Organizational effectiveness, people and performance

121 downloads 9075 Views 172KB Size Report
with organization effectiveness and HR, such as consumer behaviour, operations, risk and crisis ..... style, rather than focusing on a theoretical-only dialogue.
Journal of Organizational Effectiveness: People and Performance Organizational effectiveness, people and performance: new challenges, new research agendas Sparrow Paul Cooper Cary

Downloaded by National Institute of Technology Rourkela At 03:52 28 August 2014 (PT)

Article information: To cite this document: Sparrow Paul Cooper Cary , (2014),"Organizational effectiveness, people and performance: new challenges, new research agendas", Journal of Organizational Effectiveness: People and Performance, Vol. 1 Iss 1 pp. 2 - 13 Permanent link to this document: http://dx.doi.org/10.1108/JOEPP-01-2014-0004 Downloaded on: 28 August 2014, At: 03:52 (PT) References: this document contains references to 60 other documents. To copy this document: [email protected] The fulltext of this document has been downloaded 1444 times since 2014* Access to this document was granted through an Emerald subscription provided by All users group

For Authors If you would like to write for this, or any other Emerald publication, then please use our Emerald for Authors service information about how to choose which publication to write for and submission guidelines are available for all. Please visit www.emeraldinsight.com/authors for more information.

About Emerald www.emeraldinsight.com Emerald is a global publisher linking research and practice to the benefit of society. The company manages a portfolio of more than 290 journals and over 2,350 books and book series volumes, as well as providing an extensive range of online products and additional customer resources and services. Emerald is both COUNTER 4 and TRANSFER compliant. The organization is a partner of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) and also works with Portico and the LOCKSS initiative for digital archive preservation. *Related content and download information correct at time of download.

The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available at www.emeraldinsight.com/2051-6614.htm

JOEPP 1,1

Organizational effectiveness, people and performance: new challenges, new research agendas

2

Paul Sparrow and Cary Cooper Lancaster University Management School, Lancaster, UK

Downloaded by National Institute of Technology Rourkela At 03:52 28 August 2014 (PT)

Abstract

Journal of Organizational Effectiveness: People and Performance Vol. 1 No. 1, 2014 pp. 2-13 r Emerald Group Publishing Limited 2051-6614 DOI 10.1108/JOEPP-01-2014-0004

Purpose – As founding editors of the Journal of Organizational Effectiveness: People and Performance, this paper welcomes the beginnings of a new academic community. The purpose of this paper is to outline why both academic researchers and organizational practitioners need to enter into and be guided by a new debate and new set of expertise. It signals the sorts of research agendas that need to be addressed in this field. Design/methodology/approach – The paper establishes the future research agenda for organizational effectiveness. It reviews historic literature and traces the development of the field of organizational effectiveness from: early analysis of political judgements about effectiveness; systemic analysis of the intersection of profitability, employee satisfaction and societal value; debates over stakeholder, power, social justice and organizational fitness, resilience and evolution; the importance of mental models of senior managers; how organizations use changes in work system design and business process to modify employee’s mental, emotional and attitudinal states; and the use of an architectural metaphor to highlight the locus of value creation perspectives. Findings – There are many echoes of the debates and concerns today in the past. The paper shows how current concerns over strategic and business model change, organization design, talent management, agile and resilient organization, balanced scorecard, employee engagement, advocacy and reputation can be informed, and better contextualized, by drawing upon frameworks that have previously arisen. Research limitations/implications – The paper argues that the authors must adopt a broad definition of performance, and examine how the achievement of important strategic outcomes, such as innovation, customer centricity, operational excellence, globalization, become dependent on people and organization issues. It signals the need to focus on the intermediate performance outcomes that are necessary to achieve these strategic outcomes, and to examine these performance issues across several levels of analysis such as the individual, team, function, organization and societal (policy) level. Practical implications – The audience for this paper and the journal as a whole is academics who work on cross-disciplinary research problems, the leading human resource (HR), strategy or performance research centres, and finally senior managers and specialists (not just HR) from the internal centres of expertise inside organizations who wish to keep abreast of leading thinking. Originality/value – The paper argues the need to combine human resource management perspectives with those from decision sciences, supply chain management, operations management, consumer behaviour, innovation, management cognition, strategic management and its attention to the resource-based view of the firm, dynamic capabilities, business models and strategy as practice. It argues for a broadening of analysis beyond human capital into related interests in social capital, intellectual capital and political/reputational capital, and for linkage of the analysis across time, to place the novelties and contexts of today into the structures of the past. Keywords Employee engagement, Performance, Organization effectiveness, Business model change, Agile organization, HR architecture Paper type Research paper

Introduction Organizations are facing complex performance drivers, such as the globalization of their organizational capabilities, the need to pursue strategies of innovation,

Downloaded by National Institute of Technology Rourkela At 03:52 28 August 2014 (PT)

the need to build ever more lean, productive, but intelligently efficient and effective processes and to shift the focus of their organizations so that they are customer centric. Those responsible for people management need to be able to look into their organization – its strategy, mission, business model and performance priorities – and be able to articulate how the management of people can serve to create value for the organization, capture that value, leverage it, whilst also protecting and preserving what is of value. However, the human resource (HR) function has been “looking in” – at business strategy and performance, and at its’ own internal transformations – for many years now. This is still hugely important, and HR academics will continue to examine the competitiveness challenges faced by organizations. But in an age of constrained growth we have returned to an era when HR functions also have a responsibility to start “looking out” again – to understand the changing nature of work and its’ place in society, and the issues that cut across organizations but will strongly impact the internal world of any of them. We need HR academics to also establish this “looking out” agenda. These challenges require increasingly cross-disciplinary insight, and yet the academic literature, and much organizational practice, still tends to be structured around narrow and specialist lines. Inevitably, this leads to a fragmentation of organizational capabilities and resources which, in turn, impact upon effectiveness and performance. There is a need, therefore, to understand the implications that these problems of organizational effectiveness have for both the people and organizational processes, and to seek to challenge these through research lenses that synthesize and integrate important logics of action, theories and models. To the extent that they address issues of people and performance, we need to tap disciplines beyond those typically associated with organization effectiveness and HR, such as consumer behaviour, operations, risk and crisis management, political economy, population ecology, industrial sociology, amongst others. Therefore our dialogue needs to be undertaken in a new way: through different disciplinary lenses and against different paradigms; across disciplines; and across different levels of analysis. We want this journal to cross-fertilize academic debates, forging points of common understanding and informing respective disciplines of knowledge that can co-opted and applied to new settings. We have chosen the term “organization effectiveness” for a reason, but we need to stress that whilst all disciplines have an interest in this issue, it is the “people and performance” aspects that this journal will focus on. To capture this work, the journal will adopt a broad definition of performance, beyond of course just financial performance – hence the term organization effectiveness – and tapping into the achievement of important strategic outcomes, such as innovation, customer centricity, operational excellence, globalization. It will focus on the intermediate performance outcomes that are necessary to achieve these strategic outcomes. The journal will publish research papers that tackle performance issues that have relevance at the individual, team, function, organization and societal (policy) level. It will not be focused on the effectiveness of people and organizations, but rather on the “role of people in the effectiveness of organizations”. We also seek papers that are concerned with the experience of workforces and the productivity and performance of employees, or that address the impact of important management functions and processes. Papers should be capable of contributing to strategic (and policy) thinking and identifying the long-term performance issues that confront workforces and organizations, with findings that can provide guidance on the best ways forward.

Organizational effectiveness

3

JOEPP 1,1

Downloaded by National Institute of Technology Rourkela At 03:52 28 August 2014 (PT)

4

Organization effectiveness in retrospect and prospect There is a golden thread that connects people and their performance to organizational effectiveness. This thread connects many issues. To help signal the territory and the sorts of issues that we welcome to this new journal, we trace some of the main developments in the study of organization effectiveness. As we look forward to an important research agenda, we therefore also briefly look back. The study of organizational effectiveness has a long and distinguished history. We can find many echos of the debates and concerns today – indeed from one perspective there nothing new under the sun – the path towards a broad and multi-disciplinary understanding of organization effectiveness has been trodden by our predecessors. As we look forward, it is important to recognize that we can learn from the established principles of the past. Organization effectiveness became more central to organization theory when in the late 1950s and 1960s systems models took over from more goal-based ways of thinking about it. Sociologists viewed organizational effectiveness within a systems model that needed to jointly understand the interplay between productivity, flexibility and an absence of organizational strain (Georgopoulos and Tannenbaum, 1957). Today we give much attention to the need for organizations and their leaders to manage in the broad context of strategic and business model change, balanced by concerns about the sustainability of such strategies. Yet from the beginnings of the field of organizational effectiveness, when Katz and Kahn (1966) argued that whilst senior managers could attend to activities associated with internal issues of efficiency from an economic perspective, it was evident that effectiveness was a political judgement made about organizations best viewed externally. The key issue was how to align the two views of an organization in ways that led to growth, storage, survival and control over the environment. As more systemic ways of thinking about effectiveness took hold, Friedlander and Pickle (1968) said that organizational effectiveness should be seen as the intersection of profitability, employee satisfaction and societal value, whilst Mahoney and Weitzel (1969) argued that we needed to focus on the level of productivity in, support for, reliability of and utilization of the organization’s business model. Blake and Mouton (1964) saw it needing to focus on the simultaneous achievement of high production and high people centred enterprise, and for Gibson et al. (1973) organization effectiveness had to be concerned with the alignment of structure, process and behaviour, best judged in terms of short-run productivity, efficiency and satisfaction, intermediate adaptability and development and long-run survival. Today we give much importance to talent management models (Sparrow et al., 2014). Many of the debates today about the importance of, but also limitations of, talent are echoed in a finding by Lieberson and O’Connor (1972) which showed that leadership succession in large corporations bore only a limited relation to performance. Indeed, organizational effectiveness as a topic had its beginnings in the contribution of individuals to organizational success. Similarly, coming from a selection perspective, it was argued that the success of such talent and therefore measurement of organizational effectiveness was best seen in terms of an “ultimate criterion”, such as productivity, net profit, mission accomplishment or organizational growth (Thorndike, 1949). But organizational effectiveness requires the satisfaction of multiple constituencies – each having an influence on the priorities against which organizational performance should be judged. Many of the debates we have about this today trace back to the 1970s, when more critical voices first began to be heard. For Hirsch (1975), a sociologist,

Downloaded by National Institute of Technology Rourkela At 03:52 28 August 2014 (PT)

organizational effectiveness was determined by two things: first, the alignment between the organization’s (internal) task environment and the institutional environment that conditioned and set the context for industry profitability; and second, the way that the external environment influenced senior management decisions over strategy. At the same time and in the same journal, Steers (1975) reviewed 17 different models of organizational effectiveness. He found little consistency, concluded understanding was rudimentary and identified eight problems. Measures of organizational effectiveness were generally used in isolation, with the most popular being productivity, profit or rate of return, employee satisfaction and employee withdrawal or turnover (the latter two being seen as being value-laden and less objective). Today’s attention to the agile organization was evident then – ten out of the 17 models of the time used adaptability and flexibility as the main criteria, followed in order of importance by productivity, satisfaction, profitability, resource acquisition, an absence of strain, control over the environment, development, efficiency, employee retention, growth, integration, open communications and survival. It could be argued, based on these findings, that attempts to measure organizational effectiveness are fruitless. The conclusion arrived at then (Steers, 1975), as today, was that the “effectiveness” construct is so complex as to defy simple attempts at model development. The bottom line questions, then, as now, were “whose preferences should be weighted most heavily in reaching a judgement about organizational effectiveness [y] [and] whose preferences should an organization attempt to satisfy through the distribution of performance outcomes” (Zammuto, 1984, p. 606). There were four ways of answering these questions. By the 1980s, the first 30 years of thinking about organizational effectiveness had been shaped by shifts in the expectations of the public and the areas of management attention. There were four ways in which people thought about organizational effectiveness and judged its desirability. As a forerunner to today’s balanced scorecard thinking, the first answer was that “it is all relative”, so ask the main stakeholders as consumers of the organization’s performance to each evaluate against their own criteria, and use a collated set (Connolly et al., 1980). The second answer was a “power” one, which argued that there are dominant coalitions at any one time who negotiate what the performance outcomes should be (Pennings and Goodman, 1977), this negotiation reflects the relative power each has in terms of control over strategic resources (Pfeffer and Salancik, 1978), and these demands have to be met in order to ensure the survival of the organization. The third answer took a “social justice” perspective (Rawls, 1971). Arguing that social values determine organizational effectiveness, and place limits around what a society can seek and the means by which it is attained, effectiveness must be judged by the extent that it ensures equal distribution of key resources for self-respect such as liberty, opportunity, income and wealth. The yardstick of organizational effectiveness was that the organization passes the “regret principle” ( Keeley, 1978) – i.e., it seeks to minimize any level of regret that its constituents have over participating in the organization. The fourth and final way of thinking about organizational effectiveness was to see it in evolutionary terms. What is effective at one time becomes ineffective at others as the context changes, so effective performance is that which increases the adaptability of the organization – the ability to satisfy a continual process of divergent definitions of effective organizational performance over time (Zammuto, 1982). Researchers talked about “resilient” organizations – yes, a term back in vogue – seen as those who could survive because they had the foresight and capability to anticipate and prepare for the future (Connors, 1979; Ross and Goodfellow, 1980). “Organizational fitness” needed to be tested, which meant seeking sharpened skills and self-correcting responses.

Organizational effectiveness

5

JOEPP 1,1

Downloaded by National Institute of Technology Rourkela At 03:52 28 August 2014 (PT)

6

Today, in the wake of a global financial crisis, we question and challenge the direction of business development and the financial and economic models that drive it. Such challenges again follow an important intellectual heritage. By the late 1980s, concern was growing over the failure of management and narrowness of the criteria used to organizational effectiveness in practice, triggered mainly by challenges to US competitiveness and poor growth in productivity. It was Hitt (1988) who first noted the dual problem of there being a discrepancy between actual organizational health and reported health in financial metrics, being created by an over reliance on financial measures of performance and short-run profits on the one hand, but an equal reluctance of academics to link any measures of organizational effectiveness to their own research, ignoring or working on assumed models of effectiveness. Accounting determined measures such as return on investment, assets, equity or assets and earnings per share were highly inter-correlated but were subject to distortion, and did not take account of risks to the reported finances. Whilst capital asset pricing models, or shareholder return models, were argued to be a more reliable longer term way of thinking about organizational effectiveness from a financial perspective, looking at the securities market and adjusting the returns based on the risks and capturing long-run performance potential, these too reflected a narrow stakeholder base. For Hitt (1988), the financialization of organizational effectiveness measures was still creating sealed boxes and closed loop thinking in addressing the problem. At this point, as there is again now, there was a shift towards thinking about organizational effectiveness by design. This question is as live today as it was then. From an organization design perspective (Butler, 1991), organizations were seen as being constrained by their environments and therefore had to set the criteria for effectiveness via “performance norms” underpinned by essential values. It was accepted that there may be competing or contradictory norms, but management have the crucial task of translating the norms into an “internal ideology” which provides the foundations for decision making and actions (Huber and Glick, 1996). Themes of information and organization design also led us into risk and management cognition, and from this the mindset and capital of top talent. Hodgkinson and Sparrow (2002) argued the importance of mental models of senior managers. Today it is evident that organization designs continually erode in their efficiency, so a re-design capability is important – an ongoing and crucial need (Lawler, 2005; Mohrman, 2007). As HR professionals move into the topic of HR design (Ruona and Gibson, 2004), it brings with it renewed attention to a range of developments that have a bearing on people and performance: the redesign of strategic organizational processes; the competing value of information inside the organization and how structures can help make sure managers attend to the most important information. Attention is being given again to changes in the organization form – defined as the combination of strategy, structure and internal control and co-ordination systems that provide an organization with its operating logic, its rules of resource allocation and its mechanism of corporate governance. Meanwhile, as organizations are being designed around strategically important information markets, strategists are highlighting the importance of the integration mechanisms that bring together the varied knowledge of individuals to produce important organizational solutions (Hansen and Haas, 2001; Bryan and Joyce, 2007). Human resource management (HRM), people and organizational performance Returning to the golden thread that links people and performance to organization effectiveness, as researchers took an increasingly broad perspective on what is meant

Downloaded by National Institute of Technology Rourkela At 03:52 28 August 2014 (PT)

by effectiveness, psychologists too have begun to concern themselves with the most important contributions that individuals make to organizational effectiveness (Robertson et al., 2002). This work again presages today’s interest in topics such as employee engagement and advocacy, and employer brands (Albrecht, 2010; Truss et al., 2013). As attention was given to the need to link employees more deeply to the organization’s products and services, processes and performance, the performance criteria applied to “effectiveness” became more diverse, managerial but also reciprocal (Rousseau, 1995). Sparrow and West (2002) noted these ranged from basic task competence or proficiency, through to delivery of performance against efficient or cost effective performance metrics, impacts on organizational competitiveness on the basis of speed or time, the creation of internal or external customer perceptions of added value, the challenge of longer term strategic risks or costs associated with error or inappropriate organizational decision making, and the “collateral damage” created by current actions in terms of the future constraints on actions that they might create. Organizations needed to develop organizational cultures that created the mental, emotional and attitudinal states that precede effective employee performance. Once these states were established in a positive direction, then employees could begin to exhibit a series of salient organizational behaviours, i.e. the behaviours that actually generated effective performance. People were attracted to specific organizational cultures, culture acted as a stabilizer of individual behaviour. Psychologists there began to look at how organizations could use changes in work system design and business process to modify employee’s work orientations and responsibilities, and therefore the extent to which the appropriate mental, emotional and attitudinal states could be seen as discretionary, or as an inherent part of the job and organizational life. The changes in the structure of employment, job stability and employment outcomes and quality of the employment relationship that was by this time evident, led to organizational psychology mobilizing interest in a range of new areas of research (Herriot, 2001; Sparrow and Cooper, 2003). The initial conceptualization of psychological contributions to organizational effectiveness being based around commitment, absenteeism and turnover (Mowday et al., 1982; O’Reilly and Chatman, 1986; Meyer and Allen, 1991) had shifted focus. Sparrow and Cooper (2003) structured attention to the employment relationship around eight issues. Driven by discussion of the psychological contract and shifts in the nature of careers, and an increasing individualization of the employment relationship, attention began to focus on the importance of a series of individual-organizational linkages and bonds (Pierce et al., 2001). In addition to the traditional interests in commitment, discussion picked up questions of identification, internalization and psychological ownership. The management of work-life balance, well-being and generational shifts in work values were also becoming mainstream (Robertson and Cooper, 2011). Finally, from the late 1980s onwards, we began to the systemic relationships among HRM practices and their relationship to specific approaches that organizations could use as they strove to gain competitive advantage (Schuler and MacMillan, 1984; Schuler and Jackson, 1987). This perspective argued that HRM practices could not be chosen based on technical merits alone. Rather, it should be in terms of their ability to facilitate strategy implementation. From an organizational effectiveness perspective, a key point of interest was to understand how HR practices might be differentiated in relation to intermediate strategic performance outcomes, such as innovation, cost (efficiency and effectiveness) or quality. Contingency models were used to identify the

Organizational effectiveness

7

JOEPP 1,1

Downloaded by National Institute of Technology Rourkela At 03:52 28 August 2014 (PT)

8

essential role behaviours that needed to be engineered amongst employees, with HRM practices configured and packaged differently to support these role behaviours. By the late 1990s, researchers began to use an architectural metaphor to highlight the locus of value creation in strategic HRM (Becker and Gerhart, 1996; Lepak and Snell, 1999; Wright et al., 2001; Wright and McMahan, 1992; Becker and Huselid, 2006; Kang et al., 2007). The language of HR architecture was used to reflect a combination of systems, practices, competencies and skills needed to develop and manage an organization’s strategic human capital (Becker and Huselid, 2006). As this work developed, research began to focus on the different intermediate strategic performance outcomes (e.g. innovation, customer centricity, lean management) that were central to organizational effectiveness. These performance outcomes were understood to emphasize different internal business processes in terms of competitive advantage (Lepak and Snell, 2007). Hence, an important agenda is one of understanding the skill sets that become critical for value creation across these different outcomes. Similarly, we need to understand which sets of skills, competencies, knowledge and delivery mechanism enable the HR architecture to exert strategic influence over the execution of organizational strategy (Jackson et al., 1989; Barney, 1991; Wright and McMahan, 1992; Huselid, 1995). An example of attempts at more strategic application would be talent management, defined as the process through which employers anticipate and meet their needs for human capital (Cappelli, 2008). Coming from a strategic talent pools perspective, research notes that decisions around talent are rarely optimal (Boudreau, 2010; Boudreau and Jesuthasan, 2011). For Cascio and Boudreau (2010), the answer to these problems is to use a risk optimization, management and mitigation framework to look at HR strategy and strategic workforce planning (SWP). Human capital strategies have to be built on the reduction of uncertainty, elimination of bad outcomes and insurance against bad outcomes. Whilst cautioning against the illusion of predictability, this might still include efforts at increased precision in predictions about future supply and demand for skills, or the application of quality-control tools to important HR processes (such as talent management) to achieve the same “low-defect” rigour seen in engineering and operations processes. Flowing from such developments, another important area of research now is to show how organizational effectiveness can be aided by practices associated with human capital management. The word capital reflects a concept from economics which denotes potentially valuable assets (Nahapiet, 2011). These include a number of evolving practices. One of these is human capital (or workforce) analytics or accounting, which typically blend techniques such as forecasting principles and scenario planning to create forecasts of the current and future workforce. This in turn is evolving towards SWP, which attempts to identify the characteristics of human capital needed to achieve important strategic objectives, and create insight into relative value of specific talent to the execution of an important strategies, alongside necessary investments and actions needed to avoid any loss of value. What should be evident from all the historical perspectives outlined above is that they all bring cross-disciplinary insights into the process of linking people, performance and organizational effectiveness. We see now the need to combine perspectives from decision sciences, supply chain management, operations management, consumer behaviour, innovation, strategic management and its attention to the resource-based view of the firm, dynamic capabilities, business models and strategy as practice. We see a broadening of analysis beyond human capital into related interests in social capital,

Downloaded by National Institute of Technology Rourkela At 03:52 28 August 2014 (PT)

intellectual capital and political/reputational capital. In order to be clear what the real problem is, we see the need to link analysis across time, and to place the novelties and contexts of today into the structures of the past. This has implications for the style of research that is now needed. The style of research Building on these areas of interest, in this journal we seek research that has a performance connotation, either by including hard performance data or by focusing conceptually on key processes and capabilities considered central to performance. The issues that are of interest in thinking about the performance context of any topic might include: (1)

The implicit models of performance within the phenomenon being examined.

(2)

The broad direction of causation that is argued exists between the topic and performance.

(3)

The performance range that is created by the topic. We might think of three different and increasingly more complex performance outcomes: proximal performance outcomes (e.g. task performance, contextual performance, commitment, satisfaction, turnover intentions); intermediate performance outcomes that capture the delivery of a strategy (e.g. customer service or value proposition, innovative behaviour, understanding of a broader business model and performance context); or distal or organisational performance outcomes, e.g., measures of quality or financial performance.

What are the important antecedents that bring the topic about, and therefore what is the most appropriate fulcrum around which organizational performance interventions will pivot and should be designed? The journal will carry a range of papers – synthetic and state-of-the-art reviews, conceptual pieces and critiques of existing theory and practice, and empirical studies of both quantitative and qualitative method on performance and people management process issues. We are keen to attract papers that have a reflexive, evidence-based style, rather than focusing on a theoretical-only dialogue. We seek research data and insights of specific relevance and utility to HR academics and practitioners, functional specialists and academics involved in research that has strong people management implications from cognate fields (e.g. marketing and customer services, operations management and work systems). We also invite applied research based on new ideas and emerging trends that have the potential for impact and address real-world needs (research linked to current and emerging practices). In this opening issue, we have five excellent contributions that help to establish our agenda and the research style. The first paper, from Susan Mohrman and Ed Lawler, reflects the perspectives of some of the first scholars who argues for an integration between HRM and organizational effectiveness. It focuses on the need to design organizations for sustainable effectiveness. They note that we are another moment in history when the choices we make about building sustainable global economy will need system-wide changes, and will require deep changes in organizational design. The three papers each come from different HR traditions, and signal important areas that we wish to be active in. The paper by Randall Schuler and Susan Jackson, embedded in the link between strategic context and source of competitive advantage, employee role behaviours and organizational effectiveness, reminds us that the debate

Organizational effectiveness

9

JOEPP 1,1

Downloaded by National Institute of Technology Rourkela At 03:52 28 August 2014 (PT)

10

about HRM can be seen in the context of HR strategy. The paper by Robert Kasˇe, Jaap Paauwe and Sasˇa Batisticˇ examines the intellectual structure of the HRM-performance debate – more broadly how HR as a strategic function and its HR systems contribute to superior organizational performance – and how competition of business models and rapid technological change is once more altering the people-technology equilibrium. The paper by Wayne Cascio and John Boudreau builds on the human capital management traditions within organizational effectiveness. In today’s world, those researching the contribution that human capital can make to organizational effectiveness need to incorporate learning from the field of risk management – as they argue, risk-mitigation may overshadow risk-optimized decisions. They examine the concepts of uncertainty, risk and opportunity, again drawing links back to the importance of mental models, as noted in the earlier work on management cognition and organization design. Finally, the paper by Jim Quick, Ann McFadyen and Debra Nelson from an organization health and well-being perspective focuses on high-risk employees, and the way that HR professionals can advance health, well-being and performance while averting danger by identifying and managing high-risk employees, anticipating their needs and actions before damage is done. We welcome those who wish to join in the agenda of this journal and look forward to a rich and informative academic and practitioner dialogue. References Albrecht, S. (Ed.) (2010), The Handbook of Employee Engagement: Models, Measures and Practice, Edward-Elgar, London. Barney, J. (1991), “Firm resources and sustained competitive advantage”, Journal of Management, Vol. 17 No. 1, pp. 99-120. Becker, B.E. and Gerhart, B. (1996), “The impact of human resource management on organizational performance: progress and prospects”, Academy of Management Journal, Vol. 39 No. 4, pp. 779-801. Becker, B.E. and Huselid, M.A. (2006), “Strategic human resources management: where do we go from here?”, Journal of Management, Vol. 32 No. 6, pp. 898-925. Blake, R.R. and Mouton, J.S. (1964), The Managerial Grid, Grief Publishing Co, Houston, TX. Boudreau, J.W. (2010), Retooling HR: Using Proven Business Tools to Make Better Decisions About Talent, Harvard Business School Press, Boston, MA. Boudreau, J.W. and Jesuthasan, R. (2011), Transformative HR: How Great Companies Use Evidence Based Change for Sustainable Advantage, Jossey-Bass, San Francisco, CA. Bryan, L.L. and Joyce, C.I. (2007), Mobilising Minds: Creating Wealth from Talent in The 21st Century Organisation, McGraw-Hill, New York, NY. Butler, R. (1991), Designing Organizations, Routledge, London. Cappelli, P. (2008), Talent on Demand: Managing Talent in an Age of Uncertainty, Harvard Business Press, Boston, MA. Cascio, W.F. and Boudreau, J.W. (2010), Investing in People: Financial Impact of Human Resource Initiatives, Financial Times Press, New York, NY. Connolly, T., Conlon, F.M. and Deutsche, S.J. (1980), “Organizational effectiveness: a multiple constituency approach”, Academy of Management Review, Vol. 5 No. 2, pp. 211-218. Connors, J.F. (1979), “Management continuity – the key to organizational effectiveness”, Training and Development Journal, Vol. 33, pp. 92-95. Friedlander, F. and Pickle, H. (1968), “Components of effectiveness in small organizations”, Administrative Science Quarterly, Vol. 13 No. 2, pp. 289-304.

Downloaded by National Institute of Technology Rourkela At 03:52 28 August 2014 (PT)

Georgopoulos, B.S. and Tannenbaum, A.S. (1957), “The study of organizational effectiveness”, American Sociological Review, Vol. 22 No. 5, pp. 534-540. Gibson, J.L., Ivancevich, J.M. and Donnelly, J.H. (1973), Organizations: Structure, Process Behaviour, BPI, Dallas, TX. Hansen, M.T. and Haas, M.R. (2001), “Competing for attention in knowledge markets: electronic document dissemination in a management consulting company”, Administrative Science Quarterly, Vol. 46 No. 1, pp. 1-28. Herriot, P. (2001), The Employment Relationship: A Psychological Perspective, Routledge, Hove, East Sussex. Hirsch, P.M. (1975), “Organizational effectiveness and the institutional environment”, Administrative Science Quarterly, Vol. 20 No. 3, pp. 327-344. Hitt, M.A. (1988), “The measuring of organizational effectiveness: multiple domains and constituencies”, Management International Review, Vol. 28 No. 2, pp. 28-40. Hodgkinson, G. and Sparrow, P.R (2002), The Competent Organization: A Psychological Analysis of the Strategic Management Process, Open University Press, Buckingham. Huber, G.P. and Glick, W.H. (Eds) (1996), Organisational Change and Redesign: Ideas and Insights for Improving Performance, Oxford University Press, New York, NY. Huselid, M.A. (1995), “The impact of human resource management practices on turnover, productivity, and corporate financial performance”, Academy of Management Journal, Vol. 38 No. 3, pp. 635-672. Jackson, S.E., Schuler, R.S. and Rivero, J.C. (1989), “Organizational characteristics as predictors of personnel practices”, Personnel Psychology, Vol. 42 No. 4, pp. 727-786. Kang, S.-C., Morris, S.S. and Snell, S.A. (2007), “Relational archetypes organizational learning, and value creation: extending the human resource architecture”, Academy of Management Review, Vol. 32 No. 1, pp. 236-256. Katz, D. and Kahn, R.L. (1966), The Social Psychology of Organizations, Wiley, New York, NY. Keeley, M. (1978), “A social justice approach to organizational evaluation”, Administrative Science Quarterly, Vol. 22 No. 2, pp. 272-292. Lawler, E.E. (2005), “From human resource management to organizational effectiveness”, Human Resource Management, Vol. 44 No. 2, pp. 165-169. Lepak, D.P. and Snell, S.A. (1999), “The human resource architecture: toward a theory of human capital allocation and development”, Academy of Management Review, Vol. 24 No. 1, pp. 31-48. Lepak, D.P. and Snell, S.A. (2007), “Employment sub-systems and the HR architecture”, in Boxall, P., Purcell, J. and Wright, P. (Eds), The Oxford Handbook of Human Resource Management, Oxford University Press, Oxford, pp. 210-230. Lieberson, S. and O’Connor, J. (1972), “Leadership and organizational performance: a study of large corporations”, American Sociological Review, Vol. 37 No. 2, pp. 117-130. Mahoney, T. and Weitzel, W. (1969), “Managerial models of organizational effectiveness”, Administrative Science Quarterly, Vol. 14 No. 3, pp. 357-365. Meyer, J. and Allen, N. (1991), “A three-component conceptualisation of organizational commitment”, Human Resource Management Review, Vol. 1 No. 1, pp. 61-89. Mohrman, S.A. (2007), “Designing organisations for growth: the human resource contribution”, Human Resource Planning, Vol. 30 No. 4, pp. 34-39. Mowday, R.T., Porter, L.W. and Steers, R.M. (1982), Employee-Organization Linkages: The Psychology of Commitment, Absenteeism and Turnover, Academic Press, New York, NY. Nahapiet, J. (2011), “A social perspective: exploring the links between human capital and social capital”, in Burton-Jones, A. and Spender, J.-C. (Eds), The Oxford Handbook of Human Capital, Oxford University Press, Oxford, pp. 71-95.

Organizational effectiveness

11

JOEPP 1,1

O’Reilly, C. III and Chatman, J. (1986), “Organizational commitment and psychological attachment: the effects of compliance, identification and internalisation on pro-social behaviour”, Journal of Applied Psychology, Vol. 71 No. 3, pp. 492-499. Pennings, J.M. and Goodman, P.S. (1977), “Toward a workable framework”, in Goodman, P.S. and Pennings, J.M. (Eds), New Perspectives on Organizational Effectiveness, Jossey-Bass, San Francisco, CA, pp. 146-184.

Downloaded by National Institute of Technology Rourkela At 03:52 28 August 2014 (PT)

12

Pfeffer, J. and Salancik, G.R. (1978), The External Control of Organizations, Harper Row, New York, NY. Pierce, J.L., Kostova, T. and Dirks, K.T. (2001), “Toward a theory of psychological ownership in organizations”, Academy of Management Review, Vol. 26 No. 2, pp. 298-310. Rawls, J. (1971), A Theory of Justice, Balknop Press, Cambridge, MA. Robertson, I. and Cooper, C.L. (2011), Wellbeing: Productivity and Happiness at Work, Palgrave Macmillan, London. Robertson, I., Callinan, M. and Bartram, C. (Eds) (2002), Organizational Effectiveness: The Role of Psychology, Wiley, London. Ross, G.H. and Goodfellow, J.L. (1980), “A fitness approach to corporate survival”, Journal of Business Quarterly, Vol. 45, pp. 19-25. Rousseau, D.M. (1995), Psychological Contracts in Organizations: Understanding Written and Unwritten Agreements, Sage, Newbury Park, CA. Ruona, W.E.A. and Gibson, S.K. (2004), “The making of twenty-first century HR: the convergence of HRM, HRD, and OD”, Human Resource Management, Vol. 43 No. 1, pp. 49-66. Schuler, R.S. and Jackson, S.E. (1987), “Linking competitive strategies with human resource management practices”, Academy of Management Executive, Vol. 1 No. 3, pp. 207-219. Schuler, R.S. and MacMillan, I.C. (1984), “Gaining competitive advantage through human resource management practices”, Human Resource Management, Vol. 23 No. 3, pp. 241-255. Sparrow, P.R. and Cooper, C.L. (2003), The Employment Relationship: Key Challenges for HR, Butterworth-Heinemann, London. Sparrow, P.R. and West, M. (2002), “Psychology and organizational effectiveness”, in Robertson, I. Callinan, M. and Bartram, C. (Eds), Organizational Effectiveness: The Role of Psychology, Wiley, London, pp. 13-44. Sparrow, P.R., Scullion, H. and Tarique, I. (Eds) (2014), Strategic Talent Management: Contemporary Issues in International Context, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Steers, R.M. (1975), “Problems in the measurement of organizational effectiveness”, Administrative Science Quarterly, Vol. 20 No. 4, pp. 546-558. Thorndike, R.L. (1949), Personnel Selection: Test and Measurement Techniques, Wiley, New York, NY. Truss, K., Alfes, K., Delbridge, R., Shantz, A. and Soane, E. (Eds) (2013), Employee Engagement in Theory and Practice, Routledge, London. Wright, P.M. and McMahan, G.C. (1992), “Theoretical perspectives for strategic human resource management”, Journal of Management, Vol. 18 No. 2, pp. 295-320. Wright, P.M., Dunford, B.B. and Snell, S.A. (2001), “Human resources and the resource-based view of the firm”, Journal of Management, Vol. 27 No. 6, pp. 701-721. Zammuto, R.F. (1982), Assessing Organizational Effectiveness: Systems, Change, Adaptation and Strategy, SUNY Press, Albany, NY. Zammuto, R.F. (1984), “Comparison of multiple constituency models of organizational effectiveness”, Academy of Management Review, Vol. 9 No. 4, pp. 606-616.

Further reading Arthur, J.B. (1994), “Effects of human-resource systems on manufacturing performance and turnover”, Academy of Management Journal, Vol. 37 No. 3, pp. 670-687. Mowday, R.T., Porter, L.W. and Steers, R.M. (1979), “The measurement of organizational commitment”, Journal of Vocational Behavior, Vol. 14 No. 2, pp. 224-247.

Downloaded by National Institute of Technology Rourkela At 03:52 28 August 2014 (PT)

Corresponding author Professor Paul Sparrow can be contacted at: [email protected]

To purchase reprints of this article please e-mail: [email protected] Or visit our web site for further details: www.emeraldinsight.com/reprints

Organizational effectiveness

13