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Employee Worth: Why Every Hour Worked Doesn’t Add Value (but Counts)

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Coherency Management

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Abstract

This chapter begins by assessing the problems of improving employee engagement and commitment in the modern business environment. It also looks at how these are affected by concepts of organizational justice and social identity theory, and the importance of aligning organizational and individual values. It continues by outlining the positive effects on employees of responsible business practices in relation to these issues. It finishes by explaining how coherency management, when applied to the company-employee relationship, can improve overall productivity and commitment to more responsible organizational behavior.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    This seems to be of particular importance for organizations that operate internationally, crossing different cultures, sectors, trading blocs, and regulatory zones.

  2. 2.

    These concepts—values and external recognition—are also known as self-evaluation and reflected evaluation (Collier and Esteban 2007).

  3. 3.

    It is also increasingly being accepted that a good relationship between a business and its employees is a precondition for a broader organizational-wide responsibility (Lee et al. 2013).

  4. 4.

    Mirvis and Googins (2006) have identified these stages as elementary, engaged, innovative, integrated, and transformative.

  5. 5.

    For example, employees on a volunteering program or managers participating in an academic workshop on equality will both probably end up in an in-house electronic newsletter of some sort.

  6. 6.

    Interestingly, in the mentioned study, this potential was only realized in the case that the manager demonstrated that he or she shared the commitment to more responsible behavior.

  7. 7.

    This is particularly important given that most analysis takes place only once professed identity is aimed at certain groups, becoming projected identity (Chong 2009). In other words, it is only when a message reaches a receiver, that its impact can be evaluated by the sender, at which point it will be too late to alter in the case that the message is not received as the sender intended it to be.

  8. 8.

    Indeed, Balmer et al. (2007) argue that responsible management must be holistic by nature if it is to have any chance of success.

  9. 9.

    This goes some away to explaining the increasing popularity of recognition processes such as Great Place to Work (Great Place to Work, n.d.). They not only highlight areas related to how employees as stakeholders are treated, and issues such as job security, atmosphere, safety, accessibility, and evaluation transparency. They also demonstrate how such issues affect workers views of the organization in general.

  10. 10.

    Thus the popularity of greenwashing. A positive evaluation in one aspect of a company’s responsibility can paint a positive picture in the public’s mind of the company and help to mitigate scandals or other discomforting news down the line.

  11. 11.

    A transactional approach is incompatible with a genuine commitment to behaving responsible, in that it fails to provide any opportunity for change in the organizational purpose, with all its inconsistencies.

  12. 12.

    This may include rumors, informal internal communication channels, employees personal knowledge gleaned from external sources, accidental or intentional leaks, communication and document control errors, etc.

  13. 13.

    It is sometimes the case that an overemphasis on the legal relationship blinds us to this interlocking relationship and reduces it to a simple utilitarian approach focusing on contractual obligations (Kerr and Slocum 1987). This may suit those who promote the argument that rewards should be distributed based on contractual claims (employees, suppliers, etc.) and residual claims (shareholders), despite the massive inequality such a system is generating in the world, and the extremely rich continue to amuse ever larger shares of the world’s wealth.

  14. 14.

    For example, the growth of evaluation systems whereby employees participate in their own evaluation, either individually or as a group (Beehr et al. 2001; Chiang et al. 2014), can be considered an advance in internal procedural and interactive justice by improving the information by which decisions are made, and opening up how those decisions are made. However, this hasn’t led to any changes in distributive justice for employees.

  15. 15.

    To bring up a very old case, that of Enron, in a company of 26,000 people, it is believed (and agreed upon by the investigators and courts) that only three people were involved in the illegal decisions that led to its downfall. Admittedly, they were highly placed persons, but still only three from 26,000.

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  1. School of Social Sciences, Universidad Europea de Madrid, Madrid, Spain

    Ivan Hilliard

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Hilliard, I. (2019). Employee Worth: Why Every Hour Worked Doesn’t Add Value (but Counts). In: Coherency Management. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-13523-2_7

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