minimize costs of unavoidable disruptions in the global volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous (VUCA) environment and attain long-term sustainability. The purpose of this chapter is aligned with the main principle of this book: HC OC bloom when people thrive. This is the main quality principle.

The chapter is divided in 3 parts. The Introduction discusses the causes pressing the organizational culture transformation and the need to advance from the humans-as-resources HR locus of behavior to the humans at the center HC imperative. The second part discusses the importance of people’s wellbeing in HC OC and introduces a multidimensional approach integrating the traditional inward-looking approach with the outward vision as condition for quality and sustainability in the VUCA environment. The third part discusses the integration of HCM quality component that is shaping the human centered quality culture in organizations. The chapter closes identifying elements pressing for change and the costs associated with postponing the culture transformation.

What is Organizational Culture?

Organizational culture may be compared to the personality of an organization. It represents the tacit foundations encompassing values, ethical principles, assumptions and behaviors, which originally were established by the organization's founders. Organizational culture commonly shows familiar clues followed by the people who work IN and FOR the organization.

A word of advice is to understand an important difference between working IN and FOR an organization. Although IN and FOR are commonly used interchangeably, HCM calls attention to special differences that mark level of commitment and work engagement that drive performance, productivity and, actually, organizational success and long-term organizational sustainability. Stating that people work IN an organization implies they work and receive a salary for the work they deliver, but it does not necessarily mean they work also FOR the organization. In HCM, FOR requires high commitment with job responsibilities and work engagement. Clarifying that work engagement can only be achieved when workers, regardless of their position in the organizational chart or level or responsibility, feel genuinely happy with the job they do on a daily basis and stimulated to put their best efforts to achieve continuous improvement as individuals and as members of the organization.

HCM highlights the importance and implications of work engagement as an essential element of organizational success and sustainability and it is a critical factor pressing for the transformation of organizational culture. HCM is also aware of the challenges organizations face in order to shape a culture that pleases all and where every person feels included and can be identified with the organization. Whereas organizational cultures tend to unify beliefs and behaviors of its members, the unprecedented diversity in organizations of the 21^st century hinders achievements.

Among other unprecedented disruptions, increasing life expectancy of people brings together up to five different generations to the workplace. This unparalleled phenomenon generates new challenges for organizations that complicate the search for solutions and expose need to find new formulas.

Traphagan tackles the challenges. In his 2017 HBR article We’re Thinking about Organizational Culture All Wrong, he posted that the study of organizational culture commonly conveys the idea of culture as a unifying force that brings people together to work productively toward the attainment of organizational goals. The approach implies that organizational culture is understood as a collective project able to create unity and cohesion in some simple steps. But reality presents a quite different picture because today culture is not only about cohesiveness and unity. It is also about disagreement, discrepancy and disparities constantly testing the capacity of people to work together and benefit advancing common and ethical organizational goals in spite of individual differences.

In HCM, the foundations of an effective organizational culture are built on the continuous search and identification of common grounds aligned with the wellbeing of people in work environments that mirror inclusive societies working for the common good. Culture is shaped by behavioral forces that people use to expedite the achievement of goals. The closer these forces align with organizational pursuits, the better it is for the organization and its members.

Scope of the HC OC Transformation Challenge

The global surveyor Gallup, in its 2017 State of the Global Workplace, reported gloomy results of work engagement. Approximately 15 percent of employees surveyed worldwide expressed they feel engaged with work, compared with 85 percent not engaged or actively disengaged. It is important to highlight that global surveys have limitation and overlooking some important dimensions of work engagement including cultural differences (Kathirasan, 2015) but can help to understand overall situation. Among them the inferences reported by one of the authors of the study, Jim Harter, Chief Scientist of Workplace Management and Wellbeing at Gallup, concluded that these results show a sign of global mismanagement (2018). This confirms the perception and critical calling for deeper assessment and organizational improvement embedded in quality standards.

Gallup calculated the economic consequences in lost productivity in approximately US$7 trillion, not to mention the huge costs in human disappointment and frustration. In view of this, Harperstated that the majority of the workforce not engaged or disengaged with work are not the worst performers but are workers indifferent to the organization and unwilling to support its mission (2018). Although these people give their time to an organization (in exchange for a salary), they are not stimulated to make their best efforts or share their best ideas to advance the organization. In short, it can be inferred that a significant portion of workers worldwide work IN but not FOR the organization.

As far as the human dimension is concerned, whereas most likely these workers at one point in time were willing to make a difference in the organization, most likely nobody noticed their talents or expressed interest in human capital and relevant talents they could provide to improve the organization and got discouraged and detached.

Concerns are growing about the work engagement issues coming from multiple disciplines. Some experts emphasize that organizations are overlooking essential elements of employee wellbeing (Pfeffer, 2018). Recent studies conducted at Harvard University are examining why employee initiatives fall short of human centered expectations (Harvard Business Review, 2020).

The interest on work engagement research has grown steadily since last decade (Schaufeli & Bakker, 2010, Schaufeli, 2012, Schaufeli, 2018) along with expanding exploding studies on happiness that have grown from organizations to the national level (Lepeley, 2017) and international comparisons (Helliwell et al., 2020). Drastic disruptions in the global VUCA environment in 2020 are igniting rapid need to explore organizational culture transformation and new non-traditional approaches.

Accelerating the Transition to HC OC

In the year 2020, while we are producing this and two other complementary books that will be part of a Human Centered Trilogy, people and organizations worldwide are affected by unprecedented disruptions caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. At the beginning of the year, the coronavirus has exposed the world to high health risks due to the spread of infection changing the life and work routines of people worldwide. People quarantined at home for months and increasing numbers of deaths worldwide are also challenging the survival of organizations and industries forced to closing restrictions. The pandemic effects are leading nations into deep contraction of national economies and deterioration of the social strata across societies.

Although this pandemic may not be inducing a need for organizational culture transformation, it is certainly accelerating concerns for a change. Today, there is widespread awareness of management challenges pressing organizations to switch traditional work standards from office work to distance home-based work for millions of workers. In this precarious volatile global environment, organizational cultures with resource-based rigid structures are exposed to drastic consequences and considerable losses.

An article by Stefan Thomke in the March–April 2020 issue Harvard Business Review is highly consistent with ideas I discuss in this chapter. The title is Building a Culture of Experimentations. It takes more than good tools. It takes a complete change in attitude (Thomke, 2020). The lessons conveyed highlights that a culture of experimentation is timely for organizations to prepare for the post-COVID-19 reality. It emphasizes that the main obstacles obstructing change are lodged in the culture, in deep shared behaviors, beliefs and values that shape a culture over time ...