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
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