Managing Value-Based Organizations

Citation

Hoag, B. (2007), "Managing Value-Based Organizations", Human Resource Management International Digest, Vol. 15 No. 6. https://doi.org/10.1108/hrmid.2007.04415fae.001

Managing Value-Based Organizations

Managing Value-Based Organizations

Bruce Hoag, Cary L. Cooper, Edward Elgar, 2006

The authors believe that managers today have little understanding of why there is so much change in the world of work or what they can do about it. Answers to these questions are essentially given in parts 1 and 2 of the book.

Part 1 looks at why work has been organized and managed the way it is from the sixteenth century to the present day. Current organizations are examined, as is the “horizontal revolution” currently taking place. The value-based organization is also described.

Part 2 examines how organizations have manipulated these traditional practices through three “myths” – of rightsizing, competitive advantage and the balanced scorecard.

The practical implications of value-based principles are examined in part 3, from the viewpoints of organizations, managers, employees and human-resource managers.

I found the first three chapters of part 1 very interesting, as the authors have drawn on social and economic-history sources to describe how the organization and management of work have changed from the pre-Industrial Revolution period in England to the post-Industrial Revolution period in America – a span of about 400 years.

The “traditional” organization that grew out of the latter not only changed the way in which work was organized and managed, but also served as a template for the rest of the industrialized world. The term “horizontal revolution” is used to describe current approaches to change – horizontal because organizations that pass through it often are referred to as flat and the process through which the flattening has taken place as downsizing, rightsizing or restructuring. It is a collection of smaller revolutions, each contributing its own “chaos”.

Part 3 is the “so what” section of the book. To survive the upheaval, the authors believe that organizations need to be designed according to value-based principles. Managers need better to understand what each employee values and to engage with him or her to increase the level of this value to the individual.

Employees, who now are in effect independent contractors, are accountable to themselves for their own employability and have to manage themselves to the same extent as someone else in a traditional organization would have managed them. HR managers, whose traditional roles disappear in a value-based organization, now are manages of value partnerships, identifying and changing organizational behaviors that impede value exchange and helping staff to become “transpositional networkers”.

The book is unusual in that what it is really about is not completely revealed until the fourth chapter. The chapter summaries are helpful, although some could be more succinct. Nominating a target audience is problematic: given the structure of the book (and its 38-page bibliography) I would nominate executives and academics, notwithstanding that the book contains a valuable message for all employees.

Reviewed by David Cromb, Queensland Transport, Australia.

A longer version of this review was originally published in Leadership & Organization Development Journal, Vol. 28 No. 3, 2007