Introduction
These organizations claim that their employees are their number one priority. They further assert that their efforts and resources are focused on employee satisfaction and development (2002). In some situations, such statements are absolutely true. Unfortunately, these statements are often a mere collection of words designed to impress potential shareholders. On closer examination, organizational reality is considerably different from the words expressed in the annual report. Typically, employees are treated as disposable resources to be used and disposed of as the organization sees fit, like pawns in a great, competitive contest among the mighty lords of industry. Because of this approach, many of a firm's best employees leave, seeking opportunities for growth, development, and appreciation in other organizations.
In many organizations there exists between the perceived importance of employees and their treatment within the firm. When we go beyond the rhetoric of organizational ease and identify the way organizations go about developing their human resources, we discover a remarkable disparity ( 2000). Let us illustrate. One of the world's largest corporations recently made a conscious decision to adopt the principles and practices of the learning organization. As a result, it renamed its training and development department to the department of organizational learning and changed the name of its executive vice president of training and development to chief learning officer. Close examination of this business revealed that nothing else really changed. Its focus remained on providing classroom training activities. Little regard was given to how learning was ultimately used on the job or how learning could improve the organization's performance capacity. Although the firm's leaders claimed they understood the tenets of learning organizations, they failed to change the overall developmental strategy employed within the firm. In other words, the organization simply applied a new coat of paint to an existing problem, hoping the efforts would change future outcomes (1996). At the same time, the organization boasted that employees were its greatest asset and that it could not achieve its mission without the efforts of its people. In reality, nothing could be further from the truth.
All too often, firms believe that employees are easily replaced. Consequently, they develop policies and procedures that demonstrate a revolving-door philosophy toward human resources (1999). Under these conditions, employees are often treated with a lack of dignity and respect because of management's belief that people are disposable and that qualified replacements abound in the marketplace. The primary responsibility of executives in the developmental organization is to initiate organizational transformation. Organizational transformation is the re-creation, redesign, and redefinition of a firm to meet continuous, ever-changing competitive challenges. Within this definition it is assumed that leaders will be responsible for initiatives that cause organizations to shift their culture, structure, work climate, job and work designs, and fundamental identification of products and services necessary to enhance a firm's competitive readiness. Although these leaders will integrate managers, human resource professionals, and employees into the transformation process, it is still the leaders' sole responsibility to identify the firm's future vision, strategies, and tactics necessary to reach its destiny.
Organizational transformation may be accomplished when executives shift their human resource efforts from activity-based to outcome-based solutions. Developmentally minded executives demand that human resource professionals focus on outcomes instead of activities. Ward (2002) believes that four approaches accomplish this change. First, executives should communicate to all organizational members that personal skills, cultural change, and intellectual capital are critical to business success. Executives must stress the importance of soft skills, demonstrating this belief in words and deeds.
Second, executives explicitly define the deliverables for human resource professionals, holding them accountable for results (2000). This accountability is similar to that for other departments, divisions, and units. Thus, human resource professionals will track, measure, and evaluate results, and be rewarded accordingly.
Third, executives invest in innovative human resource practices. Human resource professionals must utilize new technologies and practices to transform the organization to the developmental level. By promoting new human resource practices, executives signal to the organization that its human resources are worthy of the organization's investment, attention, and time.
Fourth, executives must improve the professionalism of human resources practitioners, which is perhaps the most important thing that executives do to transform the organization (2000). Firms need human resource professionals who know the business, understand the theory and practice of human resources, can manage culture, can make change happen, and possess personal credibility
Leaders are ultimately responsible for bringing about change through these seven factors, although they rely on managers and employees to ensure that change happens (1999). Although leaders initiate and guide change, employee participation is necessary to create a shared need and shape organizational vision. Managers sponsor change by mobilizing commitment, modifying systems and structures, monitoring progress, and making change last. We will examine the questions that help leaders, managers, and employees assess and accomplish the key success factors for change in their respective sections in this chapter.
Effective leadership drives lasting change. Moreover, evolving to the developmental level requires organizational leaders willing to follow certain practices
Own and champion change
• publicly commit to making change happen
• obtain the resources necessary to sustain change
• make a personal commitment to follow through with change
The organization's responsibility is to determine whether leaders possess "the right stuff" essential to championing the changes needed for evolution to the developmental level (1998).
One of the great debates within organizations involves who should be responsible for employee development. In many firms this responsibility has been delegated to human resource professionals who are skilled in adult learning, instructional design, and the facilitation of learning ( 1999 ). Although this may be a convenient solution to the developmental dilemma, it raises serious considerations given the primary responsibility of managers -- to secure results through people.
Achieving greater and greater results requires employee development. Although some argue that the development process is a complex one requiring specialized expertise, we contend that development revolves around manager-employee communications designed to enhance employees' knowledge, skills, and competencies for their current job or in preparation for future assignments (1996).
For development to be successful, complex skills and activities should be broken down into "microsteps" and communicated to less experienced workers. Employees learn to perform these tasks one step at a time, achieving proficiency that eventually increases their performance and productivity ( 2000). As this process plays out over time, employees improve their overall development.
Development aims to improve employee knowledge, skills, and competencies for current or future jobs. Since employee performance and organizational productivity are impacted by developmental activities, it makes sense to hold the same people responsible for all three areas. Who is the organizational player accountable for performance, productivity, and overall development? The answer is obvious: managers.
Human resource professionals (training and development practitioners, specifically) are not held accountable for employee performance and productivity because the organization does not ask them to explain why performance, productivity, or quality decline. Logically, then, development should be managers' responsibility since they are the only organizational members held accountable for employee performance and firm productivity (2000 ).
Additionally, managers judge their subordinates during formal performance appraisals, evaluating quality, measuring performance, and discussing strategies for improvement and development. Given these responsibilities, it makes sense that managers are held responsible for development (1999). Again, human resource professionals do not conduct performance appraisals for the individuals they train; they simply provide training activities, at the conclusion of which employees return to the workforce to apply what they have learned.
In essence, managers are responsible for the transfer of new knowledge, skills, and behaviors on the job by their employees (1998). Currently, human resource professionals inhibit the transfer of learning by advocating an inefficient model in which training occurs off the job, in formal training activities. At the conclusion of these training sessions, employees are on their own to apply what they have learned. Because human resource professionals do not interact with employees on a regular basis they are unable to provide feedback, reinforcement, support, or additional instruction necessary for employees to integrate what they have learned on the job. This model creates a barrier to learning transfer, as it prevents the efficient, effective application of new learning on the job. The individuals best positioned to reinforce and provide feedback, support, and instruction are managers. Consequently, the very grouping of developmental activities around an inefficient model offers another reason that development should be every manager's responsibility.
Within the developmental organization, managers continue to be held responsible and accountable for enhancing employee performance (2002). Managers communicate specifically what they want their employees to improve, focus on performance problems as opposed to the person, use confrontation to produce desired change without causing the employee to become defensive, and maintain a positive relationship with employees
Applying the developmental organization blueprint generates several important outcomes, including dialogue; harmony through respect; interpersonal reciprocity; collaboration, camaraderie, and teamwork; a sense of belonging; shared reality and purpose; active engagement; and inspired growth and development. Collectively, these outcomes change an organization's culture from a product- and revenue-centered approach to a people-centered one, producing an atmosphere of cooperation, respect, and dignity that yields synergy. These outcomes are essential to enhancing organizational renewal and competitive readiness as well as the continuous growth and development of employees.
Incentives attract or repel organisms and thus change their motion. We have implicitly adopted Newton's second law of motion as our primary law of behavior: Change of motion is proportional to the resultant force, and in the direction in which that force is impressed. The resulting movement toward an incentive along spatial coordinates has been called sign-tracking (2000). This article extends the concept of sign tracking to a more general coordinate system that includes stimuli, actions, and time. The trajectory of motion through this extended coordinate system will shift with learning, as random variation steps the path closer to the optimal trajectory between starting point and incentive. Conditioning ends when variation can no longer shorten the path. This dynamic metaphor provides a pegboard for many of our empirical observations; as they become incorporated, they will exert constraints on other implications of the system, making predictions increasingly possible.
Some readers may object that such a treatment works for physics where there are real dimensions and forces, but for psychology it is a metaphor that will only frustrate our ultimate understanding of behavior in its own terms. But we understand nothing in its own terms. All understanding is a putting of things into other terms that we are comfortable with. We are content to say that reinforcement strengthens responses, yet we easily forget that is no less a metaphor than many of those that were presented in this paper.
Each of the seven separate HR practice areas previously discussed can be used in combination to facilitate transformation from the traditional to developmental organization (2001). HR management activities work in combination with those of human resource development. For example, human resource planning ultimately impacts the selection and recruiting process, which in turn is affected by the organizational system (culture, structure, managerial practices, and work climate). Consequently, recruiting and selection policies and procedures are influenced by these two activities. Employees recruited and selected by an organization will eventually be required to engage in learning and change actions to advance or improve their knowledge, skills, and behaviors, for either their current or future jobs. This is further influenced by an organization's performance management process, which, over time, impacts the career development and planning activities of employees as they advance their careers.
Finally, the firm's compensation and reward strategies affect individual employee performance, management, and career development. In short, HR professionals must understand their individual responsibilities and must interface with one another to enhance employee and organizational growth and development. To create competitive advantage through people and processes, growth oriented firms adopt the principles and practices of the developmental organization. In this way, organizations treat their employees as their most valuable component in achieving global competitiveness, organizational renewal, and enhanced performance capacity and capability. We also suggest that firms adopt the principles of developmental leadership
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