Recommending Books for Purchase (Bulletin 66 - May 2020): Human Resource Development

For the past 100 years, we've progressively dehumanized our places of work. We've learned to systemize, homogenize, and mechanize - all in the quest for greater efficiency and cost-saving. We've forgotten that the human being is the centre of work. This book highlights the ten essential performance and development conversations leaders must have to restore human spirit at work. First, it explains the importance of cultivating an authentic workplace by resisting the dumbing down of work and respecting employee dignity. Second, it presents five developmental conversations, from coaching to relationship-building. Third, it outlines five performance conversations, from climate review to innovation. An organization - any organization - is a group of people working together towards a common goal, but we tend to lose sight of this simple idea. Too often, human resources are lumped in with technological resources, administrative resources and financial resources. Managers become obsessed with processes, procedures and systems. Tim Baker provides leaders with a roadmap to bring the human being back to work.

Addressing emotional workplace abuse, this Palgrave Pivot takes a multidisciplinary approach which combines feminist research on violence with organisation and management studies, in order to offer a new approach on workplace violations. The book analyses why it is difficult for targets and organisations alike to name and identify emotional abuse and addresses the severe negative effects of abuse on the targets' lives. It brings ethical leadership to the fore as a means to foster sustainable organisations. Using empirical data and research, this book highlights subtle forms of violations that take place in the workplace, and provides analysis from the perspective of the target.  A valuable read for scholars and practitioners involved in organisational management and HRM, Emotional Workplace Abuse will help readers to understand the importance of sustainable leadership in preventing emotional workplace abuse.

This book explores the role of HRD professionals in ethical and legal decision making in the workplace. While previous books have described the need for ethics in HRD, this book presents ways that HRD scholars and professionals can influence, through collaborative relationships, effective implementation of ethical policies and legal standards in the workplace. The ethical policies of an organization provide a key insight into its values, and this book shows the relationship between those values and HRD practices, such as training and development, career development, and organization development. Exploring such topics as protected classes, diversity intelligence, employee rights, and employee privacy, this book will inform HRD scholars and professionals on researching and enhancing ethical and legal decision making in the workplace.

This book provides a guide to the process of accrediting training programs, sets out how to achieve consistent measurement of the results of training, and explains why accreditation is critical for capturing and developing today's workers' skills, aiding retention, and boosting strategic organizational credibility with millennials. Workplace and executive training is a multi-billion dollar industry and yet an enormous percentage of that budget is spent on programs that have never been rigorously examined to ensure that they are fit for purpose and deliver value for the money. If you're signing off on that budget, or asking your people to spend time on training programs, shouldn't that concern you? Training accreditation offers vital quality assurance, ensures global consistency of results and delivers accountability for learning and performance outcomes. Apart from delivering better results and greater ROI, organizations can differentiate themselves from their competitors in the employment marketplace by offering accredited proprietary training. After all, digital natives, and indeed all of today's most talented potential employees, expect (and increasingly demand) the high quality, engaging and transferable employee development that only accredited programs can deliver. Aligning with the standards set by the International Association of Continuing Education and Training (IACET) - today's premier accreditation body for training programs - the authors offer principles for quality program structure, delivery, and improvement needed to achieve accreditation.  They share practices used by high quality training program managers today, covering business alignment and program administration along with the planning, design, delivery and evaluation of learning systems.

Many managers and organizations still assume that employees who devote long hours to their jobs with no family interference are "ideal workers". However, this assumption has negative consequences for employees, their families and, more interestingly, for their organizations. This book provides a wealth of empirical evidence from around the globe, as well as innovative conceptual frameworks, to help practitioners and researchers alike to go beyond the classic notion of the "ideal worker" and to rethink what companies actually need from their employees. As it demonstrates, doing so will be beneficial for countless men and women, and for society at large.

This edited collection offers a critical appreciation of talent management in contrast to the extensive literature adopting mainstream approaches to the topic. The authors explore fundamental questions in the field to better understand why managing talent seems so attractive as a management practice, the meaning of talent, and how talent is recognised in organisations. The mix of conceptual and empirical chapters in the book teases out some critical perspectives that will provoke thought and reflection among practitioners and stimulate ideas for new research topics and approaches. The diverse contributions presented in this book will undoubtedly be of use to academics, practitioners and postgraduate students of human resource management.

This book explores the behaviours that result from Public Service Motivation (PSM), outside of a firm or agency environment. Covering topics such as volunteering, and political participation, the authors present rich empirical data from the US and the UK, as well as other countries. With fresh insights into a growing area of interest, this book will provide valuable reading for researchers working in the field of PSM, and those involved in working towards a successful and sustainable society.

This book reports on the findings from a research study of vocational and higher education graduates' employability challenges. The nature and extent of these challenges, their underlying causes, and effective strategies to address the problems in this area are all analysed from a multiple-stakeholder paradigm. The primary focus of the book is on governments; secondary, vocational, and higher education systems; and industry employers - rather than graduates themselves - in order to highlight the policy and strategy implications for governments, industry and educational systems.   Readers will acquire comprehensive information on the nature and extent of graduate employability in terms of country-specific challenges, together with a deeper understanding of their complex causes, and the inter-relatedness between governments, educational systems, industry sectors, and potential employers. They will also be provided with a broad range of stakeholder strategies designed to effectively address these challenges within integrated national and regional approaches.

Work analysis seeks to breakdown the work behaviors that people do and the characteristics of people who successfully perform the work, and then to reassemble the information in a form that has many uses in practice.  The information can be used to specify job expectations, establish quality standards, develop training programs, document work processes, and anticipate safety risks, among many other uses.  This book is a practical guide to using the work analysis process for improving performance in the workplace, particularly with the emergence of knowledge work.  Work has undergone much change, and the trend is towards increased complexity, demanding employees to use their cognitive abilities to a greater extent.  Work analysis has often been criticized for its historical focus on documenting simple, observable, and routine behaviors performed by individuals involved in low-skilled production work.  But it doesn't have to be so, as readers will discover.  Indeed, the demands of organizations and societies in the digital age has placed greater emphasis on documenting the changing nature of work. This practical book addresses the questions of how does one perform a work analysis?  How can complex work be documented?  How can the information be used by organizations, technical schools, and government agencies?  Readers will find detailed descriptions of numerous work analysis techniques, along with case studies and example documents from actual organizational and national workforce development situations.  This book serves as a relatively comprehensive resource for human resource development professionals in range of settings.  The book should also be useful for human resource managers, line managers and supervisors, and other professionals such as quality and safety staff.    Readers will value the information in the book, based on the author's extensive experience, which is presented in a clear and concise approach. 

Organization leaders typically look at each job position, characterized as identical based on pay and job description, in the same way. They hire employees to do that particular job and often do not consider other capabilities that the employees may possess. This book examines how to optimize workforce performance by understanding the diversity of skills and competencies of employees. Diversity is generally explored in terms of gender, race, nationality, disability, and other physical characteristics that differentiate one legally protected group of people from another. In the workplace, however, diversity can take on a different meaning, describing not only physical differences but also work performance characteristics unique to each individual employee. Inter-personnel diversity seeks to explore those diverse characteristics and begin to understand each employee's strengths and weaknesses so that they can be developed to benefit the employee and the organization. This much-needed text will inform scholars and scholar-practitioners in HRD and workforce development how to use these differences to enhance the individual and the organization.