Final Blog Post on Organizational Performance, PA

Imagine you and three friends started your own business. Each of you has strengths, one friend is good at the financial and accounting functions, another good at marketing, the third knows the product and service inside and out and you consider yourself to be a generalist with excellent people skills. Suppose further, that everything goes well for a couple of years. Each of the friends assumes mastery over his function, and enlists the support of members of his family, wife, children even brothers and sisters to help carry out operations. This informal help eventually becomes formalized and many of these family members are put on payroll.

During the early years, when it remained just the four of you, none of you would have dreamed of bringing up the notion of merit pay, job analysis or performance appraisal. You would meet once or twice a week to discuss how things were going, to plan, and to coordinate upcoming events. Each of you had so much respect for the others that you would not dare raise the matter of “doing better”, even if there were downturns in business. You had started as equals and it did not seem right to change. The business, after all, was not as old as your friendship. In fact, as we said before, one way to define friendship is as two people interacting but allowing the other to retain ownership of him or herself, to more fully develop his or her identity as an individual.

Consider the differences between your small company and a large organization with formal systems. In the case of your business, things are accomplished due to trust, communication, commitment, competence and loyalty. You trust one another, so you do not need to implement a performance appraisal system. You communicate well, so job satisfaction, morale or feelings of being “left out” never get so bad you cannot just talk it out. You are all committed, so there is no need for some sort of merit pay or incentive system. You are all competent so you do not have to worry about training, development or selection systems. And you are all loyal, so the issue of grievances, retention and turnover, never surface because you would not dare let business ruin your friendship.

Would it ever be possible to organize a large number of previously unacquainted people, around the principles of trust, communication, commitment, competence and loyalty; so that there was no need for a performance appraisal system, participation programs, selection, training and development, grievance procedures, retention efforts and the like? It might be, but the challenge would increase as the organization grew in numbers of people and in quantity and variety of subsystems.

Returning to the company of four friends, what would have to transpire to make you need to start formalizing systems? One thing, of course, would be to add employees. Notice that it would be almost impossible for the four of you friends to fully explain to the new people how you operate. They will not be accustomed to such a way of doing business and may take your lack of formality as a sign of disorganization. Or some of them may see the absence of formal systems as a surefire way to get paid for doing whatever they want to do, whether it serves your business or not.

Ultimately, you will probably need to put in place certain checkpoints, boosters and correction devices. Performance appraisal can serve as a way of checking developmental progress, as a boost to an associate’s performance or as a way to correct or readjust the associate’s understanding of what is important to the company. However, come what may, it remains important that the company continue to stress trust, communication, commitment, competence and loyalty. How can this be done?

PA is something of a gamble. If the PA system is poorly designed or implemented, it can serve to undermine the five important variables we are discussing. Merely the idea of putting a PA system in place indicates a doubt in trustworthiness. It might be something like a wife deciding to park in the dark beside the exit from her husband’s workplace and tailing him home every evening. Such behavior on her part suggests at least two possibilities. Either she has found reason to suspect that he is cheating or she has become insanely jealous and cannot be trusted herself, since her judgment has led her to snoop on him with no probable cause.

If he finds out she is doing this, his trust in her will be undermined, if he is not cheating. If he was cheating, he may take a few different courses of action. He may lie and try to cover it up, perhaps evening acting enraged that she would not trust him. He may decide to confess and ask for a divorce. He may not let her know that he knows she is tailing him and figure out stop dropping by and seeing his tryst on the way home from work, if he has previously been doing that. In short, almost no good might come out of snooping on him.

However, if she asks him why it takes him longer than the normal driving time to get home each evening, the confrontation will lead to a lot of the same sorts of outcomes. Not many marriages would last very long if both partners made it a requirement that each tells the other exactly how he or she spent every hour of every day when they were apart. In other words, a performance appraisal system automatically signals distrust, can strain communication, and might undermine commitment and loyalty. Competence or performance of one’s role may even be compromised because of the reduction in commitment.

Of course, the relationship between an employee and the company for which he or she works is not exactly the same as that between two marriage partners. The relationship between two small business partners is closer to that of marriage partners, but in the context of a large number of employees working for the same company, performance appraisal seems more justified.

The formal written job contract is like a prenuptial agreement. You might say the employee-employer relationship is something of a Hollywood marriage, with both partners having been married many times before. (In fact, the employer practices polygamy, right? And so do moonlighting employees. ☺)

What makes PA more acceptable when it involves a relationship between employees and large companies? The employee and the employer haven entered into a limited exchange agreement. The employee agrees to pay the company in time, expertise and effort in exchange for the company’s payment in monetary and other agreed-upon forms of compensation. The company cannot simply agree to pay the person whatever they can afford for a given pay period. Therefore it seems only right that the company expect that the associate not give just the amount of effort he or she has left over after taking care of other obligations, more one week, less another, up and down week to week. The pay stub (or statements about other benefits) is the associate’s opportunity to appraise the contractual performance of the employer, so you might say that a formal performance appraisal system is the employer’s opportunity to appraise the contractual performance of the associate.

What we are looking for in a PA system is an acceptable substitute for intimacy-based trust, loyalty, communication, commitment and competence assurance. The great difference is that for friends who are business partners, the friendship may come first, whereas for bureaucracies and other forms of large organization, friendship is often not possible, since the required level of interaction is precluded by distance, time constraints, or differences in role obligations.

Let us consider the ways that PA can do damage in an organization, prior to looking at how it might be beneficial. (In almost all cases, those who “do well” as judged by the PA system, do so at the expense of those who do not “do well”. This is because most PA processes require that the rater achieve variation in the ratings he or she gives. For the most part, real variance is made secondary to rating variance.)

For every rating situation, there is what might be called a “true score” and then there is the “assigned score”. The true score is never known, but assumed to exist. To varying extents, raters and other consumers of PA results, will imply that the “derived” or “assigned scores” are actually “true scores”. Deep down, everyone involved in the process knows this is not the case.

We all have spent years involved in one of the most elaborate PA processes known to modern humans, namely that which pertains in an academic setting. A professor assigns students positions on either side of an issue relevant to the subject they are studying and asks each of them to lead the in-class dialogue on his or her side of the issue. Consider some of the important factors that help determine the “score” each student receives.

The professor will have had to weigh alternatives of how explicit to be in instructing the students as to what will be considered excellent performance on the assignment. Explicit instructions may take away any possibility of innovation or creativity by the student. Doing this will make the professor’s grading process easier, but it may well turn the entire exercise into something far less meaningful for everyone involved.

Vague instructions may mean that everyone who completes the assignment, does so with different conceptions of how it ought to be done. This makes the professor’s grading job much more difficult since he or she will be comparing “apples to oranges”, so to speak. However, the freedom afforded each dialogue leader may allow for highly creative approaches and thus for a more rewarding experience.

Notice that in work organizations, if performance standards are rigid and detailed, the result may be more reliable criteria by which all those judged will be appraised, however, this benefit to consistency in ratings may come at a sacrifice of interpretive excellence on the part of the individual worker. That is, in the case of explicit criteria, it may be relatively easy to tell those who do an inadequate job of playing their role from those who do a poor job, whereas with more open-ended criteria, the individual performers will each have freedom with which to interpret the role they are playing.

Notice how the job itself will make a difference in this regard. If a person’s job is to remove bushings from a rotating machine, hammer a key in place on one side of the bushing, run it quickly through a liquid that removes any metal shavings from it, and place it in a nearby basket, moving quickly to repeat this process and to do this all day long, it would be possible to simply count the number of correctly processed bushings at the end of each day, and thus have a fairly accurate number approximating a “true score” for that person.

Suppose, on the other hand, the person’s job was to take from and hand to, set-up tools, for each person clocking off one machine and on to another. This person would be stationed at the back of the large room full of machines, possibly in a cage-like area, where employees could not just wander in and out at their leisure. How would this “cage person” be evaluated on his or her performance? Only a few people may occupy the job and the only thing that might be considered measurable may be how many times one of the workers being served complains about how long it takes to turn in their old tools and get new ones. And who knows, these complaints may result from personal disagreements between those served and the “cage person” and not so much how well the cage person actually does the job.

The differences between these two jobs has numerous implications for their respective evaluation possibilities (as well as other interesting implications). Comparisons among workers on the bushing job are made easy by the mechanical output of the process. Notice that when cries of inequity among those doing the job occur, they are more likely to be as a group rather than as individuals, since equity versus inequity will be more readily defined. The entire group of people doing the job may complain together that the production rate is set too high or that the machines malfunction (unless, of course, one person is always stuck with the one machine that breaks down, then the potential for an intra-role equity problem will be quite serious). This means those doing this job are likely to be inclined to raise inter-job equity issues with the outcomes of performance appraisal.

On the other hand, that handful of people who work the cage (across three shifts, possibly two and three at a time), will be more likely to find fault with the PA system as it divides them, giving one an excellent rating and another a poor rating, perhaps with limited data on which to base the ratings. Intra-role equity will be the prevailing complaint in that job.

It is interesting to note here that when most factory jobs were of the type where inter-role equity was likely to come up more often than intra-role equity, unions tended to have more power, and this is likely not a coincidence. A factory full of many people performing a few highly standardized roles would mean that they would be more likely to band together as a group against those not performing the standardized roles, namely management. On the other hand, in a workplace where the jobs are highly various and unstandardized, equity issues will be more vague and people will be less likely to grieve about inequities in a uniform way. In other words, hard feelings will be more likely between individuals than between roles and when you have people fighting against one another, they are much less likely to band together to form a union or argue the same case for justice.

Few people like evaluating others and nobody likes those who do (like evaluating others). Beyond this issue though, W. Edwards Deming pointed out what might well be even bigger problems with evaluating others in the context of organizations.

He contended that the rather American performance appraisal process (others around the world use it too, but we developed and promote it the most) passes the primary responsibility from management (where it belongs) to hourly employees. Deming (1986) said that over 90% of the variance in employee performance is attributable to differences in supplies, procedures and equipment, not under the control of the employee. Once these differences have been removed, then less than 10% of performance variance would remain. He was a world-class statistician, having first become involved in statistical consultation to organizations when he advised the U.S. government on the census.

If most of the variance in employee performance is due to factors other than the individual’s motivation, attention, commitment, and even ability, then the performance appraisal process, which almost everyone agrees, is an undesirable one, is not just distasteful, but it may well be much ado about nothing.

From the perspective of TQM, management’s job is to make sure that processes are in control, reduce common-cause variance and seek out and eliminate special cause variance. It is right for management to enlist employee efforts to control sources of process variance, but is it right for them to blame most of that variation on the employee?

TQM advocates changing processes not workers. It is wishful thinking, Deming would say, for a manager to look at changing the employees who work for him as the key to his or her success. The employees are allies in the fight against the enemy, process variability. They are not the problem, but rather they are an integral part of the solution
(Bowman, 1994).

References
Bhatti, M. Ishaq, Kuldeep Kumar & Michelle Schofield. (1998). On Deming’s principle of human resource management: a statistical perspective. Career Development International, 3(6), 220-232.

Bowman, James S. (1994). At last, an alternative to performance appraisal: Total Quality Management. Public Administration Review, 54(2), 129-137.

Deming, W. Edwards. (1986). 1986. Out of the Crisis. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Post one for Organizational Performance and HR

Consider all the ways things can go wrong after you hire people. If you hired them to do job X, there is a good chance, they will not have done exactly that job before, which means you will incur either one or two types of cost: underperformance while they learn the job or time spent away from the job receiving training.

Even after they have started to perform at the expected level, you may find they cannot sustain the performance for any number of reasons, with perhaps the most fundamental being, they simply do not have the qualities required of someone to perform the job in question. The job may require them to be pleasant with the customer, but their personality is basically sarcastic or indifferent. Or the job may require them to be physically strong, but they are not.

In the case of those who do learn the job and have the qualities necessary to continue performing it well, you may reasonably expect them to grow beyond that job so they can do other things for your organization. An important part of this process is surrounding them with people who demonstrate how you would like things to be done. But what if those role models are not there? What if you recently had to downsize and in the process you lost a good number of your senior people who would have served well as role models, but were deemed too expensive to keep around during difficult economic times? In such a case, you may find the cost of losing those potential role models is greater than the savings of their salary, but of course, you will not necessarily be able to quantify this loss.

Over time, the workers you hire may grow indifferent toward the work if it is boring, repetitive or even an interesting job but something they can master and thus no longer find challenging. Or they may not be bored so much as they do not buy into the standard of performance you have set for them and thus are always seemingly eager to negotiate down the expectations. On the opposite end of the spectrum may be those who were stretched initially to perform at the expected level and find they are unable to make the personal sacrifice required to stay at that high level. They may have underestimated the basic life adjustment the job would require of them in terms of time, energy or commitment.

Or it could be what changes is not so much the employee, but actually you or your fellow managers. Without being fully aware of it, over time you may relax your standards of performance due to inattention or distraction. Your attention may shift to other things and away from frequent enough reminders of what is expected. Or, relatedly, you may start deluding yourself that standards are being met, in the absence of hard data; but when real data does show up, you realize, perhaps too late, that you had been assuming everything was fine due to your overreliance on qualitative information or the comfortable feeling we all sometimes get when we work with nice people who are nevertheless, underperforming.

It can also occur that people working for you start to shift their opinions of what is important in their life from say the work, to their children, continuing their education, focusing on their marriage, improving their house, or finding fulfillment in a more spiritual or emotional dimension, once material needs have been met.

Thus far I have been kind to the organization and harder on individuals when imagining what all can go wrong, but suppose your policies and procedures have made the job distasteful for people? Maybe the job does not offer enough feedback on performance, enough recognition, enough input from them, or too little variety, or other components most would consider requirements of an “interesting” job. In such instances, you may not always get negative feedback from your employees out of fear they have of you or the belief they may hold that the organization would come down on them hard if they complained. You may be forcing people into a position of learned helplessness, one where they do not complain, seek to fight for justice or anything, but just hunker down and do the job. In the short run this may not appear to be a problem, but eventually, they may suffer the negative effects of stress, mental or emotional breakdown, or work in such a distracted manner they are dangerous to themselves and others.

Sometimes people will, perhaps without knowing it, begin to defer excellence; by which I mean, they start assuming they can let things slide until right before inspection time, or deadline time, or evaluation time. This often happens in sports where the players go through the motions until the game is on the line, with little time to go and then they get going, but sometimes they do so too late.

One of the constant issues with an aging workforce is that after a while, older workers begin to stop caring as much about how they perform, because they are counting down the days until retirement. This can even happen years before actual retirement, especially if sufficient attention is not paid to incentives that may keep them engaged.

And we have to acknowledge, sometimes working hard for long periods of time can be tiring and even grueling, even if we usually enjoy what we do. The most committed workers in the most interesting jobs will need time away to recharge their batteries, opportunities to sit back and reflect on where they are in their life or in their career; to assess, or just to be away from the activity for a while. Some people, especially those inclined to high levels of commitment, may be afraid to take time off or get away from the work, perhaps due to the suppressed feeling that if they step away for a while, they may not be able to return at the same high level, that the time off may come to feel too good by comparison.

Cultural norms can influence the commitment people give to their work. Sometimes even high performers sink to the lower performance level of those around them after a while. This can occur because their frame of mind changes from being one of focus on performance goals to being more social or comfortable among their peers. Any frame of mind we find ourselves in should probably be considered temporary, such that even those of us who work hard most of the time now, may find it much more difficult to stay focused at some later point due to social changes, too little recognition, or the fear that many see in the middle of their lives, that they will die without ever having had any fun. They may start to ask, why continue to sacrifice my own desires for those of the company or other people or why sacrifice current reward for some promised future reward that may or may not happen anyway?

These performance issues are matters of concern for the entire organization, but other managers often turn to HR to address them with such programs as more aggressive recruiting, improved selection methods, career development and guidance, as well as training and development.

Employee Development second Post: ED as HD

If we consider Human Development (HD) one of the four pillars of HR, does that mean it gets equal attention with the other three: rights, justice and organizational productivity? What happens in practice and what should happen, in this case, as in so many others, is not always the same. HD tends to not get equal attention, but I believe the case can be made that it should.
Amitai Etzioni (2002) mulls over the question of particularistic obligations (concern for those of one’s kind or those in one’s community, above concern for humankind universally) and concludes that we do have such obligations and meeting them, helps not only our local community, but also humankind, in the end. We would be, he implies, doing a disservice to all of mankind by not acting to defend the moral and social ecology of our community of residence.
Corporations or public institutions, deliberately include some and exclude others (Etzioni, 2001). In this way, they are no different from perhaps less formal, often more bottom-up communities, such as political parties, neighborhood watch groups, or fraternities and sororities. Organizational communities can justify creating such artificial barriers among people on several grounds, including the economic well-being of those included, and also, the moral well-being of those included.
Robert Putnam (2000) defines bonding (creation of community) and bridging (creation of social links among communities). Clearly, business organizations, as well as public or political organizations, must be actively involved in both of these creative processes. In fact, bonding and bridging are necessary inside and outside the organization; that is, within and among organizations.
It would not be possible for people to build effective communities without elaborated social as well as technical skills. Organizations that are bonded and bridged inside and out, have more social capital than those that are not developed in these ways. Technological, economic and political resources can be parlayed into profit, money, capital. People who communicate effectively and who value human progress are more apt to succeed in the development of social capital.
Viewing organizations as generators of social as well as monetary capital, allows us to more easily prioritize economic productivity and social productivity. In fact, ultimately the distinction between these two types of productivity, breaks down. It is a false dichotomy. There are only illusory priority concerns because in the integrated system that is the world’s economy, there is no meaningful difference between economic and social outcomes.
The flow of events that occur within and among organizational communities are a type of text to be read by the actors involved. Those in power tend to be both writers and readers of text, whereas those who are relatively disenfranchised, but often nonetheless affected by these texts, tend to be strictly readers of texts. We can go further than this, though, and say that those who are powerful also tend to have the capacity to not only write the text, but to greatly influence how those who are less powerful, read the text written by the powerful. This combination of writing and influencing is often called (political) spinning.
In organizations where power is shared, many texts are written and offered for others to read. Perhaps the classic case is that of union and management. Both of these groups help create events and then seek to interpret them for their shared constituency. It serves no one for any of those involved in this writing, reading and spinning, to be incompetent at any of the three.
Even when power is unevenly distributed and primarily vested in the top of the organization, it is essential that those outside of power be competent in their ability to read and respond in a sophisticated fashion. Historically, those who have been in power have also tended to be the most developed intellectually, socially and politically. When this is not the case, a natural strengthening of the organizational community occurs. The organization is less likely to take action that will be against the best interests of the majority of its membership, when its membership is broadly capable.
The healthiest communities have well-developed, sophisticated leaders and followers. Nothing is more dangerous to a leader, or to the community he or she leads, than a broad gap between his or her human capacity and the human capacity of those being led. Nothing is healthier than a balance between a community’s leaders and its followers. Respect, trust, and communication, are all benefited by such an arrangement.
Thus, the case can quite easily be made that broad HD is in the best interest of not only the individuals who make up a given organizational community, but also in the best interest of the community itself. One reason this is so, is that leadership is most effective when it flows among members of the community, as opposed to staying in the hands of a few. The most adaptive social systems are the ones in which responses to the environment are led by those in the best position to formulate optimum responses (Pfeffer, 1992).
Collective action organizations (CAOs) are agencies that challenge the status quo by advocating for innovative solutions to social problems (Knoke, 1990; Salem, Foster-Fishman & Goodkind, 2002). You might say that the most adaptive organizations are not only those where leadership swirls among members, rather than staying in one place, but also those organizations comprised of various interconnected (bridged) CAOs. Such organizations are built on the capacity of individual members to bond, bridge and collectively innovate. It is this type of organizational community that will be the most resilient in the face of dynamic circumstances; and it all begins with individual HD.
HD is both an outcome of, and an input to, all organizing processes. The very process of creating and maintaining an organization, and the community within it, develops new skills among those in its membership. But such natural HD can be enhanced by interventions at the individual level. A large group of interacting people who begin their interaction each speaking a different language, may ultimately figure out how to communicate in one super-language, but just think how much time would have been saved, and how much mental energy turned toward organizational outcomes, if the people had been taught to speak the same language, early on in the process of building the community. Organizations filled with people at many different stages of development, are like modern-day Towers of Babel. Organizations comprised of highly-developed member-musicians all playing the same well-orchestrated song, can bring down the walls of Jericho.

References
Etzioni, Amitai. (2002). Are particularistic obligations justified? A communitarian examination. The Review of Politics. 64(4), 573-599.

Etzioni, Amitai. (2001). Is bowling together sociologically lite? Contemporary Sociology, 30(3), 223-224.

Knoke, D. (1990). Organizing for collective action: Commitment in voluntary associations. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press.

Pfeffer, Jeffrey. 1992. Managing with Power. Harvard Business School Press.

Putnam, Robert D. (2000). Bowling Alone. The Collapse and Revival of American Community, New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000.

Salem, Deborah A., Pennie G. Foster-Fishman, & Jessica R. Goodkind. (2002). The adoption of innovation in collective action organizations. American Journal of Community Psychology, 30(5), 681-610.

First Employee Development Post

The primary systems of HR activity can be said to fall into three categories, checkpoints, boosters and correction devices. Checkpoints include such HR activities as selection into the organization, promotion, placement, and exiting the organization. Boosters are such things as training, job design, employee assistance programs, and compensation plans. Correction devices include performance appraisal, job analysis, discipline, and the protection HR offers to the organization from a legal standpoint.

All of these programs and activities serve to give HR authority over rank-and-file associates, but it also gives HR a certain type of authority over the entire organization. Judicious use of these forms of “power” is essential to the health of the relationship between HR and the other functions of the organization. If the power of HR is wielded in a heavy-handed fashion, other functions and levels within the firm may begin to assert their counter power, narrowing their zone of indifference, suspending their belief in the fiction of HR’s authority.

HR gets its power by holding a place of legitimacy in the organization, as one of the major functions, but also as being an instrument of individual rights, justice, human development, and productivity, as we have discussed. HR defends the interests of the organization against various types of aggression, to include legal threats from the labor market, legal threats from the government as it pertains to equal employment opportunity, inferences drawn about the organization among those in the labor market as to how “good of a place to work” it is, and the vast number of ways its relationships with associates can come to be “too expensive” for the revenue of the company.

There is a cost associated with maintaining the human presence in the organization and the cost of maintaining the “human face” of the organization. That is, HR adds value to the organization not only through the actual outcomes of its services but also through the way those services are perceived by those consuming them.

The ceiling on the cost of the human element of doing business is virtually unlimited. Consider the case of The Johns-Manville (JM) Corporation that made products containing asbestos throughout most of the twentieth century. Records show that they were aware early on of the potential for associates to develop, the often fatal condition called asbestosis, a disease that emanates from asbestos fibers lodging in the lung tissue of the human lung. Office or other building-related exposure to such fibers is not that likely to cause the disease, but work exposure proved to be lethal to many of their employees. JM spent most of their wealth settling claims against them brought by former employees.

So, HR is a cost center, in that it costs money to maintain; but it is also a function that is in a position to dramatically lower the ceiling on costs, if its activities are carried out in an effective fashion. Any HR activity has at least five transaction costs (from the standpoint of the organization) associated with it: preparing, arranging, running, controlling and correcting costs. For example if the HR activity is training, the costs are associated with planning the program, delivering it, covering the jobs of those receiving the training, scrutinizing the program for quality, and if anything that happens is inadequate or counterproductive, solving the ensuing problems.

When I call certain HR activities boosters, I mean just that, these are programs that presumably “boost” the organization’s associates in some way. How are they supposed to boost them? They are designed to help associates develop, which should lead to increased organizational productivity. Notice that we have finally formally broached the two subjects that often comprise 99% of what you find in HR discussions of this sort, development and productivity.

The picture I have of “Boosters” is that of few relatively-empowered human beings seeking wisdom in the way they deal with a few somewhat less powerful human beings, and arriving at the compromise decision to incur a few highly-quantifiable costs in exchange for the opportunity to manage the risk of other, often less quantifiable costs. You pay for an associate’s counseling now in hopes that he or she may not wind up shooting a warehouse full of his associates and himself a few months from now. There is a long history of such incidents in U.S. workplaces.

I am not saying every company that suffers the agony of such “violence on the floor,” could have avoided it if only they had put money in counseling; but EAP’s can be looked at as a type of preventive maintenance to help reduce the risk of such eventualities. The organization, like people who have preventive maintenance done on their cars, is wagering that it is better to pay a little now than a lot later.

Preventive maintenance should be done, but individuals and companies often do not always do it. And why do they not? Usually, in my experience, it is because preventive maintenance is often considered a luxury, the choice of the rich. We “poor folks” just wind up paying more after something goes wrong in the middle of operations. EAPs, are a great example of corporate preventive maintenance. Most companies consider them luxuries. In fact, over the years, unions have tended to advocate for them, often winning in their efforts, and thus, assisting a “poor” company to watch out better for its future, by paying a little up front to avoid a potentially devastating loss on the “back side”. I am going to get a little sexist here, so get ready to let me have it, but in these cases, unions are like wives (mothers? fathers?), insisting the person primarily responsible for repairs, do preventive maintenance that should have been inserted into the budget, without prodding.

Of course, EAPs and other boosters, may also be considered “unnecessary repairs” as opposed to “preventive maintenance”. When a person operates a machine that requires maintenance, she can go by the owner’s manual and perform services at the time or wear intervals suggested. Oftentimes, warranties are nullified or at least contestable, if the owner cannot produce records documenting timely service to the piece of equipment covered.

Unfortunately, there is no owner’s manual when it comes to servicing the needs or wants of associates. Should a company reimburse tuition for any college course an associate wants to take? Should the company invest in a workout facility so that associates find it more convenient to take care of their physical health? Should the company offer on-site daycare so that their minds are put at ease about the well-being of their younger children? What about flexible work schedules, dental and eye care, educational opportunities in such areas as money management, stress reduction, or work-family issues?

Seldom do you hear companies argue that benefits from these “Boosters” are an entitlement, that people simply should not be without such opportunities. The companies that offer such benefits tend to defend doing so by saying that it positively affects the bottom line, morale, or that it makes them more competitive in the labor market. They will cite evidence (or even make it up sometimes) that the payoffs exceed the costs.

What do company’s who do not do such things give as their reasons? Often you will hear such things as, we built an indoor running track and bought expensive treadmills and Cybex machines, and people used the stuff for a while, but then they quit, so we decided to cut our losses and sell the equipment to a local health club. Or you hear, we do not offer tuition reimbursement, although we did for a while; because we decided we could not justify the cost - too many people left shortly thereafter or we never realized any noticeable benefit from the knowledge they received. Now, the training our people need, we tend to provide ourselves. That is expense enough.

These companies are saying that we have looked at the potential costs and benefits of Boosters and have found them to be too expensive. During difficult financial times, these companies will look at their choices not to offer a “gravy-train” workplace, as being sound and prudent. During good times they may be tempted by such programs, but decide that there are more productive uses for that money, one of which might well be increased bonuses or other forms of compensation for top management. After all, they will often say, these executives are the reason we are doing so well or we have to stay competitive in our compensation packages or we will lose our brain power.

Boosters are almost always considered optional, always required to be justified by financial considerations (we can afford it or we must do so because it pays off), and often considered a form of compensation that may or may not also be thought of as a substitute for other types of benefits. The presence of Boosters, make a statement about the values of the organization.

If Philip-Morris or Brown and Williamson (tobacco companies) invested lots of money in employee health and wellbeing, it might be considered astute, noble, hypocritical, cynical, a smokescreen (sorry for the play on words) or even ironic. The same is true of a company like Ben and Jerry’s ice cream. They may have a great track record as a company that treats its people well, but it is also easy to see that the product they make is not exactly heart-friendly.

Firms that are in more humanity-neutral lines of work, such as software development, or the manufacturing of a durable good of some sort, do not have to worry about the occasional contrast between what they do for their associates versus what they do to their customers. Other firms that operate in dangerous lines of work, such as mining, or that engage in manufacturing processes that are dirty, risky or dangerous, have the same sort of contrast problem as tobacco, asbestos and unhealthy foods, companies.

Another factor that helps determine organizational stances toward boosters are industry traditions. It is simply not normal for heavy manufacturing firms to provide boosters. These industries tend to have been male dominated and not just any sort of male, but masculine males, with “tough minds”, “hard hearts” and “thick skins”. The prevailing value is that people who work here are not mollycoddled.

You might say boosters do not have a storied tradition in the more macho lines of work. (Actually, this hypothesis is testable, is it not, and would not be that difficult to study. You could simply take the percentage of males working in a profession as evidenced by data from the largest players in that market and the prevalence of boosters as part of their benefits’ packages, and run a correlation.)  Notice how I am lured by the prospect of the aforementioned, correlation coefficient. In this case, though, it might actually help us draw a meaningful conclusion. The other way to look at this research issue, might be to explore the contrast between “dangerous” work and prevalence of boosters, versus “less dangerous” work.

Another factor that might influence whether companies offer these boosters I am describing (what is another way to describe them, programs that are considered optional or beyond minimal requirements of an employer?), might be the extent to which they are global in their coverage and whether they tend to consider it necessary to treat their workers the same all over the world or not. It could be that some MNCs find it intolerable to have workout facilities for their associates in the U.S. and to not have them for their associates in Indonesia. Notice how this raises the issue of equity that we have discussed at some length already.

Another factor that might come into play would be the education level of the workforce. Do you suppose it would be more likely that companies who employ mainly college graduates would offer boosters? If so, what does this imply about how we value human beings? Is a college graduate a superior human (more worthy of fringe benefits) to a high school graduate? Is an MBA graduate more fully human, more booster-worthy, than just a college graduate? These are a few of the issues I can think of that might affect whether boosters are offered.

More on Justice

Sometimes a society or its institutions may value a brand of justice that leans toward greater equity (even equality with guaranteed rights for all) and at other times the society may swing toward justice that permits larger inequities economically and politically. A few years ago, Robert Keegan, CEO of Goodyear, made $17,196,461 whereas that same year, the average worker at Goodyear made $32,048. The fact that this is not only tolerated, but virtually expected in our society, speaks volumes of our current view of what is just or not.

During the heyday of unions, corporate executives were less likely to receive pay so much higher than everyone else, in part, because they knew the union would make waves about it. It was also true that in a bygone time, a certain shame went with getting so much more than others, from the same source of funds.

We may be beginning to see the pendulum shift with the recent public outcry against Wallstreet Bonuses, but this anger seems to be more slowly reaching other pay inequities. Public money is one instance where it has occurred, as illustrated by the recent announcement that city officials in suburbs of L.A. have submitted their resignations under pressure from the public, due to excessive salaries, high six figures in some cases, in a time of austerity in most city and state budgets.

Equity is compensation for one’s intentions and behaviors. Societies and their corporations should seek to reward in kind, not more so and not less than is due the person for his or her ability, effort, attitude or knowledge. I call the corresponding power, compensative power, that is, each person should be granted enough recourse that they can expect to be fairly compensated. If need be, such fair compensation may be leveraged from societal institutions (this is the basis on which unions, government policies, and the courts, operate).

Each person creates for him or herself opportunities to meet his or her social needs. The person who affords him or herself sufficient social support may be considered socially productive and to have social power. In complex institutional situations, such as the middle to upper echelons of business, philanthropic or public organizations, this form of power might be considered political power. Notice that there is no basic right or guarantee from the society for this form of productivity or power. The individual merits this or not through his or her own thoughts and behaviors. Social productivity can enhance the individual’s, and those connected in some way to that individual, capacity to leverage consumptive and compensative power from the society’s institutions. Thus, social power can lead to greater compensative power, and compensative power increases the likelihood of consumptive power.
Material productivity is characterized by the ownership of land, property, means of production, or access to other of society’s goods and services. Personal power is the term I chose to describe the power that goes with this level of productivity. The desire to obtain such power is assumed to be driven by one’s desire for greater self-esteem or one’s reactions to threats against such esteem.

In virtually all human cultures, there is something that can be defined as the “promised land”, “self-actualization”, “enlightenment”, “salvation,” that to which those subscribing to a particular view of human existence, aspire. Spiritual productivity appears to be an odd combination of words, but I use it to keep the columns parallel. Spiritual productivity is driven by what Maslow said was the need to be all that one can be and it leads to a type of emotional power that offers the individual a sort of sanguinity or centeredness with which to live in the lower realms, as it were. Such emotional power can actually transform one’s definition of the lower levels and how one pursues their fulfillment.
Religion, forms of government, and economic systems are all important factors in the way members of the society advance to higher forms of productivity and power. Protestant Christians in democratic nations, with a capitalistic form of economics, tend to turn out similar or at least be greatly influenced to value the same things. Muslims in theocratic totalitarian regimes are also quite likely to hold to common ideals. Not surprisingly, people from these two societies tend to not understand one another and when they are “thrown together” the relationship can be discordant.

Other societies tend to not emphasize consumptive power as much as those in Western, secular or Christian democracies. Many cultures see this desire for increasing consumptive power to be an obstacle to the achievement of the highest level of spirituality and in extreme cases, a reason to strike violently against such values.

One irony of excessive consumptive wealth is that it can forestall other forms of development, which means ultimately the saddest existences spiritually might be the most successful materially. This can be true wherever such excessive emphasis on the ability to consume goods and services is found.
Notice too that the rich and the poor live in realms of little contrast…only those in the middle tend to have “four seasons” of life. Some stories are rags to riches, some riches to rags and a lot are up and down between these extremes. The wealthy, especially those born into it, tend to live their lives not knowing what it means to be deprived of consumptive or compensative power. Those who are poor, especially those born into it, tend to live their lives, not knowing what it would be like to not be distanced from consumptive or compensative power.

My wife and I have far more social, compensative and consumptive power than we knew as children and a certain joy is available to us for a little while here in the middle of our middle class lives, whereas it was not before and of course, there is no absolute guarantee that it will remain.

Another inference from the foregoing discussion is that those Muslims who perform suicide missions for their beliefs do not do so because they hate freedom as you sometimes hear from our government. They do it because they cherish deep values, the same way people the world over cherish things more important than money or what it affords. We would do well to recognize this similarity among us all and begin meaningful dialogue to settle our differences, before our differences undermine the possibility that any of us can have a basic and good life.

The office I work in represents to me the office my father never had, a father who worked variously in doffing in a cotton mill or yelling behind a pulpit stand. Another son somewhere drives a car his father could never have. These tend to be stories of capitalism and often involving the protestant work ethic or a Calvinistic belief system that one should always be working for more than one had before or more than one’s parents had. This is sometimes referred to as the American dream.
What is the Armenian dream? The Islamic dream? The socialistic dream? They are all different and taken from the point of view of one of them, the others often seem ridiculous. As I implied earlier, one great source of diversity in multi-cultural, multi-national firms is the amount of consumptive or compensative power held by those from different traditions. But perhaps an even more important source of diversity is the extent to which people from different traditions working for the same organization, tend to hold varying beliefs about the importance of these various forms of power.

Notice that HR management as we have been discussing it thus far, tends to come from the Western capitalistic, democratic, Christian point of view. It would do us well to think of how HR management might look from other perspectives. What makes “our” value system unique from most others in the world, is the extent to which we have exaggerated the first two levels of productivity, needs and power. In its extreme manifestation, it could be argued that capitalism colors the other values we hold so thoroughly that we have jumbled up the order of importance of the levels, so that consumptive and compensative power are at the top of the hierarchy and spiritual, social and personal are only considered important as they might be expected to help us be more highly compensated, so that we can consume more. It is not that difficult to see how peoples of other value persuasions might find such a reordering to be at odds with goodness. Might we not also benefit from considering whether such an arrangement is best for us as individuals or for our organizations?

Human Resource Management, seen in this way, turns out to be a reaction within corporations (or government in the case of public HR services) to the dominant values of those who comprise and govern the organization. Justice, equity, productivity and human development (actualization) are found across cultures, but their relative importance varies, as do the accepted means of achieving each of them. These differences represent the greatest challenge for something that might be called global or multi-national HR management. Notice also, that international unions will also face the challenge of figuring out which form of leverage against management sovereignty is optimum across the varieties of peoples they represent.

Look back at top management’s position, as it has changed with the decline of unions. Management is currently in a strong position with respect to worker outcomes. Unions tend not to have much leverage, especially given the anti-union, pro-management values that pervade our current society. What counterforce is there to keep management honest these days?

One such force is public opinion. The news magazine programs such as 60 minutes, have done a good deal to expose management when it acts in ways unjust toward associates or in ways that damage workplace equity (remember, this equity is about the outcomes you get for your inputs, which makes it a cousin to distributive justice…all that makes it different is that equity is about accumulated merit and justice tends to be based more in basic human rights). There is virtually no force, however, to keep management from talking a good game when it comes to the development of human potential, and not walking that talk. The gamble for management is something like, if we can get people to work harder (smarter?) and therefore be more productive, by creating procedures that appear to be in their favor but in actuality do nothing to increase justice, equity or even human potential, why not take the risk that associates will never wise up to our game.

My point is that management has a built-in incentive to make pseudo-changes, do window dressing if you will, especially in the absence of a counterforce like unions, and with our societal tendency to buy in to marketing. Management is primarily required to establish work-improvement programs that appear to serve justice, equity, development and productivity, and then to market these programs to everyone who is paying attention, inside and outside the organizations. Such program and marketing efforts can be much less costly in every sense of the word cost (to include the time savings gained by autocratic decision making in the guise of democracy) than actual transformations of the workplace into bastions of democracy and havens of human fulfillment.

Let us return to our treatment of the issue of justice for a moment for some further clarification. We have seen that justice can be thought of as having to do with procedures and with outcomes. We can also speak of justice in utilitarian terms, in terms of virtue or with respect to what John Rawls calls, the original position. Utilitarians believe that our actions, individually or collectively, should be governed by a concern that they do less harm to a minority than they do good for a majority of people. This tradition of thought does not fare well when situations are as complex as they are in today’s global economy, with minorities, majorities, good, harm, and the various proportions assumed, are all so difficult to determine. Virtue ethics is perhaps a little too idealistic and seems to fail the test of being pragmatic enough for everyday affairs (James, 1892). However, Rawls’ (1971) notions deserve a little of our attention here.

John Rawls died at age 81 in November of 2002. But when he was 50 he published his magnum opus, A theory of Justice. In this book he proposed that we might better understand how to construct a society if we were to adopt the perspective of what he called the “original position”, that is, the time before we came onto the planet. Having reasoning faculties even prior to birth (impossible, of course, but necessary for the development of his ethical position), and confronted with the choice of what sort of probabilities to build into the society in which we would soon be living, he said that we would opt for a society in which the probability of being in abject poverty and meager circumstances would be least, the probability of being in the middle greatest, willingly sacrificing some of the remaining probability of living in sublime wealth and privilege. He further asserted that most rational thinkers would conclude that it was best to create a society in which the least well off were not as bad off compared to the wealthy as they might be, even if this meant that the most fortunate were not as well off as they might be.

James, W. (1892). Psychology: The briefer course. New York: Holt.

John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1971

Procedural Justice in Examples

Procedural Justice (Global): Are the rules and procedures used by the judge fair overall?

Consistency (PJ): Whether the organization treats all employees the same way.
Several years ago I served as a sort of HR manager for a manufacturing company that had no one formally in the position, so they would ask me questions and one of their young engineers would try to carry out my suggestions. I was asked to interview several employees to gauge morale and one of those I interviewed reminded me of my mother, so we will call her Joyce.
Joyce looked like my mother and she was also quite opinionated and by the time I arrived on the scene, pretty bitter about how she had been treated. The company had started a practice of putting the names of those absent or tardy to work on the wall for everyone to see when they walked in the door. If you were absent without a doctor’s excuse you got a red dot and if you were late without a doctor’s excuse you got a yellow dot, with red dots worth two points and yellow dots worth one. If, in the course of three months, you accumulated five or more points, you went on probation and more than two points during the next three months meant you were fired.
Joyce had been on probation a number of times and nearly fired more than once, since the policy had been put in place around a year before our interview. She had actually talked them out of firing her once, even though technically she had gone over the number of points.
What bothered Joyce was that there were a few favorites of management whose points were manipulated so they stayed off the board. When she had asked management about this practice, they were told she was wrong and even lying.
When I talked to management before the interviews started, Joyce’s name came up as someone I needed to interview and they proceeded to tell me of her case and how they knew what she would say, but they wanted me to see what they put up with; how ill-tempered and difficult she could be.
After the interview, I went to management and told them I thought her accounts of things rang fairly true and that they either should stop having the names-on-the-wall system, or at least conduct it in a fair manner. Shortly after that, I went in and the board for names was taken down.
This case illustrates the consistency facet of procedural justice, as an instance where the system itself may not have been unjust, but the way it was administered was. It could even be argued that employees have the right to not be embarrassed in front of their coworkers in this manner, but unless favorites are deliberately left off the board, the system could have been equitable, although perhaps regressive and counterproductive.

Bias Suppression/Neutrality (PJ): Whether the judge is unbiased and impartial in making decisions.
The case also demonstrates bias or impartiality on the part of those making decisions. Bias led management to make partial decisions. Of course, it may be Joyce was making up her accusations, but the system was ripe for such suspicion, especially since those whose names went on the board could be expected to be hyper-vigilant about partiality given the level of embarrassment the system caused.

Accuracy (PJ): Whether the organization uses the most accurate information they can get when deciding an employee’s case.
When I worked at IBM, the story was told of three managers who had gone to a convention with their trip paid for by IBM, but before their return, word got back to management that their conference expenses had been waived due to their membership in an affiliated organization, expenses which they nonetheless had reported to IBM. When they returned to the building, their swipe cards would not open the door and they were met at the door and asked to remain outside while their personal effects were brought out to them. They were fired on the spot.
Management had the courage to act so boldly due to the perceived accuracy of their information. If there had been any element of ambiguity, they would not have acted in such a direct and forceful manner, but as it turned out, the offending managers had been caught, “red handed”. If proof of their “double-dipping” had not been available, those who fired them would have had to spend more time investigating and thus to make a slower decision.

Correctability (PJ): Whether employee has the opportunity to appeal to the organization to change the decision if he feels he is being treated unfairly.

In the above case, not only was the evidence considered to be accurate enough for a summary decision, there was no provision made for appeal. I am not sure of the exact wording of the policy, but I suspect it was to the effect justice in such cases will be fast and without appeal, if the evidence is compelling. Again, if the evidence was not so strong, IBM would have felt it necessary to ask the men to explain their position before making a decision or to have let them proceed through a pre-determined appeals process. You may, like me, think there ought to have been an appeals process and it may have occurred in the form of a lawsuit by one or more of the managers.  I never heard the end of the story, as far as that goes.

Representativeness (PJ): Is the organization’s behavior suitable to all of the different people or groups affected by the decision?
An embattled College Dean, in order to get a loyal Department Chair on the University President selection committee, and thus ensure the candidates were more likely to hear the Dean’s side of the college controversy early on in the selection process; had the Department Chair fill out bogus vote forms to get himself elected to the committee. A group of the Dean’s enemies went to the Chief Academic Officer (Provost) and told him what the Department Chair had done. The Provost was not sure whether the allegation was true, but enough of the faculty were in the accusing contingent that he felt threatened to do nothing, so he overturned the results of the election and another was held. Ultimately, a faculty member other than the Dean’s ally, was elected to the position, and within a year; the Dean was dismissed and the Department Chair retired.
It seems the easiest decision to make in the case was simply to have another election. The Provost would have been within his rights to fire both the Chair and the Dean, but that would have been a long, public, ugly battle and he knew the University could not stand such negative publicity. His decision might be considered the wise one given the circumstances and perhaps the just one, in the long run; especially as everything turned out.

Ethicality (PJ): Does the organization act in an ethical way when he makes his decision about the employee?

In November of 1974, Kerr-McGee employee, Karen Silkwood was killed in a suspicious accident on her way to deliver documents that would have proven the company was covering up dangerous levels of nuclear exposure to their employees. A movie was made of the case and the clear accusation was that Kerr-McGee had Karen Silkwood killed for her union activism and whistleblowing; clearly not only an unethical action, if true, but of course, illegal.

Notice the company actually construed their actions as justifiable given that Silkwood's actions could have brought down the entire company. I suppose the lesson here is be careful how you poke and prod at a cornered, dangerous animal. Of course, Silkwood was in the right, and a great injustice was done; but the organization temporarily suspended rationality and entered into a most sinister version of their version of what was just - in the case, retribution.

Voice/Process Control (PJ): Whether employee is allowed to fully explain to the organization, reasons for his/her behavior.

When I sold Electrolux vacuum cleaners in Terre Haute, Indiana during the summer of 1981, to say my boss was a little shady would be an understatement. He once convinced a lady to trade in her old vacuum cleaner for a new one by telling her the old one was a fire hazard, and then turned around and sold the used one to her daughter-in-law. When they came to Terre Haute to straighten the mess out, they got their money back and were met with lots of sorry-about-thats and sad faces, but once they were gone, my boss received praise for his creative approach to closing a sale. In this case, an injustice was done to the customers, but no real justice was given to the culprit because the organization was only too eager to hear “his side of the story”.

Standing (PJ): Does the organization show respect for the employee as a person?
Lt. General Claudia Kennedy, the highest-ranking female Army officer accused a colleague of fondling her, after which, he was promoted; but never court marshaled or otherwise punished. If her accusation is true it raises the question as to how respectful the Army is not just of her, but of all the women in its ranks.

Trust (PJ): Is the organization trustworthy in the way it makes decisions?
When U.S. soldiers were accused of torture and humiliation of Iraqi detainees in Abu Ghraib in a May 2004 article in the New Yorker, the chain of command worked to control the damage by making it appear the work was that of a few renegade soldiers, but the suspicion remains that knowledge of the events or even permission, was held at much higher ranks; calling into question the integrity of the entire system.

Decision Control (PJ): Whether employee has a direct influence over the final decision made by the organization?
During any trial of a top-level official of an organization, steps must be taken to guard against the power of the person charged to influence the outcome of the decision, a concern not nearly as great when the employee ranks lower in the organization. In fact, it can be said that the opposite is the case. When the lower level person faces accusation, the full weight of top management’s influence can fall heavily on the side of the company and against the employee. The Erin Brockovich case against Pacific Gas and Electric and other whistleblowing cases offer good examples of this.

FLWEFA as a human right

In the recent run up to the passage of healthcare reform in the United States, a public debate occurred over the question of whether basic healthcare was a right; a question all other industrialized nations had answered in the affirmative. Passage did not mean the answer is in, since a number of states have filed lawsuits against the federal government to repeal the requirement for all to have healthcare insurance; but the official answer for now could be construed as, yes.
Healthcare coverage for all Americans took over 100 years to achieve from the time the first president tried, Teddy Roosevelt, until Barack Obama was successful, although many supporters of reform believe it did not go far enough toward guaranteeing it as a right; many of whom believe healthcare should not be tied to employment. Leaving it associated with employment begs another question regarding rights, namely; whether full, living-wage employment for all (FLWEFA) is something that should be guaranteed by a nation.
By the middle of the twentieth century, nearly 100 million people had lost their lives to human violence, including wars, genocide, regional conflicts, harsh living conditions, work arrangements and abject poverty. Because of this, many of the world’s leaders assembled as part of the newly formed United Nations to declare a list of human rights, finalized on December 10, 1948. The list covers thirty rights, three of which, listed below, have to do with employment issues. [all can be found at: http://www.un.org/Overview/rights.html]

Article 23. (1) Everyone has the right to work, to free choice of employment, to just and favorable conditions of work and to protection against unemployment. (2) Everyone, without any discrimination, has the right to equal pay for equal work. (3) Everyone who works has the right to just and favorable remuneration ensuring for himself and his family an existence worthy of human dignity, and supplemented, if necessary, by other means of social protection. (4) Everyone has the right to form and to join trade unions for the protection of his interests.

Article 24. Everyone has the right to rest and leisure, including reasonable limitation of working hours and periodic holidays with pay.

Article 25. (1) Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control. (2) Motherhood and childhood are entitled to special care and assistance. All children, whether born in or out of wedlock, shall enjoy the same social protection.
As you can see the United Nations stated that FLWEFA was a basic human right, however; all these decades later, the goal has been far from reached. This is surely one of those goals that may never be reached, but I do not hear much discussion of even trying to reach it. Many might argue FLWEFA will be one of the last things earth’s humans set as a goal, given all the other ongoing other struggles. One group has gone so far as to categorize the great issues facing humanity over the next few decades.
The Global Strategy Institute, part of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, sponsors an initiative called the Seven Revolutions, which is designed to raise awareness of seven areas within which people will need to seek to revolutionize current practices by 2025, or face grave consequences. Those areas are: (1) population, (2) resource management and environmental stewardship, (3) technological innovation and diffusion, (4) the development and dissemination of information and knowledge, (5) economic integration, (6) the nature and mode of conflict, and (7) the challenge of governance.

Erik Peterson, who has provided a toolkit for integrating the Seven Revolutions into various university curricula, elaborates on each category:
Population—shifts in the nature of the human family, including overall population level, rate of demographic growth, distribution of growth, age distribution, level of urbanization, and the profound asymmetries implicit in many of these demographic trends;
Strategic resource management—in the face of increasing population pressures and environmental sustainability limits, the challenge of meeting demand in food, water and energy;
Technology innovation and diffusion—exploring which technologies will have the greatest influence on changing our lives, with a view to innovations in computation, robotics, biotech and nanotech and a focus on convergence points between them;
Information and knowledge creation and dissemination—the remarkable opportunities and challenges associated with the exponential rise in the movement of data, information and knowledge across the planet;
Economic integration—implications of the continuation of the massive cross-border movements of goods, services, labor, capital and technology, and the volatility such integration engenders;
Conflict—the tremendous new complexities associated with addressing the erosion of the nuclear non-proliferation regime, traditional nuclear and radiological threats, the onset of new threats involving bio-terrorism, the rising specter of cyber-warfare, and the challenge of post-conflict reconstruction; and
Governance—in government, the private sector, civil society, or in the research and education fields, our capacity to organize ourselves to seize opportunities and mitigate risks in the longer run.
It is interesting to speculate on the relationship between FLWEFA and the seven revolutions. Clearly, population shifts have already and will continue to create mismatches between job applicant pools and jobs available, both at local levels and around the world.
Nebraska, Kansas, and other states declining in population have had trouble hanging on to highly motivated young people, who leave to work in areas more populated and with greater work possibilities. These people wind up settling and raising the next generation in metro areas and recently since both husband and wife work they have fewer children.
This has been repeated in many Westernized countries, while agricultural economies, which rely on more children, have diminished. In economies that have recently moved toward factories, larger numbers of children are still common which often means children are seen as sources of livelihood much as they were on farms but now the kids wind up in sweatshops, fighting wars or turning tricks.
If something such as Monster.com could match all the world's people in need of work to the available jobs, imagine how much education, training, orientation, corporate movement and reduction of migration barriers it would take. But of course, it would be a good thing right. The GWP would explode, as would the standard of living for most people. But do we have sufficient natural resources for this? Do we have the political will? Are we adroit enough at mixing ethnicities?
History says we would wind up fighting over resources, values differences, and national preservation, too much to pull it off.
But if we could turn over new leaves as global citizens and work through our social problems, we would be left with the daunting reality of too few resources for so much "progress". Which leads to the next revolution, that of, resource management and environmental stewardship.
Sticking with the goal of full, living-wage employment for all (FLWEFA) the world's people, we have to wonder what the carrying capacity of the planet would have to be for such an eventuality. The earth seems unable to carry us all now, and if everyone lived like the average American ecologists tell us we would need several more earths.
So we do not try for FLWEFA because the earth cannot carry us all and we intuitively know that, right? Hardly. It is more apt to say we do not try for it because that is not the way most people view the world. We do not set targets for all of mankind, considering ourselves too pragmatic for such a lofty goal. Instead, when it comes to jobs, it is each person for him or herself. We seldom consider the role fortunate accidents have played in the work we do. Those who reach high levels of professions have had education available, informal mentoring, opportunities to gain experience, and other forms of support.
At some point through technological innovation and diffusion, more widespread availability of information, economic integration, reduction of global conflict and an increase in global democracy, perhaps the world will be able to solve the FLWEFA problem and guarantee this right for all.
For now, however; perhaps as good as we can hope for will be to create a more democratic workplace for those fortunate enough to find employment. In June, 2008, Reuters reported the results of a survey suggesting a quarter of U.S. workers believe the place where they work is a dictatorship, less than half said their employer encouraged creativity, and only a little over half said they and their co-workers were motivated. We pride ourselves on living in a free and open society, in the U.S., but many of our workplaces can only be described as: “command and control”.
A hundred years ago innovative managers turned to scientific management to constrain variability out of worker performance, with the primary emphasis on efficiency. Today, the most innovative managers are seeking ways to restore the human imagination in their organizations, with effectiveness being the main goal. Efficiency is still important, but technology can virtually guarantee that; whereas effectiveness will require engagement of the heart and mind as well as the body of those performing the work.

Who owns whom?

The distinction between human resource management, human rights, and labor issues is not at all clean and perhaps it is not even necessary. This fact is becoming increasingly apparent as the world’s economy becomes nationally and culturally integrated and “first-world” nations are confronted with many of the problems they dealt with and made decisions on a century or more ago, such as child labor.
Read the following excerpt from an article by Diller, J. M. & Levy, D.A. (1997). The American Journal of International Law, 91(4), 663-696. “Well-established rules of international law compel the harmonization of international trade rules with fundamental human rights and labor norms that prohibit the most exploitative, or extreme, forms of child labor. Prohibitions against certain forms of child labor are rooted in peremptory norms that permit no derogation by treaty. These jus cogens prohibitions apply to protect children as well as adults, and involve slavery, slavery-like practices, the sale of children, trafficking in children, forced or compulsory labor (including debt bondage) and labor under certain conditions that constitute torture. Other forms of child labor that constitute cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or arbitrary detention arguably also come within the scope of jus cogens. Where instances of child labor implicate these fundamental norms, international law requires that treaty obligations, such as trade undertakings, be maintained only to the extent of consistency with these norms.
Certain extreme forms of child labor, which are not necessarily performed under threat or coercion, may not be prohibited by peremptory norms. These forms include employment likely to be hazardous, to interfere with the child's education, or to be harmful to the child's health or development. Prohibitions on such conduct are based in obligations under international human rights and labor conventions, including the Convention on the Rights of the Child, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, and ILO Conventions dealing with the employment of children in particular labor sectors and under certain conditions. Various regional treaties in the African, European and interAmerican systems stipulate obligations consistent with those at the universal level. The prohibitions apply whether the offensive conduct is performed by an act or omission of state officials or agents, or by private actors who are not deterred or punished by the state.
There is parity among states on two bases as regards most of these prohibitions. Firstly, many states hold common commitments under the multilateral regime of GATT/WTO agreements and under multilateral lawmaking treaties that either explicitly or implicitly prohibit such extreme forms of child labor. Secondly, nearly complete parity exists at the level of charter memberships; that is, nearly all member states of the WTO also share commitments as members of the ILO and the United Nations. For all three international organizations, improvement in the standard of living is a raison d'etre, and to that end they have entered into cooperative agreements with each other.
The extent to which GATT/WTO parties also share commitments under the international human rights and labor systems calls for harmonization of the two spheres of law. Trade rules, which partake of both international contract law and treaty law, should be interpreted and implemented consistently with the treaties that create fundamental norms on human rights and labor standards. Such harmonization can be justified on two grounds. Firstly, the "ordinary meaning" of the GATT regime in light of its object and purpose reveals that the treaty is not intended to override fundamental human rights protections like those involved in international prohibitions of extreme forms of child labor. Secondly, as an elaboration of Articles 55 and 56 of the UN Charter, the customary and Charter-based law of human rights and fundamental labor standards, supplemented by treaty law, can be read into the obligations of UN members for purposes of Article 103 of the Charter. Under Article 103, the Charter obligations of UN members prevail in the event of a conflict with obligations under any other international agreement. Maintenance of the international trade regime to the extent of consistency with international obligations respecting extreme forms of child labor may require WTO contracting parties to ensure that specific products imported for their domestic markets, or exported from their territory, are not produced with such child labor. Such restrictions, if applied in a standardized fashion, need not interfere with adherence to the fundamental principles of the GATT/WTO framework: nondiscrimination in imports between contracting parties, and between imports and domestic production, and national treatment. Two of the exceptions under Article XX can be interpreted in context to permit such restrictions: Article XX(b), so long as the restriction is found to be "necessary to protect human. . . life or health" and is not a means of "arbitrary or unjustifiable discrimination" or a "disguised restriction on international trade"; and, by its terms, Article XX(h), which exempts otherwise inconsistent obligations deriving from labor-related provisions in intergovernmental commodity agreements, including child labor prohibitions. As a practical matter, Article XIII on accession of new members has proved useful as a negotiating lever in advancing certain labor laws in countries seeking to join the WTO. However, little support exists for interpretations permitting such restrictions on imports within the antidumping framework of Article VI of the GATT, the 1994 Subsidies Agreement, the escape clause of Article XIX, or the exception for restrictions "relating to the products of prison labor" under Article XX(e) . Even the prospects for claims of nullification or impairment of benefits under Article XXIII appear problematic, in view of the new WTO Dispute Settlement Understanding. In addition to case-by-case interpretation of a harmonization principle, the adoption of a collective interpretation under Article XX could promote standardization of implementation. With respect to unilateral acts under U.S. law, prohibitions on the use of extreme forms of child labor as a condition for the extension of benefits under a GSP program appear consistent with international trade rules. A similarly grounded ban on imports of products under section 307 of the Tariff Act of 1930, however, would face challenge as an inconsistent "disguised restriction on international trade," as would the use of U.S. trade remedies. In the investment arena, regional trade and bilateral investment agreements may contribute to the development of a binding international treaty governing investment. In that regard, further attention should be paid to formulating and interpreting such agreements consistently with international prohibitions on extreme forms of child labor. The treatment-of-labor laws, specifically child labor prohibitions, have yet to appear consistently, or become standardized, in commercial treaty practice or the investment laws of the host or home state. The United States is virtually alone in imposing obligations based on human and labor rights in regulating aspects of the behavior of its nationals who invest in foreign markets.
International peremptory and treaty prohibitions of extreme forms of child labor are being incorporated, with increasing standardization, in nonlegislative and private sector initiatives. Such initiatives, which serve as an important indicator of the will of the international community, can contribute, in the long run, to the development of international investment law. Notable efforts include the U.S. Government's nonbinding Model Business Principles, codes of conduct promulgated by investor corporations, model business codes introduced by private organizations, and labeling programs sponsored by private interests, often in cooperation with exporting industries and governments.
As specialized treaty regimes grow in number in response to the rapid growth in international relations in many areas, the flexibility and application of rules requiring harmonization of treaty obligations must also be expanded. The aim of these rules should be to facilitate the international regulation of specialized activity, such as trade and investment, consistently with general principles and fundamental norms of international law. In the end, harmonization will achieve the common aim of international trade, human rights, and labor law: improvement in the standard of living and wellbeing of the human race.”
As you can see from the above passage, the World Trade Organization (WTO), and the General Agreement on Taxes and Tariffs (GATT), as well the United Nations, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, are all important to the future of Human Resources and Human Rights around the globe. Sorry folks, we are no longer living in a world where the only thing that matters is what happens to members of just our family, friends and community. We are (all human kind) increasingly interdependent and whether our collective lives get better or worse is for us to determine.

Psychological ownership and real ownership
Psychological ownership has recently been discussed in the organizational (Pierce, Kostova and Dirks, (2001) literature. The ownership this article refers to is the sense of “ownership” gradually developed by individuals for the company at which they work. What the article does not explore is the opposite notion, that is, the tendency for those in control of organizations to see the employees of that organization as "their property".
When an organization hires a person to perform a job, that person signs away a large percentage of his or her time, expertise and energy. The individual, in a sense, becomes the property of the organization, a human resource equivalent of other items of inventory. When a chemical scientist invents a new pill, he or she usually does so for a giant corporation, giving the distinction of inventor to the organization itself (Mueller & Dyerson, 1999).
How can an organization own a person’s ideas, unless it owns the person? And how can an organization own a person? Organizations have long owned the people who work for them. The association has variously been described as employer-employee, principal-agent, boss-hired hand, supervisor-subordinate. If we are referring to mill towns in the mining and textile industries, it could be argued that the company’s owned not just those who worked for them, but their entire families, even their unborn children. In modern society, it is a myth that human beings are free-standing entities. On the continuum from slave to free agent, most people in democratic, capitalistic societies are clearly somewhere in the middle, at times closer to slave and at others, closer to free agent (Pescosolido & Rubin, 2000).
But, you say, people are paid for their services, for their commitment to the organization. How is that different from saying that they have sold part or in some cases almost all of themselves to the company? It is only a matter of semantics. As long as the organization to which a person has sold him or herself in part or in whole, operates in that person’s best interest, there is no problem, but in the case where the organization buys part of the person and proceeds to violate that part of the person, we most definitely have a moral issue, if not a legal one.
Am I more concerned with the organization’s violation of the individual employee than I am the individual employee’s tendency to be disloyal or disruptive to the offices of the organization? I am, and it is because of the relative power distance between the two. When entire families were owned by mining companies or by textile mills, who was more likely to exploit and who most likely to be exploited? The situation only changes by a matter of a few degrees when you consider the unbalanced nature of loyalty expectations, indeed of employment-at-will arrangements. People who worked in company towns did not even have discursive control over their own perceptions of their relationship to the company (Steinberg, 1999). That is, the company could always trump their claims of injustice by reminding them, and anyone else interested, that if it were not for the company, the employee would not have a place to live or a place to buy their groceries and so on.
When we are relatively free, as in the case of say a twenty-something female, living on her own, employed at the mall dispensing yogurt and soft drinks in the food court, our freedom also comes at a price. The organization compensates us for giving up some of our freedom to them, but we pay in other ways when we choose not to take, or cannot find, employment with another company. On the other hand, she may actually have more freedom (say flexibility of schedule, dress code, attitude, and the like), than she might have if she were employed by a larger, more demanding, bureaucratic organization. Her wages are lower at the soda shop, but even at that, the company that employs her, defies her to leave, asking her to prove any claim she might have that she is worth more on the open market. Until she overcomes inertia and a certain type of fear, she will remain there, operating under the assumption that the company is right about her lack of viable employment options. When jobs are in short supply, the company looks “more right” than when jobs are easily obtained. If she gets trained in a skill, say manicuring, her opportunities may well improve. She is thus, you might say, able to more easily “buy herself back” from the company that owns her.
It is offensive to compare modern employment to slavery, just as it would be offensive to compare the “plight” of the heir of a great fortune to that of the offspring of a homeless couple. But it does not seem entirely wrong to claim that even free-agency employment is in the same sphere of life as slavery or conscription. They both have to do with one’s relinquishment of self in whole or part to what is most often a more powerful, external force, the institution that employs them. To varying degrees we all become agents to principals, and in some instances we are able to serve as both agent and principal at the same time. If I own a Wendy’s franchise, I obligate myself as agent to the principal Wendy’s corporation, while at the same time I may be the principal to a number of employees, who are “agents of mine”.
The reason I am framing this matter of one person being somehow owned by another, is to argue that when the “owner” is relatively powerful over the life outcomes of the person he or she “owns”, their relationship becomes fertile ground for exploitation and abuse. Does it always happen? No. Is it always avoidable? Clearly not.
To tie this argument to our discussion of various forms of rights, the individual who is playing the role of agent is, all other things being equal, more likely to give up rights than he or she is apt to limit the rights of the principal. [It occurs to me that I should remind us all at this point that principal is a term used in economics to mean the entity whose interests are being served by the agent.] The agent gives up power (rights?) over his or her life in terms of time, energy, expertise, alternative means of income, in exchange for remuneration.
Mayer (2000) argues that individual agents have no right to workplace democracy. The only right the agent has is to sufficient power to maintain a balanced relationship with the principal, in terms of being able to demand that the remuneration he or she gets from the principal will be commensurate with the value of his or her efforts as an agent. Notice though that in the absence of labor market forces, unions, or a clear inbalance in favor of the agent in the relationship (such as a labor market where suitable qualified employees are difficult to find), the principal will always be at a distinct advantage.
We have seen an economy where real wages have declined for thirty years, while employment levels have been up and down like a yo yo, which seems to indicate that in the current economy, wages are only loosely connected to employment levels, if they are at all. Individual agents have always suffered from the fact that some if not most of their “employment alternatives” were mythical, that is, their mobility is often effectively blocked (by geography, transportation, information about the jobs, etc) from finding and applying for every job for which they might be qualified. In an economy where wages appear to not be tied to employment levels, it is not just individual agents who are at a disadvantage, but it could be argued that all or almost all agents are in a position to be exploited by principals.
The types of potential exploitation to which I am referring includes: limited commitment from the employer to the individual’s career, abandonment of entire communities of employees for “cheaper” communities (e.g. Michigan for Mexico or Mexico for Thailand), or simply wages too low for people to actually live on. While it may be argued that workers do not have a right to workplace democracy, can it also be argued that they do not have a right to fair remuneration for the parts of themselves they are “selling” to the employer, or a right to consider the employment contract to be at least in part based on their ability, good will and good effort?

References

Mayer, R. (2000). Is there a moral right to workplace democracy? Social Theory and Practice, 26(2), 301-325.

Mueller, F. & Dyerson, R. (1999). Expert humans or expert organizations? Organization Studies, 20(2), 225-256.

Pierce, J.L., Kostova, T. & Dirks, K.T. (2001). Toward a theory of psychological ownership in organization. Management Review, 26(2), 298-310.

Pescosolido, B.A. & Rubin, B.A. (2000). The web of group affiliations revisited: Social life, postmodernism, and sociology, American Sociological Review, 52-76.

Steinberg, M.W. (1999). The talk and back talk of collective action: A dialogic analysis of repertoires of discourse among nineteenth-century English cotton spinners. The American Journal of Sociology, 105(3), 736-790.