Recommending Books for Purchase (Bulletin 8 - January 2018) - Choice Review: Human Resource Management

If the corporate workplace is a battlefield, then HR issues are landmines waiting to blow up an executive’s career. Due to policy differences across states, no one reference book can help everyone. But Falcone, an HR specialist, is a great start. Falcone’s 75 mini-chapters contain scripts for most HR issues an executive is likely to face, and the advice is solid. Even better, Falcone frequently explains in what areas state policy differences are likely to occur. Handling terminations, resignations, and layoffs is eye-opening in terms of what can go wrong, and how to avoid the most obvious landmines. One recurring theme that works well involves having employees take ownership of how coworkers perceive them. This is very much a how-to book, but one encouraging managers to talk to HR early and often. The values expressed are similar to Mark Murphy’s Hiring for Attitude (2011), but Falcone addresses a wider variety of HR topics. The book’s only weakness is that the leadership material is mostly generic, offering no new insights.

Roseberry (Copenhagen Business School, Denmark) and Roos (Jonkoping International Business School, Sweden) argue that gender imbalances in leadership and occupations are not simply a moral or economic issue, but a governance issue. Based on interviews and conversations with leaders and managers in the US and Europe, the book offers a great deal of information on the topic. The persistence of the gender gap, particularly at upper levels of organizations, is well documented in the book. This continuation of the gap, in pay and positions of power, has been shown to negatively affect both the morale of the women and the earnings of the organization—two good reasons to change the system. Also discussed are the reasons people offer to justify accepting the gap, and the pros and cons of these reasons are evaluated. The history of stereotypes, and the "science" of male–female differences are presented. Finally, the ways in which men, women, and organizations can benefit from a gender–balanced workforce is carefully addressed. Useful references are provided throughout the book. All in all, the authors show how gender imbalances are reinforced through common stereotypes about women's abilities, and the arguments are presented so as to be easily understood by college students and working adults.

In the US, no federal laws make bullying illegal. In the interest of providing an overview of bullying in the workplace, a topic not often discussed in the literature on the work environment, Paludi has brought together contributors (mostly psychologists) from the US and other countries (mostly in Europe). The essays offer a number of definitions of bullying in this context: for example, the contributors of one essay identify it as repeated “generally deliberate demeaning of co-workers or subordinates.” The volume looks at bullying in a variety of workplace settings: the academy, health care institutions, middle schools. Contributors discuss the characteristics of perpetrators and victims (men and women are in both categories), the effects of bullying on victims (less job satisfaction and more stress—particularly among women), and the impact of bullying on organizations (increased turnover and lawsuits, decreased company performance and reputation.) In an essay titled "The Role of the Victim and the Perpetrator-Victim Relationship in Understanding Workplace Aggression," Jennifer Bozeman and Sandy Hershcovis offer a well-researched discussion of whether victims contribute to their selection as victim. The book argues that organizations should institute strategies to identify perpetrators and support victims, and that those who observe bullying incidents should be willing to report them.

Editors Lipinski (Middle Tennessee State Univ.) and Crothers (Duquesne Univ.) have compiled a well-researched, comprehensive volume on workplace bullying. Academics from a variety of disciplines contribute informative essays that span research and practice. The first section shares several definitions of bullying and explains different ways to measure it. Another uses neurological, evolutionary, ecological, and developmental theories to explain why bullying exists. The volume addresses various forms of bullying, such as sexual harassment, physical and verbal abuse, employer and union intimidation, cyber bullying, and abuse of the disabled. To manage such bullying, a separate section covers strategies for treating bullies, remedies for victims, employee handbook policies, and legal issues. Recommended ways to keep bullies out of the workplace include formal job candidate assessments of hypothetical situations; job simulations; interviews about past behavior; background checks; and thorough references. Management commitment and prompt investigations of inappropriate behavior are needed, according to the final study. A shorter, more accessible book on bullying is Teresa Daniel's Stop Bullying at Work: Strategies and Tools for HR and Legal Professionals (CH, Jun'10, 47-5747). The present volume is timely in addressing a significant societal issue as it relates to the workplace.

According to the author, a critical perspective of careers and talent management focuses on how all individuals are freed from organizational constraints. This perspective supports more work autonomy and challenges the notions of working classes, inequality, and a dignified way of living. A significant part of Reis’s book discusses how global entrepreneurs and talent agents need to respect other cultures and have their actions frequently audited. It encourages senior executives to identify their self-purpose to enhance boundary-less careers. They would be able to transfer their skills to a wide variety of organizations and not be locked into the constraints organizations promote. Though Generation X is not mentioned in the book, the career-focused rather than job-focused generation corresponds to Generation X Goes Global, by Christine Henseler (CH Apr’ 13, 50-4729).

Allcorn (Univ. of New England) and Stein (Univ. of Missouri) offer what they refer to as the “dark side” of organizational dynamics. They contrast reality with the popular notion that organizations are full of rampant rationalism among decision makers. Most management textbooks offer support for the rational view while acknowledging relationships and behaviors that may be better explained by sociology, political science, and psychology. Psychiatric workplace analysis is a relatively new phenomenon, and Allcorn and Stein make a strong argument that its omission will leave some behaviors unexplained. Their book is quite interesting and readable, with explanations that help the reader understand the psychosocial implications of destructive behaviors as well as possible methods for dealing with them to improve workplace relationships and organizational performance.

Kegan and Lahey (Harvard Univ.) incorporate adult-developmental theory to enhance organizational profitability, improve honesty in communications, reduce political maneuvering, and increase solutions to intractable problems. The focus of the theory is to allow people to grow in all major activities of the organization and reduce their motivation to hide weaknesses and manage other’s impressions. The authors investigate three Deliberately Developmental Organizations (DDOs) that exemplify the theory. Next Jump, an e-commerce tech company, has programs such as the Personal Leadership Boot Camp to overcome negative mindsets and exercise leadership through regular feedback from peers and managers. The Decurion Corporation includes ArcLight, a real estate and movie theater arm of the company. It incorporates “fishbowl” conversations among managers that uncover multiple perspectives on problems. Bridgewater, the world’s best performing hedge fund, has radical transparency with glass office walls and recordings of almost every meeting. All DDOs consider errors as learning opportunities, cultures built through teams and people development, and timescales of projects set for growth. The book includes a chapter on uncovering your biggest blind spots.

Ton (MIT Sloan School of Management) suggests that a conscientious concern for employee welfare is an investment that can provide exceptional benefits to organizational success, long-run sustainability, and enhanced returns to its stakeholders. Based on a decade of in-depth observations of the traditionally low-cost retailing sector, the book's 10 brief chapters focus on Costco, Trader Joe's, QuikTrip, and the Spanish supermarket chain Mercadona, along with companies as diverse as Southwest Airlines, Toyota, UPS, and Zappos. The author's research provides a genuine insight into the operations management, organizational leadership, and strategic planning of these companies. Throughout, Ton dispels the idea that there is a finite relationship and trade-off between profitability and labor costs. Rather, her research suggests that those businesses that have created an organizational culture embracing good pay, effective employee training, workforce empowerment, and a sustainable labor force may also benefit from increased productivity, enhanced motivation and morale, and a concomitant increase in customer and employee loyalty that produce improved clients' satisfaction and profitability. The author concludes there is nothing idiosyncratic about the companies that have adopted this strategy.

The authors have crafted a perfectly adequate book that attempts to codify the advantages of diversity in the workplace and serve as an instruction manual on how to encourage inclusivity in organizations. Though the book is not as transformative as it aspires to be, it does provide a lot of good information about properly attracting and managing diverse talent. The book is organized into two parts. In the first part, the authors define diversity and inclusion and delve into some reasons they are important. The authors even describe some failed initiatives and approaches often employed by companies to increase their diversity. There is a host of good ideas in this section, but it does not set itself apart from the traditional approaches and ideas that it criticizes. The second part relates to implementing these ideas into creating a diverse workforce. Too many examples are taken from the London 2012 Olympics, which feels out of place and self-congratulatory, but otherwise this section is a very nice primer in proper business administration with concrete examples of how each approach can improve an organization’s output.

With its apt and dramatic title, this book addresses the challenges of learning as technology, globalization, and other factors drive the velocity of change at an ever-accelerating rate. Hess (Univ. of Virginia Darden School of Business) does the great service of examining the processes of both organizational and individual learning, including how those processes overlap and interact. By focusing on structures and culture in the organizational milieu—while comparing and contrasting this milieu with individual cognitive and emotional behavior, largely in lay terms—the author conducts a dialogue with readers that is refreshingly unobscured by jargon and cant. Hess presents strategies to encourage the creation of high-performance learning organizations and sprinkles his discussion with practical case studies throughout. Through the author's methodology, the text presents both theory and practice in a no-nonsense, practical discussion about how to create an actionable blueprint for becoming a leading-edge learning organization. Innovation without learning causes organizations to become stale—and perhaps even die—in this age of ongoing and accelerating change. How refreshing it is to have a serious discussion of these important issues. Bravo!

The book is a witty, hilarious, and insightful look into what it takes to manage people in a software engineering firm. It is consistently engaging and extremely readable while still offering great lessons on what it means to manage and be managed by supervisors. This is primarily a book for software engineering managers. There’s a bit of jargon and a lot of situations that are really only pertinent for software engineering managers. There is guidance about the transition from engineer to lead to manager, and advice about specific roles that are pertinent only in software engineering. That being said, this book still provides a lot of value for managers in any type of organization. Most of the advice is very broadly applicable and speaks to human nature, not just the nature of coders. Overall, this is a great book for managers in any arena, but especially those who work in software engineering. It provides a comprehensive set of tools in the form of bite-sized chapters that can help any manager improve her relationships with subordinates.

This succinct book introduces readers to the various demographic, economic, financial, political, and technological pressures that are producing significant changes in HR policies and practices around the world. Parry and Tyson (both, Cranfield Univ., UK) divide the book into three main parts with 14 chapters. Chapter 1 introduces the emerging global context, while chapters 2-4 delve into the new social and economic context of HRM and the general consequences of a changing work world on organizational human resource practices. Chapters 5-7 discuss how the role of the organizational HRM function is evolving, as well as the growth and impact of e-HRM processes and practices and the global context of HRM, especially in multinational companies. Chapters 8-14 identify and discuss changes and consequences of external forces on specific HR issues such as diversity, corporate social responsibility, talent management practices, the interaction of HR with the marketing function, employee reward processes, and employee well-being concerns. This informative book will be of special interest to HR practitioners and those concerned with how global changes will impact the organizational people management functions in the 21st century.

Espinoza and Ukleja offer managers best practices for working with the millennial generation. The authors interviewed hundreds of managers and employees to help develop a model analyzing the problems millennials face in the workplace and how they can be overcome. Millennials tend to be autonomous, entitled to receive rewards, imaginative but unfocused, self-absorbed, defensive, myopic, and indifferent. To help overcome the problems, managers need to build working relationships with the millennials, have them see the “big picture” of where their tasks fit in the organization, and promote work feedback and accountability. Numerous tables match the millennials’ problems with managerial solutions. Each chapter finishes with a scenario highlighting a major management solution for millennials. Each scenario ends with several questions for the readers. This second edition adds international discussions and new case studies. See also Lynne Lancaster and David Stillman’s The M-factor: How the Millennial Generation Is Rocking the Workplace (CH Jan 11, 48-2784) and Lindsey Pollak’s Becoming the Boss: New Rules for the Next Generation of Leaders (CH Feb 15, 52-3194).

In this book, Kayes (George Washington Univ. School of Business) provides insights into how organizations learn from experience by exploring how organizational resilience and its study can be informed by learning theory, research, and practice. Organizations are seen as bolstering their capacity to learn from mistakes and failures; indeed, breakdowns are seen as necessary precursors to learning. Kayes notes that organizations are often embedded in structures of irrational beliefs and routines, and he finds that the breakdown of these structures paves the way for learning. The author provides an alternative approach to decision making based on experiential learning, presented in a six-step holistic process that includes emotions, cognitions, and actions. As a case study, a chapter-long analysis of the learning associated with the CIA’s search for biological weapons of mass destruction in Iraq shows how organizational factors, such as power politics, threaten learning. As a whole, the book claims to offer “a way of thinking about organizations as systems of interrelated learners." Ultimately, the key takeaway is the understanding of how direct experience leads to learning. However, Ashraf Labib’s Learning from Failures (2014) covers related territory in a more engaging way.

Castellano (Rutgers Univ.) explains how companies can engage their employee talent in a changing global economy. The new economy involves faster technologies, more data, cloud computing, a growing shortage of highly skilled labor, offshoring, structural unemployment, and less predictability. The workforce features more Generation Y workers who are more electronically connected, less supportive of in-person contact, and more driven to meaningful work than their Generation X and baby boomer counterparts. Castellano offers a comprehensive organizational model to engage employees in this new environment. Though difficult to define, engagement often connotes involvement and passion in employee attitudes and behavior. Among the engagement practices discussed are mentoring work-life programs, flexible work arrangements, career management, diversity programs, phased retirement, wellness programs, and corporate social responsibility. The author also advises that engagement requires strategic planning, strong leadership, knowledge sharing, and a change in organizational culture. The book is very readable though based on considerable scholarship. See related, Purpose and Meaning in the Workplace, edited by Bryan Dik, Zinta Byrne, and Michael Steger (CH, Oct'13, 51-0972).

Editors Dik, Byrne, and Steger (Colorado State Univ.) have produced a volume integrating theory, practice, and research on creating workplaces with purpose and meaning. Contributors from the fields of industrial and organizational psychology, organizational behavior, and management describe how human resource managers, employers, and employees can make workplaces healthy, happy, purposeful, and productive. The volume is organized into three parts: "Cultivating a Meaningful Career," "Meaning Making on the Job," and "Leading a Meaningful Organization." Major topics covered include learning employee traits and interests, using job analysis to match jobs with people, developing clear expectations through selection and training, creating more meaning in "dirty" or undesirable work, blending work and family, creating apprenticeships, analyzing culture, and coaching authentic leaders. The chapter on transformational leadership, for example, deals with improving job variety, autonomy, and feedback. All chapters provide recommendations, and check marks indicate whether they were tested in practice, derived from theory, or supported by research. Chapters also provide future research directions based on references to mostly academic journals. See related, Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer's less academic The Progress Principle: Using Small Wins to Ignite Joy, Engagement, and Creativity at Work (CH, Sep '12, 50-0377).

How can human resource professionals strategically support the interactions of employees with multinationals, national cultures, and international organizations? This handbook addresses these and other questions in chapters from 56 leading scholars in the international human resource management (IHRM) field. The book's 588 pages cover many classic IHRM topics, such as recruiting, selection, compensation, cross-cultural training, repatriation, mergers, and global cultures. Several less familiar topics include developing language-sensitive approaches to IHRM, understanding demographic issues, and combining IHRM with sociological concerns. A chapter on managing ethics and corporate social responsibility is representative of the rest of the handbook. IHRM programs can impact multinational organizations up and down the supply chain through awareness and action to help eradicate slave wages and forced overtime in countries such as China and Vietnam. The chapter cites top-tier journals and major books published to support more ethical treatment of local nationals. Research ideas are suggested, and a conclusion follows. A related research text—but with practitioner-oriented stories—is Betty Jane Punnett’s International Perspectives on Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management (CH June 13, 50-5694).

President of the advertising agency Havas Worldwide, Benett believes talent is the most important consideration in business success. The author interviewed approximately 100 senior executives from Unilever, Hershey, Whirlpool, and Adobe Systems, among other organizations, to develop ideas about how to find and nurture talent such as in the increasingly important millennial generation. The author believes smart companies allow all employees to make more decisions and promote continuous learning. In successful companies, work becomes more purposeful, digital, and integrated with life outside the office. Benett features several strategies for success: organizational culture must be grounded in values; organizations are more cohesive in a trusting environment; adaptation to new work environments could lead to an entrepreneurial spirit; marketplace forces may encourage top talent to rotate jobs in the organization; and workers must be treated appropriately through effective performance appraisals, proper career management, and the articulation of clear purpose. Numerous interview quotes enhance the text. Gyan Nagpal's Talent Economics: The Fine Line between Winning and Losing the Global War for Talent (CH, Apr'13, 50-4539) provides a more macroeconomic and international approach to talent management, but Bennett's book attempts to change the general conversation about talent.

Scott-Jackson (Cass Business School, UK) and Mayo (Middlesex Business School, UK) have written extensively on human capital, leadership, and related topics. In this book, their lofty goal is “to provide the tools by which leaders of any organization, from a small company to a nation-state, can maximize the engagement, happiness, and well-being of their people,” specifically through a framework entitled “process of active committed enthusiasm” (PACE). With its numerous citations throughout, this work is for an academic audience. Many readers will find the PACE model difficult to apply, and only a few pages are devoted to a “toolkit” with practical examples. A short final chapter is devoted to a “case study” on Dubai, but it does not utilize PACE or any other tools suggested in the main text. Despite these drawbacks, the bulk of the book provides an impressive synthesis of research on the interrelated concepts of engagement, happiness, and well-being, and for this reason it will be useful to graduate students and scholars studying these areas through the lenses of business, politics, psychology, or other social sciences.

Disselkamp (Deloitte Consulting) has edited a workforce management guidebook that is useful on the job, as well as a good resource for achieving Workforce Asset Management Professional (WAM-Pro) certification. More than 40 contributors address the links among strategy, technology, and work-life balance. Key subjects include career and financial planning, return on investment, timekeeping, schedule flexibility, data and systems management, task analysis, project implementation and support, quality assurance, and legally defensible systems. For example, when discussing timekeeping the volume goes into detail about tracking hours worked based on the Fair Labor Standards Act requirement; state-by-state wage and hour guidelines; and the definition of the workday, workweek, and meal periods. Each chapter begins with learning objectives, and special tips, formulas, and graphs are scattered throughout the book. This is a valuable work for human resource and work analysis practitioners and researchers. For those interested in this subject, The Handbook of Work Analysis: Methods, Systems, Applications and Science of Work Measurement in Organizations, edited by Mark Wilson et al. (CH, Nov'12, 50-1563), provides similar but more academically oriented content.