Professional Documents
Culture Documents
SCHEIN
The Changing Role of the Human
Resource Manager
CIP - Kataloøni zapis o publikaciji
Narodna in univerzitetna knjiænica, Ljubljana
005.32
ISBN 978-961-6720-02-1
237139200
EDGAR H. SCHEIN
The Changing Role
of the Human Resource
Manager
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Introduction
As the ideas and concepts offered by the panel were very rich and connected
directly to the issues of organizational culture, we decided to include this
discussion as a real-life illustration of Edgar Schein's reflections.
I hope you will enjoy the wonderful wisdom of one the most prominent
management thinkers of our time.
I would like to share with you some thoughts on what is continuing to happen
to the Human Resource Function and the implications of these events for the
role of the Human Resource manager. There are three basic forces that are
causing these changes:
- the impact of globalization
- technological complexity
- cultural diversity
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T H E C H A N G I N G R O L E O F T H E H U M A N R E S O U R C E M A N A G E R
3. The third major force is, in a sense, derived from the other two-
the complexity that arises from cultural diversity. Culture is a
group’s learned response to the problem of survival in the external
environment and the problem of internal integration. If there is no
history of problem-solving, there is no culture. So countries or
regions of countries have cultures, organizations have cultures, and
occupations develop cultures. So when salesmen with a sales
culture are talking to engineers with engineering culture mentality,
and they come from different countries and different parent
organizations, it is a wonder that they can communicate at all, much
less solve problems together.
To understand how these forces will impact on the HR function, we must first
look historically at the different roles that HR managers have played and see
which of these is most relevant today. We can distinguish four basic roles:
- Champion of the “employees”
- Payroll and contract administrator
- Partner in top strategy
- Professional conscience and organization developer
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As we discuss each role, note that the required skill and attitude set
is quite different for each role, implying potential role conflicts in
the person occupying the HR job. Which role to prioritize and which
sets of attitudes, skills and values to cultivate can become a difficult
psychological balancing act.
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T H E C H A N G I N G R O L E O F T H E H U M A N R E S O U R C E M A N A G E R
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T H E C H A N G I N G R O L E O F T H E H U M A N R E S O U R C E M A N A G E R
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T H E C H A N G I N G R O L E O F T H E H U M A N R E S O U R C E M A N A G E R
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Planning” as one such tool that takes us beyond the simplistic Job
Description that so many organizations lean on.
New tools and concepts for dealing with complexity and diversity
In my own work with organizations and with HR issues I have found three
sets of concepts of particular help:
- career anchors
- job/role planning
- culture analysis
To deal with the growing diversity of human resources and the individual
differences that employees today represent in terms of motives, talents, and
values I use the concept and methodology of helping employees to
understand their own “Career Anchors”.
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T H E C H A N G I N G R O L E O F T H E H U M A N R E S O U R C E M A N A G E R
So let's talk a bit about Career Anchors, Job/Role Analysis and Culture.
The career anchor is based on work and life experience; it describes what
one would not give up if forced to make a choice.
The concept of career anchors grew out of longitudinal research that was
The career anchor is an
originally launched in 1960 with a panel of MIT graduates and has since evolving self-image that
been carried out in different countries, different populations and different reflects educational and
work experience. As we
occupations. The career anchor is an evolving self-image that reflects edu- gain experience we learn
cational and work experience. As we gain experience we learn what we are what we are good at, what
we really want out of our
good at, what we really want out of our work and career, and what our val- work and career, and what
ues are. By the time we are in our 30s we have had enough experience to our values are.
begin to figure out what our anchor is, in the sense of what it is we want and
what it is that we would not give up.
We found that every occupation has all of these anchor types, so one should
not stereotype occupations. But it is crucial to understand that the different
anchor types have different views of what is important in their careers, what
incentives they will respond to, what they regard as career progress, and
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T H E C H A N G I N G R O L E O F T H E H U M A N R E S O U R C E M A N A G E R
In contrast, in every organization and every occupation there are those who
realize that they do want to climb the corporate ladder, to be promoted to
higher levels of responsibility where they will manage larger numbers of
employees and bigger budgets. Rather than becoming better and better at a
particular skill, they want to integrate the skills of others. We learned that
this group, from which executives are drawn, had a clear view of the skills
necessary to succeed in general management:
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more dependent than ever on the technical/functional type and will have to
develop multiple career ladders to accommodate all of the types.
The people with a service anchor organize their career concepts around
some important value such as environmentalism or improving employment
conditions. For them, as for the technical/functional types, the important
incentives are to be able to continue to do work that they regard as relevant
to their values.
The pure challenge types are a small group of employees who are only
challenged when they face an “impossible” task or an interpersonally
competitive situation. They are people who can be drawn in when unusually
high levels of motivation and commitment are needed to solve particularly
difficult problems.
Finally, the most important group from the HR point of view is the group that
is increasingly defining their career in terms of broader lifestyle issues.
They are often in a dual career situation, they are responsive to recent
social trends which emphasize personal needs more, they are more mobile
and hence will seek their careers in urban centers that provide both
themselves and their spouses with career opportunities. This group, like the
autonomy and technical/functional groups, will require the most innovation
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The implications of all this is that organizations will require all of these types
and will, therefore, have to invent multiple incentive and reward systems to
maximize the potential of each. If we take human capital seriously we must
recognize that it comes in many forms, all of which are necessary to optimal
organizational performance.
A helpful tool for this purpose was to view the job as a role embedded in a
role set of stakeholders, each of whom had certain expectations of what the
job holder should be doing. Viewing a job as a set of organizational
expectations, supplemented by the expectations of family, friends, and
others outside the organization, and filtered through one's expectations of
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Once such a diagram has been drawn it immediately makes possible both
the analysis of the present situation and planning for the future. The totality
of the diagram of the role set will reveal:
Analyzing the role in this way also forces the job incumbent to define his or
her own expectations and how to approach the job as the management of a
complex set of social relationships, not merely a technical performance.
The job description can outline the responsibilities and the goals to be
accomplished, but without an understanding of the dynamics of the role set
the incumbent cannot figure out how to get anything done.
Analyzing jobs using role maps provides an important tool for the planning
required in developing HR strategies and succession planning. Most such
planning is done by second-guessing from the current job description what
evolution might occur in the work. If one does this without a role map one is
likely to miss the environmental and technological forces that cause such
evolution. Performing a job/role planning job therefore requires analyzing
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for each major stakeholder where that stakeholder's expectations may head
as we project into the future. It then becomes possible to predict, for example,
that a particular shareholder will become ever more cost-conscious, that
manufacturing heads will increasingly wish to take manufacturing into other
countries with lower labor costs, that the community and the local govern-
ment will become more stringent about environmental issues and emission
controls, that rapid technological evolution will make it possible, maybe even
mandatory, to decentralize work geographically and team communication to
take place purely electronically, etc. The point is that each stakeholder's
world is evolving and by analyzing each stakeholder's world before we examine
impacts on a particular job, we get a more accurate and rich picture of how
the job will change and how the requirements for future job holders will
therefore change. And that brings us to the third tool: cultural analysis.
The best way to think about culture is to recognize that it shows up in the
The best way to think about
overt and visible behavioral norms of a group: the rules of how to behave.
culture is to recognize that
it shows up in the overt and But behind that is usually a set of espoused values and ideology, what the
visible behavioral norms of
a group: the rules of how to
group aspires to and would like to be, and beneath that is the essence of the
behave. But behind that is culture, the shared tacit assumptions that have been learned over time and
usually a set of espoused
values and ideology, what
that actually drive daily behavior.
the group aspires to and
would like to be, and What level of culture to work on in a change program?
beneath that is the essence
of the culture, the shared - overt behavioral norms
tacit assumptions that have
been learned over time and - espoused values
that actually drive daily
behavior. - shared taken-for-granted assumptions
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Culture change
Focus on new, desired behavior:
- identify how new behavior will solve the business problem
- if desired behavior is consistent with assumptions no culture
change is needed
- if desired behavior is inhibited by some cultural assumptions,
these need to be changed
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produce those behavioral changes and use elements of the culture to help
achieve the changes.
If there are other elements of the culture that inhibit the desired behavioral
changes, these must then be analyzed and dealt with in a further change
program, but only when they have been clearly identified as inhibiters of the
desired behavioral change. If one consistently enforces the new behavior
and if that new behavior improves the business situation, then the norms
inhibiting it will gradually lose their coercive power and will be replaced by
new norms.
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as such. What does all of this mean for the growth and development of HR
executives?
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The most recent and up-to-date material pertaining to this talk and
related matters can be found in the folloing books.
Bailyn, L., Breaking the Mold, 2d Ed. Cornell University Press, 2006.
Gunz, H. & Peiperl, M. (Eds.), Handbook of Career Studies. Sage,
2007.
Schein, E. H., The Corporate Culture Survival Guide. Jossey-Bass,
1999.
Schein, E .H., Organizational Culture and Leadership, 3d Ed.
Jossey-Bass, 2004.
Schein, E. H., Career Anchors, 3d Ed. Jossey-Bass, Pfeiffer, 2006.
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The Biggest Challenges Facing the HR
Manager in the Future
A Roundtable Discussion
Nadya Zhexembayeva
We will start our discussion by giving the floor to the panelists, but we hope
to engage everyone after that. What are the challenges and priorities for
human resource management as we move into the new century? Where are
we, and where are we going?
I would like the panelists to start out with a short introduction of their compa-
nies, because they all operate in very different contexts. If the speakers tell us
a little bit about what they represent, we will have a clearer idea of their back-
grounds.
Marina Pakhomkina
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Vanda Peœjak
Stephan Baron
We employ 1,700 to 2,000 people in our Austrian headquarters and about 2,500
in 43 subsidiaries. If you work in a high-technology company with so many
branches, your job becomes complex, and this complexity has increased dra-
matically over the past 15 years. I joined AVL List in 1992, when we had 1,200
people worldwide. Now the number is close to 4,500. That makes us a small
global player. This peculiar situation creates some challenges that I will be
happy to discuss here.
Ursula Kuntner-Schweickhardt
I work for Erste Bank out of Vienna. We are a retail bank. We celebrated our
10th anniversary this year. In 1997 we were a very small organization with
some 3,000 people, but we now have 40,000 employees with subsidiaries in
eight countries in Central and Eastern Europe and are one of the most suc-
cessful banks in this region. At the moment, we are establishing a holding
company, which implies huge organizational change. Our intention is not to
have eight banks in eight countries but eight banks in one group. This is a big
challenge for human resource management.
Ten years ago we had enough time to think about human resource manage-
ment priorities. Today the challenge is to single out the main priority.
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Nadya Zhexembayeva
It seems that culture is one of the issues that are beginning to emerge from
these introductions. Merging two types of company- one young and dynamic,
the other more mature- may pose interesting challenges. The issue of cultur-
al diversity was also mentioned. My question for you is: what is the top prior-
ity in your job today?
Vanda Peœjak
I would say that my main priority is flexibility and speed. Years ago, we had
enough time to ponder problems and prepare the system. Nowadays, you
have to move fast. The biggest change in the human resource management
function in the past 10 years is that we have become a provider for our inter-
nal customers. We are evaluated every year and have to act in accordance
with the needs of our business.
One of the greatest challenges for the leader of the human resource depart-
ment, then, is to prepare subordinates by showing the way and being a role
model. If you do not do that, your subordinates will ask you why you expect
them to do what you are not capable of doing. Speed, adaptation, flexibility,
and constant learning are essential. I am not talking just about learning from
courses and seminars. Learning on the job is just as important.
Marina Pakhomkina
I would like to start with a metaphor related to the issue of culture. Imagine
you have married somebody and after the initial merrymaking you realize how
different you are. This can create all kinds of conflicts. However, it can also
be a source of value and synergy. One way to tap this is through interaction.
You watch the other person and observe a different model of doing things.
Then, you enter a slow evolutionary process. The second way is to agree on
a few principles - how you spend your budget, where you go on vacation, how
many children you will have.
Speaking of priorities, you have to get people to interact and share knowledge
and expertise, to learn from each other and realize that there are a variety of
leadership styles, not just command and control as the case used to be in our
country.
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You need to create a set of shared values that defines the kind of company
you are and how you operate. You need to ensure that the company delivers.
People are not paid for loyalty, but for delivery. I will share with you some of
the things that we do to make people communicate and adopt decisions
together.
A priority that relates to the specifics of our culture is foreign language acqui-
sition. Only 10 percent of our employees speak English, and that creates a
great handicap because we cannot communicate normally. We have a huge
staff of interpreters who must ensure that there is some mutual understand-
ing in our communication. In order to deal with this, we have set individual
objectives for each British and Russian executive. They have to learn Russian
and English, respectively, and we monitor their progress very closely. Their
bonuses are linked to how successful they are as students of a foreign lan-
guage.
Nadya Zhexembayeva
It seems that, depending on the context, priorities can be very different. Can
you think of any other priorities in human resource management in your com-
panies?
Ursula Kuntner-Schweickhardt
Nadya Zhexembayeva
Stephan, can you share with us some of your personal priorities? Are they dif-
ferent from Ursula's?
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Stephan Baron
Yes and no. Our company has a special workforce because in a sense we are
something like a university. We employ engineers who develop new high tech-
nology for sexy businesses. We work for automotive companies like Ferrari,
Toyota, BMW, Porsche, GM, and Ford. Although our company is not famous,
90 percent of all car engines have been tested with our products. That means
that we are well-known in the automotive community but we are not well-
known by the public. This is one of the problems that we have when we try to
attract people outside Austria. In Austria everybody knows us and wants to
work for us. In Japan and the United States, nobody has heard of us. If we
place a job ad in an Austrian newspaper, we get 300 applications. If we adver-
tise in a Tokyo newspaper, we get no responses at all.
However, getting the right people is not the only issue. Once you have identi-
fied them, you have to keep them in the company.
Our main problem at the moment is that we work out of offices all over the
world and it is not easy to achieve a good level of integration of cultures,
ideas, and processes. Managing intercultural teams is a tough challenge.
Managing growth is not easy either. We have achieved 20 percent growth this
year and expect another 50 percent next year. We are facing a lot of new proj-
ects and we need new people who can integrate into the organization. I agree
with the statement that speed has become a very important factor in recent
years. Our project managers do not accept slow human resource manage-
ment. They say that the customers are putting tremendous pressure on them
and they cannot wait for us. They want the human resource department to be
as fast as everybody else. My challenge is to convince my team to accept the
challenge imposed by this reality.
Nadya Zhexembayeva
You have already moved from the priorities to the solutions. One of the solu-
tions that Stephan suggested is being involved with the decision-making
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process so that you do not feel left out. In that way you can make a far more
valuable contribution.
Vanda Peœjak
The main problem that we have to deal with is the lack of human talent in
Slovenia and in other countries. All over the region it is hard to find qualified
people who would be motivated to work in production. However, without pro-
duction, there will be no tires. And without tires, modern life is impossible. We
have had long discussions with our trade unions in order to find a way to get
people interested in working for us. Of course, money is an issue, but we have
found that young people do not care only about money. They want to have
more spare time on weekends because they have families. And, they want to
participate in day-to-day decisions concerning production.
Another thing is that we do not have enough people taking challenging jobs.
People prefer jobs with low levels of complexity. One of our most important
projects is our talent management system. We would like to conclude agree-
ments with the best universities in Europe and attract their best students. We
have opted for this creative approach because we have realized that direct
recruitment from the labor market or agencies is not a very good method for
getting the most talented people.
Stephan Baron
There is no one best solution that works for every company. There is such a
thing as basic principles of human resources management, but you also need
to demonstrate a good deal of creativity in the context of your company.
Businesses are different and they are at different stages of development. Our
company has evolved tremendously over the past 15 years. Each consecutive
level calls for specific solutions. You always have to ask whether a particular
approach is the right one at the right time for your company.
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We are soon going to have a human resource management meeting with rep-
resentatives of all our subsidiaries. They are all very different and we wonder
how we are to manage that diversity. We have branches with 300 people and
with 10 people. The large ones have human resource managers, whereas in
the small ones this function is performed by the chief executive officer. How
can we talk about universal solutions?
Our branches expect headquarters to solve problems but on the other hand
they want freedom. Balancing these expectations is an enormous challenge.
Nadya Zhexembayeva
I would like to give the floor to Marina, who saw the merger of two very dif-
ferent companies. It would be interesting to hear what challenges they
encountered and how they handled the situation.
Marina Pakhomkina
One of our first and very urgent tasks was to integrate foreigners into our
environment and vice versa. We established a program called Mutual
Mentoring. We paired up foreign and Russian executives in the hope that they
would learn from each other how they do things in their own cultures. We
scheduled formal meetings for them, but we also expected some informal
sharing of information. This helped people understand the unfamiliar culture
of the other party.
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Upon their return to Russia, these people proved to have acquired not only
new skills but also a new mindset. They began to act as change agents and
spread what they had learned.
We also have a program with INSEAD. We send executives there not only for
the knowledge that they can obtain but also because we wanted them to
interact with peers from other countries and set up professional networks.
We set up quite a few projects literally in the middle of nowhere- even places
in central Siberia without any infrastructure or buildings. We had to get peo-
ple to work there and that was a tremendous problem. We employ 70,000 peo-
ple but they are not very mobile. Russians do not relocate easily. If you have
a family and children, you are unwilling to move.
Nadya Zhexembayeva
Ursula Kuntner-Schweickhardt
Personally, I do not think there is an ideal culture. The culture should reflect
the main goal of a company, its business, its strategy. We have a socially
responsible culture and do a lot for our employees. If we did that in some
other countries, they might think we were a little stupid. For example, we have
a Greenfield operation in Ukraine. If we tried to implement the principles of
Austrian culture there, it would not work.
Vanda Peœjak
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I would say that you should not assume that if something is good and works in
America it will also be successful in Slovenia. However, if you add a special
Slovene flavor, it might work.
Inspired by similar US practices, we set up a Family Day for all company asso-
ciates and their families. In the first year, we had some 400 applications. The
following year, we had 1000. The numbers kept rising and this year we had
4,300 in the Kranj stadium. This used to be a public relations event but I took
it over and invited trade union representatives. They asked me how much I
would pay for overtime. I sad I would not pay anything. We were holding that
event for our people. It is also very important for top management to attend.
They must be available and they must talk to everybody.
These are some of the things we do in order to build a culture. But I must
admit that we still have a long way to go. We are great in production but that
is not enough. We need passion.
Stephan Baron
You can do this from the top down but you can also do it from the bottom up.
We started an international management development program against the
will of some top managers and the owner of the company because they
thought it was unnecessary and cost too much money. That is why human
resource managers need to be part of top management, and they need to be
strong. I cannot afford to wait until all top managers agree.
We employ engineers and they do not like to manage people. They like to turn
screws. If you turn the right screw, you get the right result. But that is not how
you manage people, and for that reason they do not want to be managers.
They hate solving people's problems and discussing salaries. They want to
develop technology, and have a mechanistic view of the world. Our goal is to
change that view. Twelve years ago we started practicing skill management.
We realized that to be successful it is not enough to have technology skills.
This is especially true if you work in a multicultural environment. That was
very difficult to explain to engineers. They had to learn communication, lan-
guage, and self-management. They had to learn how to manage people for the
purpose of a project. It took us five or six years to make them accept this.
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their projects in China and Japan. They said it was terrible. They were happy
when the projects were over because they thought it was absolutely impossi-
ble to work with the people there.
The thing is to know the direction in which you want to go. Then you can start
from the top but it is also possible to go from the bottom up.
Marina Pakhomkina
In Russia we have always had stories about heroism in production: going the
extra mile, achieving a little more, etc. However, BP brought in a different
value: human life. Our executives had not even been used to using seatbelts.
When we enforced the use of seatbelts, newspapers started making fun of us.
Now this policy has caught on and our employees accept it. This is a good
example of how a company can create and propagate a value that was not
there before.
Nadya Zhexembayeva
Edita Kuhar
A couple of years ago entrepreneurship was not valued much in Slovenia, but
this is now changing. I heard top managers say some time ago that we,
Slovenes, lack the necessary spirit for entrepreneurship; there is not enough
courage and innovativeness. I would like to ask Vanda Peœjak how much she
thinks local culture influences what happens in a company.
Vanda Peœjak
In the past five years I have been listening to the same story, concerning the
lack of talent, not only in Slovenia, but all over the world. For example, if you
want to have a good accountant, you need somebody who is not only knowl-
edgeable about local standards but also has sufficient experience with
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American principles of accounting and speaks good English. Very few single
individuals offer such skills.
Consequently, one of the most important things for us is the selection, motiva-
tion, and retention of personnel. In Slovenia we decided to offer scholarships
for technical education. Do you think we got many takers? No. Engineers want
to get Master's degrees and go on to work in institutions. Some even want to
be professors. If you ask them to work in production and solve problems on a
daily basis, they do not come.
The environment has changed. The younger generation wants a new type of
job. When we advertise positions in public relations or marketing, we get tons
of applications. When we advertise accountants' jobs, we get five or ten
applicants. When we want to recruit somebody in production maintenance,
hardly anybody turns up.
I would like to hear opinions on this topic. How do you motivate people to stay
in the company? What do you give them? Is it money? Or a car? Or a special
position?
Do you think you can change the culture of a company with the same employ-
ees?
Marina Pakhomkina
There is no need to try to implement changes in all areas. You should just cre-
ate the right sort of synergy among different habits. Let me give you one exam-
ple. In Russia, people are very action-oriented. They want to know who does
what and who is in charge. British people are different. For them it is very
important to understand the context and have a consensus of views. They
want to involve everybody in discussions and have a shared vision. They also
prefer to point out the direction without giving specific instructions.
You do not have to change either of the two. You can instead combine the best
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In the past, we were very inflexible with respect to targets. We had to reach
them no matter what. The British are more lenient about that. We have tried
to integrate these two approaches.
In Russia, when you make a mistake, you get punished. British people have a
different concept of responsibility. You are responsible for achieving results,
but you do not get punished for failures. We integrated this philosophy into a
performance management system where a large part of an employee's bonus
is linked to team effort. That was a tremendous change.
Ursula Kuntner-Schweickhardt
I would like to ask why people should change their behavior in the first place.
If you cannot answer this question, nobody will change. If people do not
understand why they need to change, nobody will change.
Stephan Baron
A company's first goal is to make money and survive. If the human resources
department does not support that goal, the company will be in trouble.
Ten years ago, we changed our structure dramatically. Having been a hierar-
chical organization, we became a process-based organization. A lot of people
did not like that and we lost them. However, many others thought they would
survive. We tried to support the change by means of communication seminars.
There was nothing about technology. We just listened to their fears and tried
to understand why they were not excited about the change. We were quite
clear that the change was necessary for the company to survive. Luckily, we
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made the change at a time when the business was growing and we were mak-
ing a lot of money. We came in for some criticism but eventually achieved a
happy ending. The goal of human resource management is to defend the inter-
ests of the company, not of a few people who do not like the turn that things
are taking. However, sometimes I clash with top management who are reluc-
tant to spend money on education and coaching. A person in my position has
to play many roles at the same time
Can you change behavior? You can do that quite easily by means of bonus
manipulation. However, you cannot change deep-seated values.
Vanda Peœjak
If the question is how to change behavior and values, we are talking about dif-
ferent things. Behavior is indeed easier to change. You can watch and moni-
tor it and manipulate it with your bonus system. The important thing is that you
have an open discussion about these issues.
Changing values is certainly more difficult. They are more resistant to change.
If you want to have different values, you need to have a different environment.
When you work in a multinational company, sometimes you get very rude
requests from a manager who is not local. You may be asked to get rid of
somebody or implement an undesirable practice. You have to explain that
local rules are different and you have to stand by your convictions. That does
not mean that you are inflexible. It means that the company should respect
local rules and regulations. Otherwise, for the sake of business
profit, you could do things that are not only illegal, but also immoral.
Nadya Zhexembayeva
Now I would like to reverse the roles and have the panel ask questions of the
audience.
Vanda Peœjak
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What are the criteria for getting on this list? First, your performance on the
job, which is evaluated annually by your manager or peers. The second thing
is how many levels up the hierarchy you can move. For that, you need
leadership skills. We also use psychological assessments. The fourth
element is your inspiration. What kind of promotion are you interested in:
upward or lateral? Finally, the fifth element is your international mobility, at
least within Central and Eastern Europe.
I already asked about the main ways to motivate employees to work for a
multinational company. We are sometimes told that more money will do the
trick easily, but that is not the case. A salary increase produces a short-lived
effect that lasts a few months or a year. What else can you do?
Stephan Baron
My experience is that most people are not mobile and would not like to live
abroad. How do you motivate them to be mobile?
Marina Pakhomkina
Some multinationals say that their company has a history and particular val-
ues but that they have tremendous difficulty implementing those values in a
new environment. How can this problem be tackled? What would you recom-
mend?
My other question is this. What are the main competencies that a human
resource manager must possess in order to be successful?
Lidija Drobeæ
The first issue is setting up the right environment. That is certainly a hard task.
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The second issue is our differences as individuals and our responses to dif-
ferent motivational patterns. We also change during our lives. Therefore, the
question of how to motivate people does not have a simple answer. You need
to be flexible and be able to provide different incentives to different people.
As for the mobility issue, I would like to ask a different question. Why are we
asking people to be mobile in the first place?
Stephan Baron
You are right, mobility is not a value in its own right. Our customers want the
best products in the field where we operate. At the same time, they want us
to be as close as possible to their location. They may know that some of our
best engineers are in Graz, but they want them in Munich or Stuttgart. This
means that we have to send our people to our customers.
We also develop local talent in places like China or India. To do that, we need
to send somebody out there. We do not send people around the world on some
kind of whim but because the market requires it.
Of course, we also bring people from China and India to Graz. However,
Austrian laws are strict and we cannot host foreigners for a long time.
Douwe Mulders
I think that all issues that have been raised here are quite challenging.
However, I would like to address one that was raised by Marina Pakhomkina.
As far as I understood it, it was about the three most important competencies
for human resource managers in general.
The first one, in my view, is "know what you are talking about". I say this
because I know a lot of people who do not know what they are talking about
and this is the most important thing to start with.
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Marina Pakhomkina
Susanna Ulrich
We talked about the search for talent. To me, that sounds a bit arrogant. You
need to have a good mix in your organization. There are people who are happy
to stay just where they are and this needs to be taken into account.
Vanda Peœjak
Indeed, when you come back from an overseas assignment, your previous job
is usually gone. Also, if you move from Slovenia to Belgium or the United
States, you get a huge salary increase and you get used to high revenues.
When it is time to return to Slovenia, those people ask to become managing
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directors, but the director in place refuses to move. This means you have to
be very careful when you ask people to move abroad.
Nadya Zhexembayeva
This has been a very exciting session. Now it is time to give the floor to our
illustrious guest, Professor Edgar Schein, and have him share his opinion of
the discussion.
Edgar Schein
I find this discussion fascinating in terms of how much has come out. I also
find it totally frustrating because there are far more problems than there are
solutions, as the speakers have indicated. Nevertheless, as I listened to the
panelists, I was surprised at the number of solutions that I heard.
If you combine all the points that were raised in the description of what a
human resource manager ought to be, one common theme will emerge.
Whatever human resource managers are, they need to be culture managers.
They are in a unique position to know what culture is, how it works, and what
dilemmas it creates. If they do not know that, they should not expect their line
managers to know it.
This leads to the paradoxical conclusion that culture is both a problem and a
solution in human resource management. Many of the problems that you men-
tioned contained a cultural element. But if you cannot figure out what to do
about them, surely no one else can. That is because you have the independ-
ence, perspective, and training to think about interpersonal and cultural
issues. If I were a line manager, I would assume that you have some expert-
ise in the cultural area. That is not an easy thing to ask of you because culture
is truly a complex matter.
In that regard, what I heard was a simplification of culture that I do not agree
with. We talked about country cultures, as well as generational, regional, and
organizational cultures. But for me, the most important one is occupational
culture. That was referred to by Mr Baron. If you look at his company, you
might wonder why it is so different. The answer is because it is about special
occupations.
There are finance types, and there are engineers, production workers, and
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many others. They live in different worlds. We keep ignoring the fact, but we
have big cultural clashes inside every company. When your marketing and
production departments do not talk the same language, you have problems.
Then you have to work out how to get the people inside the company to work
toward the same goal.
One of the best questions concerning culture is how to study it so that it does
not seem only a national or organizational phenomenon, because it is also a
local phenomenon that we have to deal with every day. It usually goes under
the label of communication. When we say "communication is important", we
usually mean we have a culture problem inside the company: some people
who should be communicating are not doing that. It is not enough to say that
they should communicate better. The reason that they are not communicating
well is that they live in different subcultures.
If that is the case, the solutions that have been mentioned have to have a cer-
tain characteristic. Years ago, when we reviewed intelligence testing, some-
body pointed out that the way intelligent tests are written favor certain occu-
pational and social groups, particularly middle-class children. When rural
black children in the United States take these tests they look stupid because
the questions are geared toward a different cultural group.
I do not know if you have heard of the "culture-free test". People began to
invent tests that get at intelligence directly, without using language and cul-
ture. Thinking of that, it occurred to me that all these human resources prob-
lems are not culture-free. A solution that may work in one country may not
work in another one. Also, if it works in one company, it may fail in another.
Consequently it does little good for us to tell what works in our own company
because it is not a culture-free solution.
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and work hard at their tasks. Similarly, you can develop tasks that require sub-
cultures to work together.
Obviously, work settings and relationships are things that we all care about.
Work is a daily phenomenon. I keep reminding my children of that. When they
start thinking whether they should take a particular job, I tell them that they
have to imagine how every single day would look. What would it feel like? That
concerns the actual work, but also the climate of the company. It is an intrin-
sic motivator for people because they spend a great portion of their time at
work.
Interestingly, something which was not mentioned here, but is present in all
the research on motivation, is job challenge. A job has to somehow be
interesting. Nobody wants to do boring work eight hours or more a day.
It is interesting to think back to the experiment that Proctor and Gamble did
with their production systems. They had large unionized plants that
prevented any worker from doing anything different from his job description.
They decided that this was not a cost-effective way to do business, and
redesigned the plant according to a new approach in which workers viewed
themselves as a company getting supplies from production. Their job was to
package up what they received in such a way that sales could meet their
orders. In this way they created more challenging jobs for their workers. And
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lo and behold, the workers started working harder. It was a different way of
looking at the same work, but it had become more challenging. I do not know
if that practice has survived in Proctor and Gamble but it was a revolutionary
idea for many years. It demonstrated that you can take a boring job and turn
it into something interesting. Probably the biggest motivator is precisely that:
giving people something that can interest them. That might be a difficult chal-
lenge.
A long time ago Chris Argyris referred to an interesting example. There was a
large hospital for mentally challenged people in Connecticut. They were bored
all day long. Nearby was a dairy that wrapped butter into packets. Chris sug-
gested that the patients might find that job challenging and stimulating. His
idea worked beautifully. What seemed to be a very boring task for one part of
the population turned out to be very exciting for other people because it made
their lives meaningful.
Job redesign is a big culture-free solution. Whenever you have some of the
problems that you mentioned during this session, you should ask whether the
job is designed in an optimal way. This is related to another issue that was not
mentioned: the new generation. I wonder if one of the things that will happen
in the future, and which will turn jobs upside down, is contract work. More
and more people will decide that organizations do not attract them and will
prefer to work on an ad hoc basis. If that is the case, you will have a major job
retraining managers because they will be the real barrier. You may get the
idea, and the worker will get the idea, but what if the managers do not want
to let go? What if they do not like part-time work or do not like people working
from home because they cannot see them? There are lots of things coming up
that will concern the way that companies are organized. You will have to man-
age that transition. That will be difficult because companies like standardiza-
tion. In order to be cost-effective, they like to routinize work, although that is
boring for the people who have to do the work.
I think we all ought to take a trip through Silicon Valley and see some of the
crazy forms of organization springing up in computer-related business.
Maybe some of those models will set standards for the future.
Finally, in order to set the scene for tomorrow, I would like to talk about the
concept of "career anchors", which I have done a lot of research on. I started
out discovering that if you follow people through their careers, their concept
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of who they are and what they want gets firmer and they become clearer
about what they really want. There is a finite number of things that people
desire: autonomy, security, etc.
When I share these findings, people always tell me that this is fine as far as
America is concerned, but they want to know whether it works the same way
in other cultures. Surprisingly, Japan is probably the biggest user of career
anchors at this moment. Why are they interested in career anchors? I think
that they are discovering that companies are beginning to ask career coun-
selors to help them relocate people who are being laid off. In other words, as
bureaucracies, state-owned companies, and conglomerates diversify and get
smaller and let people go, people do not know what to do. They have trained
generations of people to be dependent on their companies and now they
expect them to provide some advice.
This career anchor idea forces you to consider how people can be more inde-
pendent and how different people really are. Do they really all want the same
things or do they want different things? Do they want to be promoted upward,
or laterally, or in some other direction? There is more than one way to
advance in a career. Yet, if you look in the literature, it is all about climbing.
We see hardly any acceptance of the fact that there is a security-orientated
anchor that wants stability, whereas the autonomy-oriented anchor wants
freedom. People in the same job may have totally different needs. I think we
have to come to terms with individual differences and job redesign because
the world may be pushing us into problems that will require more of that sort
of thing.
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BIOGRAPHIES
46
institute with nearly 40,000 employees in eight countries in central
and Eastern Europe.
47
Published by:
IEDC-Bled School of Management
Preøernova cesta 33
4260 Bled, Slovenia
Year:
2008
Editor:
Prof. Danica Purg, Dr. Nadya Zhexembayeva
IEDC-Bled School of Management
Design:
Eduard Œehovin
Circulation:
1000 Copies