The Future of HR

Understanding Knowledge Management for Motivation, Negotiation, and Influence

Helene Sætersdal, Jon-Arild Johannessen

• Publisher: Emerald Publishing Limited
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9781838671808
• eBook ISBN:
  9781838671815
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Human Resource Management
• Index: Business

HR departments are in transition. From 1980 to today, HR management has shifted into a strategic function of the company. The globalisation, digitalisation and techno-focus of the modern workplace is at the centre of a new organizational design, and with change comes resistance, particularly for employees who see this new design as a threat to their positions. For people to keep up with technology, HR management must evolve to embrace these changes. 

Through a student-led perspective, leadership experts Jon-Arild Johannessen and Helene Sætersdal discuss how the HR department can develop to face the challenges of the 21st Century, including new roles and functions to create an ambidextrous organisation. With 51 reflection tasks throughout, Johannessen and Sætersdal help students explore how to reduce resistance to organisational change and create a healthy work environment, through techniques such as mindfulness, negotiation, and enthusiasm. This is an ideal read for any student of management and leadership looking to understand the challenges HR departments are facing, and how they can help change the way the game is played for the future of work.

Chapter 1

An Introduction to the Book

1.1. Learning Goals

• How leaders can improve organizational performance by applying positive psychology.
• Facilitate leaders’ application of positive psychology in their leadership practice.
• Evaluation of learning goals through the student tasks 1–11.

1.2. Introduction

Classical organizational psychology has been criticized for no longer having anything to offer to organizational change projects (Burnes & Cooke, 2012). According to Lewis, this is a situation where positive psychology may assist and have new knowledge to offer for a new era (2015, pp. 329–338). According to Cameron (2013, p. 149), positive psychology is about implementing various practices that will help individuals and organizations to achieve optimal performance.

The question is why don’t all organizations apply positive psychology, if it has proved to be so effective in practice? There are two reasons:

(1) People have a tendency to focus more on negative factors of an organization than the positive ones. This is because “bad is stronger than good” (Baumeister, Bratslavsky, Finkenauer, & Vohs, 2001, pp. 323–370).

(2) In academic milieus, within which leadership training is conducted and among the leaders who should be applying organizational psychology in practice, there is little or no competence in the area of positive psychology.

The everyday activities of many organizations are dominated by crises, hazards, threats, challenges and problems; as Cameron explains (2013, p. 149), businesses are preoccupied with problem-solving. Accordingly, they focus on weaknesses and threats, which means that organizations view possibilities and opportunities from the perspective of being under threat. These everyday problems in turn focus attention on negative factors. This can be one of the reasons why the importance of positive psychology is downplayed.

Some of the consequences of applying positive psychology in an organization are the increased abilities of individuals to master their roles, and their attitudes, moral courage, enthusiasm and curiosity become more focused. In order to achieve these outcomes, it is crucial that leaders learn to give negative feedback in a positive manner. Helping others to master their roles is thus an important function in this new kind of leadership. Mastering a role also has an effect on the individual such that he/she dares to stand up for his/her moral values and takes moral responsibility. The consequences of applying positive psychology in an organizational context include recognition of the moral courage and self-belief of the individual. The fact that the individual stands up for his/her values in this manner also has an effect on their attitudes. This focus on role mastery, moral courage and attitudes, along with the growing demand for creativity and enthusiasm to foster innovation within an organization, means that organizations need to develop a new type of leader role.

1.2.1. Student Reflection Task 1

1.2.1.1. Case Letter

The new leadership role should have an understanding of how to lead members of Generation Y. Generation Y is made up of people, also known as “millennials”, who were born around the turn of the century (Espinoza & Ukleja, 2016). These new people in the workplace can be described, quite simply, as digital anarchists. For this generation, creativity and innovation are not just goals but necessary criteria for work (Martinson, 2016). Some of the content of this new leadership role in relation to Generation Y is a growing demand that employees exercise autonomy, self-management and self-organization, together with growing demands in the surrounding world that leaders must be “authentic”. To achieve this “authenticity”, the new leader must restructure his or her organization in a way more like a frontline organization than a classical hierarchical organization. In practice, this means that those employees who are in contact with the customer, user, patient, student, etc. are given more attention, decision-making authority, information and remuneration (Reinmoell & Reinmoeller, 2015).

Student task: Develop a step-by-step strategy of how to handle Generation Y.

1.2.1.2. How to Make a Difference

Since the beginning, positive psychology took the strengths of the individual as its starting point, and then built further on what the individual had already successfully mastered (Seligman, 2003). Accordingly, positive psychology will harmonize well with the demands that members of Generation Y place on workplaces and business leaders.

It can often be difficult to know – both for the individual and for the person(s) responsible for leading them – where an individual’s strengths lie. As a rule of thumb, an individual may be more likely to succeed in activities at which he or she excels and has a burning desire to make a difference (Lewis, 2015, pp. 332–333). Successful identification of these areas will improve the performance of both the individual and the entire organization. Leaders who understand this small point will be able to transform their organizations from “good” to “outstanding” and will also bring out the best in Generation Y, because these people are motivated by the results that they can create in a freely anarchic digital universe (Espinoza & Ukleja, 2016; Martinson, 2016). Generation Y can be characterized as an extremely creative generation whose members are motivated primarily by new things they can bring to the world: new concepts, creative solutions and innovations. If one is to lead these people, classical organizational psychology, classical motivational psychology and hierarchical leadership models all represent very poor choices (Martinson, 2016).

The development of positive psychology from 1998 onwards has created many areas of application, tools and techniques. We discuss some of the areas here. In this introductory chapter, we focus on how business leaders can come to terms with the following question: how can I improve organizational performance by applying positive psychology?

Before we answer this question, we have to focus on four sub-questions.

(1) How can I apply mastery among employees in order to improve organizational goal achievement?

(2) How can I apply attitudes among employees in order to improve organizational goal achievement?

(3) How can I apply enthusiasm as motivation in order to improve organizational performance?

(4) How can I apply mindfulness as motivation in order to improve organizational performance?

The main question and the five sub-questions are illustrated in Figure 1.1.

Figure 1.1:Aspects of the Positive Psychology of Leadership.

Figure 1.1 also shows how this chapter and the rest of the book are structured. We begin with a brief description of classical workplace and organizational psychology. Next, we describe, analyse and discuss positive psychology in relation to workplace and organizational psychology. We move on to consider mastery, attitudes, enthusiasm and mindfulness as motivational factors in relation to the positive psychology of leadership.

1.3. Reflections Upon Classical Organizational Psychology

The majority of people spend their working lives in an organization, company or institution. How they are managed, how they work together and how the work is structured will have an impact far beyond the organization, company or institution’s boundaries. Society and families are greatly affected by how organizations perform. For instance, take the case of a hospital. If the hospital is not organized and managed well, it will negatively affect the individual patients and their families, as well as society. Consequently, it is not inconsequential how we organize and manage people, rather, this has huge social consequences far beyond the walls of a particular organization.

Organizational psychology deals with the study of the organization and management of organizations. It focuses on understanding the behaviour of individuals and teams in an organization (Jex & Britt, 2014, p. 1) with the aim of increasing the efficiency so that the organization performs better. When an organization is more productive, it also has an improved working environment, but this is not necessarily the case and the reality could be the other way around (Espinoza & Ukleja, 2016). We are accustomed to thinking that the work environment affects the performance of an organization or business. Although this may often be the case, it may be equally correct to think that if productivity, performance or earnings are increased or the quality of service is improved, then the work environment may also be positively affected. In other words, no matter how one views the relationship between the working environment and performance, everybody wins by improving both the elements. There may not necessarily be a linear relationship between the work environment and organizational performance. It may rather be circular or interactive; for instance, you could start with improving performance by introducing new technologies. Such relationships involve work and organizational psychology, and can be approached through systemic thinking (Johannessen, 2016).

This book provides students with an understanding of how the new organizational and leadership psychology can contribute to improving how organizations are managed and organized without ignoring the importance of classical organizational psychology. Both the classical and new organizational psychologies can make important contributions in this context, which we should reflect upon and apply in practice.

A classic and ground-breaking book on organizational psychology, The Social Psychology of Organizations, was written by Katz and Kahn (1966). The development of organizational psychology in the 1900s and twenty-first century can be briefly described as follows.

In the early 1900s, “scientific management” evolved as a dominant theory of management aimed at improving labour productivity and efficiency by analysing workflows, among other things; scientific management is also referred to as Taylorism, and is also related to Fordism.

Since the 1920s and till the early 1930s, productivity received even more emphasis. The classic Hawthorne studies showed that workers are more productive when they are given more attention. This can be described as management theory’s first rule: employees want to be seen. The managerial consequence of this rule is that managers need to provide continuous feedback to employees so that they feel that they are valued.

In the 1960s and 1970s, there was a greater focus on stress in the workplace, and the relationship between home and leisure.

Globalization, which began around the time of the 1980s, led to a new understanding of what constitutes work. Greater emphasis was given to results and less to how activities were performed.

After the turn of the new century and towards 2010, t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Chapter 1 An Introduction to the Book
• Chapter 2 HR and Managers’ Handling of Employees’ Attitudes
• Chapter 3 HR and Enthusiasm as Motivation
• Chapter 4 HR and Mindfulness
• Chapter 5 HR and Influence
• Appendix: Process Pedagogy
• Index