Rethinking the Contribution of Organizational Change to the Teaching and Learning of Organizational Behaviour and Human Resource Management

Abstract

One of the great attributes of acting as a Human Resource Manager is being reasonable. One may not know what is best for a company but one should be able to identify, reasonably, when in-house fighting and resistance on the shop floor are disadvantageous. While agreeing with the law one must also be aware, again reasonably, that it may be in conflict with itself. One's job is to resolve difficulties to the benefit of all parties – once more reasonably – even when one's emotions are on the side of one of the parties. In short, there is a job to do, but there is a difficulty: doing so successfully depends on being reasonable as well as developing expertise. However, being reasonable is precisely what the scientific method does not support although being an expert could be a desirable attribute. It excludes anything that contributes to a bias, including the bias that trust, fairness and team spirit introduce (Huczynski & Buchanan, 2013). The result is well known: the scientific method tends to support commodification, objectification and reification and elicits resistance (Pitsakis & Kuin, 2012; Mahadevan, 2012) even on phenomenon-driven change (Schwarz & Stensaker, 2014). HRM officers do not seem to have done too badly however – albeit without the support of the scientific method (Ford, Ford, & D'Amelio, 2008). This does not mean that support would be wasted or impossible. The aim of the present chapter is to explore what it might look like. The result is a series of recommendations, based on a study showing how some employees proved able to contribute as experts to their companies even after they had been threatened of being fired due to heavy economic weather. This finding serves as an important lesson, i.e. that there are ways other than the scientific method to turn personal motivations and objectives into resources. These ways include creating an HRM/OB platform for change that helps to link people. They make it possible to create structures that help individuals to achieve ‘expert presence', i.e. expertise to deal with difficulties in the workplace in the here and now.