Practical Applications and Recommendations for HR and OD Professionals in the Global Workplace_10 pptx

• Employee opinions about the future company performance,competitive standing, personal promising future, and so onreflect organizational vitality, as demonstrated by relationshipswith a

• Employee opinions about the future (company performance,competitive standing, personal promising future, and so on)reflect organizational vitality, as demonstrated by relationshipswith a variety of economic health indicators (consumer

confidence, unemployment) and company financial metrics(DEPS, TRR)

Enduring Survey Purposes

What is the real point of organizational surveys? Whatever thespecific angle of any given survey effort, survey programs areintended to produce change Perhaps more progressive systems

are designed to promote the discipline of change management,

of listening and responding to important constituents and back about organizational performance In fact, they share this incommon with any measurement system (accounting systems, cus-tomer surveys, quality audits, sales forecasts, six-sigma methods,and so on)

feed-Stepping back from surveys in particular, what are the mon areas that organizations attempt to change? What are themost common challenges companies face? To address this ques-tion, many models of organizational effectiveness exist, from thesimple (Five Stages of Organizational Decline, Collins, 2009) tothe involved (for example, Burke-Litwin Model, Burke & Litwin,1992), and the academic (Systems Model, Katz & Kahn, 1978) tothe applied (Balanced Scorecard, Kaplan & Norton, 1996; McKin-sey 7 S Framework, Peters & Waterman, 1982) to the hybrid (HighPerformance Model, Wiley & Brooks, 2000) Stepping back fromany single model, there appear to be five enduring challengesthat virtually any organization faces in its pursuit of growth andfinancial sustainability or, more generally, vitality:

com-1 Customer Loyalty Organizations seek to create value by

pro-viding customers— particularly paying customers—with valuedand competitive products and services

2 Progressive Innovation This reflects the creation of value

through refining and inventing future products and services

3 Quality Work Processes Products need to be efficiently created

and, along with services, effectively delivered

4 Engaged Employees Organizations need to create an engaging

experience to encourage the most from the people who fuel theprocesses, create the innovation, and deliver for the customers

5 Clear and Compelling Leadership The overarching mission

and direction of the organization needs to be developed andtranslated through its leaders in order to properly secure andalign resources

We do not present these five as the only challenges that anorganization may face Certainly there can be crises of ethics, weakfinancial discipline, regulatory issues, progressive sustainabilityinterests, and so forth But these five reflect core challenges thatapply virtually universally to any organization

The employee confidence case study illustrates one version ofslicing across these areas, touching particularly upon engagement,leadership, and customer competitiveness There is, in fact, a richhistory of research linking these topics to organizational climateand performance Recent reviews for each topic include Brooks

et al (2006) for Customer Loyalty; Bledow, Frese, Erez, Anderson,and Farr, (2009) for Innovation; Miron, Erez, & Naveh (2004) forQuality; Macey and Schneider (2008) for Employee Engagement;and Efron, Greenslade, & Salob (2005) for Leadership

We argue that the vital organization is the one that canfocus on improving these disciplines, becoming a change-readyorganization, enabled to meet its challenges

Organizational Ambidexterity

Each of the five challenges can be addressed on two levels:maximizing current performance and developing future potential.For example, the Leadership challenge can involve enhancingcurrent leadership behaviors (for example, communication andprioritization), as well as developing a succession plan for thenext generation of senior executives Because no organization hasunlimited resources— whether those resources are money, talent,

or time— the appropriate balance, one leading to maximumvitality, must be struck between current performance and futurepotential Table 9.3 provides examples of how each of the fiveareas can have a current performance and a future potentialcomponent

Table 9.3 Enduring Challenges Involve Both Current

Performance and Future Potential.

Clear,

Compelling

Leadership

Quality Work Processes

Engaged, Confident Employees

Progressive Innovation

Loyal Customers

Discretionary Effort

Market petitiveness

Employee Retention

Product Pipeline

Customer Retention, Growth

The pursuit of maximizing current performance generallyinvolves streamlining systems, increasing scale, decreasing costs,and other efforts to control and standardize the organization’sefforts The pursuit of developing future potential generallydepends less on control and more on creativity The latter is

an inherently riskier endeavor Thus, there is a built-in

ten-sion between exploiting current opportunities and exploring future potential The management of this tension is called organizational

ambidexterity (see, for example, O’Reilly & Tushman, 2004).

A full elaboration of organizational ambidexterity is biggerthan the scope of this chapter, but to summarize, it represents anemerging organizational science of balancing priorities focused

on building efficiencies (process within a paradigm) against orities encouraging creative exploration (into new paradigms; seeBledow et al., 2009) Though it may not impact a traditional sur-vey program, any model of organizational effectiveness needs toincorporate this tension, and perhaps new survey programs need

pri-to take it inpri-to account

Organizational Change and Resilience

Organizations are run by people, and people face challenges inpursuing common goals and in their day-to-day efforts to enhanceperformance Striking just the right balance regarding how toinvest in organizational improvements—for example, choosingbetween maximizing current performance and developing futurepotential— is a chief concern with which organizations—and

people— struggle Being resilient in addressing these challenges

is a necessary component to maximizing the vitality of theorganization As described below, resiliency is an organizationalcharacteristic as well as a personal attribute that, in conjunctionwith balancing the resource allocations associated with maximiz-ing current performance and future potential, would lead toincreased levels of organization vitality

Measuring the organization on a global scale, as can be donewith employee confidence, is one effective way of predictingand managing an organization’s future—in effect, to manageorganizational change ‘‘The pace of change is quickening’’ is atrue statement, not just within an industry, geopolitical entity, or

by level of industrialization, but globally How an organizationdeals with change and its pace, both at an individual and at anorganizational level, will determine its long-term success The oldnotion that an organization can achieve long-term stability in itscustomer base, product line, operating processes, or technology

is unrealistic if the organization is to thrive and cope with today’songoing challenges Today’s environment is more volatile thanever and will remain so for the foreseeable future Challenges willbecome more and more ‘‘routine,’’ and responding effectively

to them will be a ‘‘normal’’ issue that organizations need to

be equipped to face Organizations need to be able to copewith challenges and to do so in a way that is sustainable anddoes not limit future options In fact, balancing the need todrive performance in a definitive fashion while keeping futureoptions open are two goals that are somewhat in opposition.Both are required for success (Berkes, Colding, & Folke, 2003).Organizations that perform well in these areas as they deal withtheir challenges will be by definition more resilient to threats andwill be exhibiting higher levels of vitality

If a corporation aspires to perform as well as the market indexes over the long term, it will have to change at the pace and scale

of the market, but without losing control Companies, of course,

do not have to change at the pace and scale of the market, but

if they do not, then the research from McKinsey’s Long Term Performance Database shows that they are more than likely to underperform for their investors [McKinsey & Company, 2009]

Resiliency is a construct that has generated increasing interestsince the 1990s and has been studied at the individual and organi-zational level Being resilient is the notion of positive adaptationwhen faced with significant adversity or environmental threats(Rutter, 1993) This definition implies that significant threats orsevere adversity are present and that the individual or organi-zation positively copes with those threats Being more resilientrather than less has been shown to lead to positive outcomes forboth individuals and organizations (Cohn, Fredrickson, Brown, &Mikels, 2009; Berkes, Colding, & Folke, 2003).

Vitality is the aggregation of resiliency measures and other ical metrics of organizational performance that, when tracked andimproved upon, enhances the organization’s ability to deal withthe increasing volatility seen in the organization’s environment.Under normal conditions, the data suggest, an organization whosevitality measures are appropriately designed, accurately measured,and higher than the competition will not only achieve higher levels

crit-of resiliency but will also outperform that competition It is tant to note that the vitality data represented by these conceptshave been found to be malleable, that is, changeable over time

impor-if the correct measures are teamed up with appropriate changeprocesses Protection from a loss of vitality and resilience doesnot only involve the factors impinging at the moment, but ratherthe way the organization deals with the ongoing and future risksand threats—processes which are potential inflection points inthe organization’s life

Being able to maintain the vitality of the organization andits level of functioning when environmentally challenged will bedependent on:

1 The level of the threat or degree of risk that the organization isfacing, including the performance of the organization on thefive common challenges cited earlier:

2 The organization’s response to the threat or risk and its ability

to turn that risk into opportunity

3 The appropriateness of the vitality measures that the tion is tracking

organiza-4 The processes and mechanisms that the organization has inplace to maintain those vitality measures at a high level

Three broad areas—the environment within which the nization resides, the investments the organization is making, andthe achievements which the organization celebrates— contain sixkey vitality processes which can be brought to bear to help addressthe threats that the organization faces, including:

orga-1 Environment

• Monitoring: Information collection or environmental

monitoring (for example, employee, customer and suppliersurveys, the gathering and analysis of other business

metrics)

• Reducing: Minimizing the occurrence of negative chain

reactions that can occur from one threat, before they ral out of control (for example, strong internal and externalcommunications networks)

spi-2 Investment

• Warding: Investing in a shared vision, a shared operating

style, senior leadership, employees, products and services,and quality—the standardization of those products and ser-vices as well as organizational procedures

• Transforming: Turning risks into opportunities by

devel-oping a culture of innovative and creating organizationalcapabilities

• Enhancing: Increasing organizational effectiveness and

efficacy (for example, cost control, state-of-the-art businessprocesses, contingency planning)

3 Achievement

• Celebrating: Celebrating and rewarding organizational and

personal accomplishments (for example, successful tion of goals; reward and recognition systems)

comple-Overall a well-designed framework builds in a positive fashionoff outcomes traditionally cited as the marks of resiliency in aperson or organization, including reduced failure probabilities,reduced consequences from failures, and reduced time to recov-ery (Holling, 1973) Specific vitality factors have been linked toincreasing organizational performance (Brooks et al., 2006), andthe organization’s ability to achieve satisfied customers (Kendall,2006) Though they should be tailored to each organization,specific factors can include:

1 Having a confident, engaged workforce

2 Not taking success or customers for granted

3 Producing quality products and services that meet customers’current needs

4 Delivering products and services with a customer serviceorientation

5 Creating products and services with perceived value

6 Operating with a disciplined growth orientation

7 Implementing effective business processes

8 Having effective leadership

9 Ensuring the right people in the right jobs, overall

10 Developing a strong new product and service pipeline

11 Operating in a sustainable fashion

12 Operating with ethics and transparency

Measuring Vitality and Other Metrics

organiza-differences and the similarities that are apparent within the force across various countries and cultures Some of the researchseems to focus chiefly on the differences that exist (Hofstede,1984), whereas others focus more on the similarities (Lundby &Hui, 2008) But in many respects everyone is after the same thing:increasing organizational effectiveness.

work-We can derive models that highlight our similarities or modelsthat highlight our differences, but the main question is, are wecollecting, monitoring, and analyzing information that makes adifference in the performance for the organization under study?That question is often answered by undertaking linkage studies,where employee opinions are aggregated by work group or busi-ness unit, and matched to various measures of performance (such

as customer satisfaction, financial performance) and then lyzed for impact Though there are methodological approaches

ana-to controlling for cultural or other geographic differences, thiskind of research is based on the notion that creating a simi-lar measure of employee opinions across various countries andcultures is in fact legitimate One challenge that researchers oforganizational culture face is to determine whether broad, across-the-globe measures of opinions are appropriate, and, in fact, ifthey measure anything approaching the same constructs in differ-ing societies The questions emerge: Are we more similar when

it comes to how you measure attitudes or are we more different,requiring perhaps a differing measurement instrument depend-ing on where you happen to be located? Do individual differencesoutweigh our ability to develop a uniform measure, or can well-worded questions embedded within robust paradigms win out increating global measures of psychological constructs seen withinorganizations?

As the case study presented earlier demonstrates, there can

be enough commonality across employee opinions aggregated at

a country level to result in significant and meaningful ships with changes in gross domestic product Accommodating forcultural differences would likely only improve upon this alreadysubstantial relationship For researchers and for organizationalleaders of global organizations, this is a fortunate and perhaps nec-essary foundation With some measures, like employee confidence,more is better no matter where—or how—you live in the world

relation-This view is similar to emerging conclusions regarding tural influences in selection and assessment (J Weekley, per-sonal communication, 22 September, 2009) First, culture doesnot change the important constructs to assess Second, culture canchange the benchmarks or average scores to a degree (thoughmore for personality than for general mental ability) Third, thevalidity of these constructs in predicting important performancecriteria appears comparable across cultures.

cul-Though it may sound like an oxymoron, we human beingsare all fundamentally the same and yet all of us, each and everyone of us, is uniquely different We are all human and ourhumanness forces each of us to operate and experience the worldwithin the evolutionarily derived boundaries of Homo sapiens Yetwhat we celebrate (or perhaps should celebrate) most about ourhumanness is our individual differences and the freedom we have

to make choices, which together yield an infinite number of ways

in which we can express our humanity We all may have a uniquefingerprint, but we all have fingerprints

Some of us choose to work in health care, others plant crops,some sell goods or services, others teach, drive a taxi, work inconstruction, practice law, become an accountant, sing on a stage,play sports, operate a business, or a whole host of other activities.Some of us prefer to live in urban environments, whereas forothers only rural will do Some of us prefer to travel and othersare homebodies, perhaps even living within a few miles of wherethey were born Some of us take comfort in being religiousand others are not religious Some get married, perhaps havingchildren, and others prefer to stay single The great majority of

us will have opinions and ideas throughout our lives that will bestrongly shaped by the cultures and societies in which we grew

up, the experiences we had—and our choices will be influencedaccordingly

As we make those choices we are creating a unique set ofoutcomes that helps to define ourselves For instance, look at therural construction worker who married his high school sweetheart,has three kids and a dog, and likes to travel to new places each timethe family takes a vacation That is a combination of characteristicsthat is accumulated over the course of one’s life that helps todifferentiate each and every one of us from the others However,

as we pick and choose between the enormous numbers of choicesthat are possible as we experience our lives, we are all in pursuit

of the same thing We have the expectation that should we beable to achieve our goals, whether they are to work in health care,construction, plant crops, travel, or to get married and have kids,that somehow we will be happier We make these choices and liveour lives in the pursuit of happiness, an underlying fundamental

of our humanity When people feel that they have no or fewoptions available to them they tend toward depression, and oneintervention to assist those who feel like they have few options is

to help them understand the choices that they do in fact have(Wake & Miller 1992)

Defining ourselves, our organizations, or our societies by ing on the sameness that exists between them is both illusory andreal, as it is focusing only on their uniqueness that defines them It

focus-is illusory for we, our organizations, and our various societies areclearly not the same But it is real in that they all have shared under-lying characteristics The richness that describes the diversity ofhumanity, or our lack of sameness, yields a more robust humanity,with individuals bringing differing experiences, knowledge, skillsets, characteristics and abilities, and with differing cultures andsocieties contributing uniquely to the powerful mix But we woulddefy you to find a worker anywhere in the world, of any generation

or any other demographic you would care to choose, who didnot want to be treated respectfully and in a dignified fashion, orwant to feel valued, with a sense of accomplishment springingfrom their efforts, a sense of fairness of treatment with respect toequity, and pride in their organizations and themselves And onewho would not want to have confidence in the future of his or herorganization We could go on describing other shared character-istics of workers, but the point is simply that a large number ofcommonalities do in fact exist

As we measure ourselves and our organizations from acharacteristics standpoint, do we focus on our similarities, ourdifferences, or do we somehow attempt to measure both? Is itlegitimate to use the same measures of employee satisfaction orloyalty, and so on in a highly industrialized country with a highstandard of living as it is in a country under the constant threat

of famine, disease, war, or terrorism? We have argued that we

humans are both similar and different We further contend thatour similarities make it possible to create a measurement withenough robustness to work across the wide spectrum of situations

in which organizations are enmeshed

As great an impact as globalization has had so far, the people

of the world today are not homogenous culturally, economically,politically, or demographically And by extension the organi-zations that operate in a global fashion are not homogenous,culturally, economically, politically, or demographically either.Organizations that operate globally work to maximize their per-formance across a wide variety of cultures, economic conditions,political systems, and demographic characteristics of the local pop-ulations It is a challenge Many of these multinational, multicul-tural, multipolitical, and multidemographic organizations, in theirattempt to assess their organizational cultures, use standardizedmeasures across their internal organizational components—andthis raises a question By doing this are they measuring the simplefact that each of these divergent components has fingerprints, orare the standard measures and the methodologies employed withthem sensitive enough to capture the unique characteristics ofeach fingerprint within the organization? What is lost and what isgained in this approach?

Conclusion

Global, multinational surveys are difficult But they are simply amicrocosm of all efforts designed to respond to organizationalchallenges and to improve organizational functioning in someway With this in mind, the major themes of this chapter can bewrapped up in a handful of key points:

• Organizational surveys, perhaps especially those in large, globalorganizations, need to drive toward improving effectiveness

• Accordingly, the purpose of surveys is not to characterize ferences in work climate or culture There is no denying theimpact of culture However, it is more important to focus on thecommon ‘‘something’’ that the organization pursues

dif-• Thus, a survey strategy, if truly strategic, is part of a larger nizational change strategy, one that maps into the five enduring

orga-challenges reflected by leadership, quality processes, employeeengagement, innovation, and customer loyalty Employee confi-dence provides one example of such a measure.

Thinking of surveys in this way parallels the evolution ofHuman Resources, with the ongoing efforts of HR professionals tobecome increasingly strategic business partners HR interests andobjectives are more and more defined first by the needs of theirline management clients and second by their human resourcesfunctional requirements (Vosburgh, 2007) As mentioned in the

introduction, vitality is the ‘‘capacity for survival or for the

con-tinuation of a meaningful or purposeful existence,’’ and therebyreflects this notion of starting with the end in mind Buildingthis capacity is about nurturing the overarching disciplines ofresiliency and ambidexterity

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Best Practices for Training Intercultural Competence

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Mitch Tindall, and Eduardo Salas

Consider the following set of facts regarding global business:research findings indicate that between 16–40% of expatriatemanagers end their foreign assignments early, often due to poorperformance or an inability to adjust to foreign environments(Black & Mendenhall, 1990; Rahim, 1983) Even if expatriates staythe length of their assignment, oftentimes their assignment can beviewed as a failure because of lost opportunities, delayed produc-tivity, or damaged relationships (Bennett, Aston, & Colquhoun,2000; Littrell, Salas, Hess, Paley, & Riedel, 2006; Selmer, Torbiorn,

& Leon, 1998) With the direct cost of sending expatriates to theirforeign assignments as high as $220,000 (Birdseye & Hill, 1995),having a substantial proportion of expatriate assignments failingcan cost organizations substantially For example, it has been esti-mated that each failed expatriate assignment costs organizationsbetween $50,000 and $150,000, with cumulative annual costs ofexpatriate failures totaling around $2 billion for U.S organiza-tions (Copeland & Griggs, 1985; Harris & Moran, 1979; Misa &Fabricatore, 1979) Furthermore, even if the expatriate assign-ment is successfully completed, a large proportion of expatriatesleave the organization within a year of returning to their nativecountry because they have difficulty readjusting to U.S life andculture (Gomez-Mejia & Balkin, 1987)

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