Human Resource Management and Building a Positive School Culture

Abstract

During the past 4 years St Peter’s College has undertaken an organizational cultural change process that builds on its current human resource management framework already in place across the School and has married that with Positive Organizational Scholarship, character strengths and Seligman’s PERMA theory (Seligman MP, Flourish. William Heinemann Australia, North Sydney, 2012, ©2011, 2012). Through our change work in human resource management at St Peter’s College the question that arose was, could Cooperrider’s Appreciative Inquiry 4D model (Cooperrider DL, Sekerka LE, Toward a theory of positive organizational change. In: Positive organizational scholarship: foundations of a new discipline, CA Berrett-Koehler, San Francisco, pp 225–240, 2003) and Kotter’s be combined together? We have overlaid the two of the models together, and it is possible to take the 8 steps of Kotter and then apply that across the board with Cooperrider’s model too. Do we have to have either a traditional approache to human resources or an alternative way of managing people? What we have found in practice at St Peter’s College is that it is a really desirable approach to have both, because we have found that Kotter’s steps one to eight are deeply familiar (almost intuitive) to people who are working in institutions that are really well established.