The New American Workplace: The Follow-up to the Bestselling Work in America
272
The New American Workplace: The Follow-up to the Bestselling Work in America
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Overview
Thirty years ago, the bestselling "letter to the government" Work in America published to national acclaim, including front-page coverage in The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and Washington Post. It sounded an alarm about worker dissatisfaction and the effects on the nation as a whole. Now, based on thirty years of research, this new book sheds light on what has changed - and what hasn't. This groundbreaking work will illuminate the new critical issues - from worker demands to the new ethical rules to the revolution in culture at work.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781137115027 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | St. Martin's Publishing Group |
| Publication date: | 05/12/2015 |
| Sold by: | Macmillan |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 272 |
| File size: | 657 KB |
About the Author
James O'Toole was chairman of the task force that created Work in America. He is a Research Professor in the Center for Effective Organizations at USC. Formerly Executive VP of the Aspen Institute, he has published thirteen books and over seventy articles. He lives in San Francisco and Malibu. Edward E. Lawler III is founder and Director of the Center for Effective Organizations and Distinguished Professor in the Marshall School of Business, both at USC. He is author or co-author of over thirty-five books and more than three hundred articles. Business Week proclaimed Lawler one of the top six gurus in the field of management, and Human Resource Executive called him one of HR's most influential people. He lives in Los Angeles.
James O'Toole was chairman of the task force that created Work in America. He is a Research Professor in the Center for Effective Organizations at USC. Formerly Executive VP of the Aspen Institute, he has published thirteen books and over seventy articles. He lives in San Francisco and Malibu.
Edward E. Lawler III is founder and Director of the Center for Effective Organizations and Distinguished Professor in the Marshall School of Business, both at USC. He is author or co-author of over thirty-five books and more than three hundred articles. Business Week proclaimed Lawler one of the top six gurus in the field of management, and Human Resource Executive called him one of HR’s most influential people. He lives in Los Angeles.
Read an Excerpt
The New American Workplace
By James O'Toole, Edward E. Lawler III
Palgrave Macmillan
Copyright © 2015 Society for Human Resource ManagementAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4039-6959-0
CHAPTER 1
WORK IN AMERICA
In 1972, the United States Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare, Elliot L. Richardson, formed a task force to evaluate the state of working conditions in the nation. A year later, after reviewing hundreds of scholarly studies and interviewing dozens of experts, the Work in America task force reported to the Secretary that the health and social well-being of many Americans were being adversely affected by the conditions of their employment. The task force cited a growing body of evidence that too many Americans were engaged in narrow, repetitive, and routine jobs—especially in the manufacturing sector—and that was leading to a variety of mental and physical health problems. The task force offered concrete examples of how companies could redesign jobs to reduce the negative consequences for workers, noting that redesigning work also would increase productivity and the international competitiveness of American corporations.
Executives in the 1970s and 1980s heeded the advice of the experts and began to pay attention to the quality of work life in their factories and offices. They redesigned some jobs to make them more challenging and fulfilling, automated other tasks, and exported many of the remaining "bad" jobs to the developing world. The combined effect of these actions led to an improvement in the quality of working conditions in the nation but, in the process, created a new set of issues and challenges. Even a casual look reveals a new world of work in America:
• Countless workers—whose "offices" are in their cars, hotel rooms, and Starbucks cafés—are on the phone in the middle of the night to "colleagues" in Indonesia and Thailand whom they may never have met, and may never meet.
• To make ends meet, some middle-class couples hold down three weekday jobs between the two of them, with the occasional part-time gig on weekends, besides caring for their kids and elderly parents.
• Significant numbers of managers and professionals, a great many of whom are women, work for large corporations on a limited contract (or contingency) basis, having replaced "organization men" who had lifetime security.
• Service representatives of American software providers are located in call centers in Bangalore, India.
• Chinese engineers design, and seventeen-year-old girls assemble, toys for American companies in the special economic zone in Chenzen, China.
• The average CEO in a Fortune 500 company takes home over 400 times the pay of the average employee (in 1973 the ratio was 40 to 1).
• For the majority of the U.S. population who haven't attended college, their incomes are stagnating, if not declining.
• American executives decide against creating new jobs in the United States because of the prohibitive cost of providing health insurance, and workers choose otherwise undesirable jobs simply because they offer health coverage for themselves and their families.
• A young software engineer in Silicon Valley is "downsized"; after a year of failing to land a comparable job in a tech industry, she becomes a self-employed entrepreneur, opening an online e-art gallery.
• Employees in factories and stores organized in self-managing work teams select their own members, make their own work assignments, and are paid bonuses based on their performance.
• A seventy-year-old "retired" American accountant starts a new career as a financial consultant to small, start-up businesses in Asia. He is "greeted" at Wal-Mart by a part-time employee his age who is still working because she doesn't have sufficient savings to retire.
• Undocumented alien workers gather outside Home Depot stores hoping for day jobs, while able-bodied U.S. citizens panhandle on the streets of American cities refusing to look for paid employment.
What is going on in this crazy-quilt world of work? What are the causes and consequences of these seemingly unrelated events and trends? While there are no simple answers to these questions, we believe some clearly identifiable developments help to explain what has happened in the recent past, and what is likely to happen in the future, in the American workplace.
RIDING THE WAVE OF THE GLOBAL ECONOMY
It is now widely recognized that a new global economy is emerging. It is characterized by the transnational flow of capital, goods, services, and labor; by greater national specialization and increased competition across borders; and by the use of new technologies that radically disrupt traditional ways of doing business. The United States is positioned at the crest of this competitive wave, having adopted the de facto national strategy of being the leader of this fast-paced, unpredictable, and unsettling global process of economic and industrial transformation. This strategy is not official by any means, nor has it been chosen consciously; instead, it is the result of countless piecemeal actions of American corporations and is buttressed by the nation's free-trade policies.
In seeking competitive advantage, the United States has targeted a niche for itself at the top of the world economy: it has opted to use the highest technology, to have the most capital- and knowledge-intensive industries, and to produce the highest-quality and highest-value-added goods and services. Surfing the crest of this giant wave is not easy: to maintain its prosperity, the U.S. economy must be in a state of constant change, driven by a process of "creative destruction." Inefficient products, companies, and entire industries continually need to be replaced by new ones employing ever-more complex processes. And the nation's industrial knowledge base needs to be enhanced constantly to yield the high profit margins required by the new standards of international finance.
On one hand, if the economy fails to advance fast enough, America will fall off the back of the wave and be overtaken by more effective competitors. On the other hand, if the economy moves too quickly, our industrial practices will be out of sync with our social expectations and institutions, running ahead of the nation's educational and health systems and outpacing the ability of individuals and communities to adjust to constant, major dislocations. If that occurs, the nation could experience a social backlash like those that occurred in France and the Netherlands in 2005, when voters in those countries rejected the proposed European constitution largely on the grounds that it left workers vulnerable to the forces of international trade and low-wage competitors.
Whether the new global economy is a good or a bad thing, and whether America's chosen strategic position is the correct one or not, are issues beyond the scope of this book. Instead of exploring the wisdom of what might have been, or could be, we have taken as givens the new global economy and the nation's competitive strategy. Our objective is to identify the consequences of these momentous changes on the conditions of work in America and on the lives of American workers. We have undertaken this analysis as objectively and rigorously as possible, recognizing the complexity of identifying and evaluating the various costs and benefits the strategy brings to the American society and to its economy, business organizations, and individual consumers and workers. Grounding our observations and conclusions in sound data wherever available, we ask what must be done in private workplaces and public institutions to make the strategy succeed in the long term: If America wishes to continue to be the world's leading economic power, what workplace practices and public policies are required to ensure that it succeeds? Our single bias is toward solutions that serve both the well-being of employees and the effectiveness of their employing organizations in the belief that doing one without the other is not viable in the long term.
Our general conclusion is that, in far too many instances, the United States is attempting to implement tomorrow's competitive strategies with yesterday's managerial ideas and public policy infrastructure. We see a disturbing disconnect between the rhetoric of competitiveness and the reality of how American corporations are managed. All too many compensation practices, training programs, and job- and organization-designs are poor fits with today's competitive realities. Many global corporations have been quick to change the way they compete globally, but too often these fast-changing businesses are out-of-step with worker aspirations, social expectations, and public policies. Further, the business models and human resources strategies of many slower-moving companies lag far behind global and domestic competitive realities. Harkening back to the 1970s, we believe that attention again must be paid to the nature of work itself. Large American corporations spend billions on recruiting, training, assessing, and rewarding workers, but many have lost sight of the importance of the design and structure of jobs and careers.
In addition, America's health and education institutions, trade unions, and governmental and nonprofit agencies charged with addressing employment matters too often are constituted to meet the challenges of yesterday's economy, not tomorrow's. We conclude that unless major change occurs, America's current managerial practices and public education, labor, and social policies are unlikely to provide the mix, quality, and supply of jobs and trained workers needed for success in the emerging global economy. The good news is that the nation does not yet face a crisis. America's strategy of riding the crest of the global competitive wave can succeed if its business owners, managers, educators, citizens, workers, and political leaders focus on, and clarify, the consequences of the public and private choices they now face and then choose wisely among the available alternatives.
Since it is difficult to gain perspective while riding atop a giant, fast-moving wave, we provide a framework for identifying and evaluating the major workplace and workforce alternatives available to the nation. We explore the new context of global competition and changing technology, and what it means for the nature of work in America and for those who do it. We also examine how these changes affect domestic industries not directly active in the global economy. We identify what these sea changes mean to businesses attempting to recruit and motivate a productive workforce, government agencies looking to provide appropriate support for workers and effective incentives for business, and individual workers trying to manage their careers in this complex new environment.
HOW THE STUDY WAS CONDUCTED
In doing this study, we have used the same basic method employed by the Work in America task force in 1972. We began by commissioning papers from the nation's leading experts on workplace matters. We asked these contributors to review the research literature in their areas of specialization and to interpret for us what the findings say about the state of U.S. workplaces. These papers (a list of which appears at the end of this book) are published in a companion volume, America at Work: Choices and Challenges. In addition, an extensive bibliography is available at http://www.newamericanworkplace.com.
We also drew on the results of twenty-five years of research undertaken in American workplaces by our colleagues and ourselves at the University of Southern California's Center for Effective Organizations (CEO), including a 2005 update of our triennial national survey of management practices in Fortune 1000 corporations. In addition, we analyzed survey data collected by the University of Michigan's Institute for Social Research in 1977 and again in 2002. Finally, we analyzed a series of structured interviews and electronic surveys of members of the Society for Human Resource Management conducted in 2005 for this study.
As in 1972, we begin our analysis by inquiring about the values and needs of American workers. In a democracy, it is appropriate to begin from the perspective of the aspirations of the citizenry.
WHAT DO WORKERS WANT?
Unfortunately, research provides no simple answers to questions concerning what Americans want from their jobs and employers. Individuals with different interests, resources, personalities, and family requirements want different things, and those things often change at different stages in their lives. Moreover, since it is not possible for employers to satisfy all workers' constantly expanding wants, it is more useful to consider what they need and how employers can meet those various needs. Decades of research establish the fact that three major human needs can be satisfied by gainful employment: (1) the need for the basic economic resources and security essential to lead good lives; (2) the need to do meaningful work and the opportunity to grow and develop as a person; and (3) the need for supportive social relationships. Good work, as we define it here, satisfies all three of those fundamental needs.
It is critical to keep in mind the distinctions among these three types of employment needs—the extrinsic tangible rewards, the work itself, and social relationships—and to understand that jobs satisfying the requirements of one, or even two, of these needs may not satisfy them all. For example, a job may pay well but, at the same time, be dull and unfulfilling. A truly fascinating job may pay poorly, and a well-paying, intrinsically interesting job may be overseen by an abusive supervisor.
The relative importance of each of the three types of needs varies dramatically from worker to worker. Some people are willing to do dull—even dirty—work if it pays well, and some will tolerate incompetent supervision if they find the work itself enjoyable. At least, some people are willing to tolerate poor work for limited periods of time, or even for long periods if they have no alternatives. But all three needs must be satisfied before most people will say they have a "good job." Indeed, for most workers, whichever need is unmet on the job becomes the one they are most concerned about fulfilling next. In 1973, the Work in America task force found evidence that many workers were dissatisfied with the nature of their work because it was monotonous, repetitive, and meaningless. Today, most likely because many routine manufacturing jobs have been automated, exported, or redesigned, employees are more likely to voice concern about pay, benefits, security, and the environments in which they work, particularly the nature of their supervision, opportunities for training, and work/family balance.
Before we examine what it takes to meet the needs of workers, we must acknowledge questions that employers might legitimately raise: Why is it important for them to provide jobs that meet all the needs of their workers? If workers have enough money to satisfy their basic financial needs—and a few extra dollars to partake in the pleasures of our abundant consumer economy—isn't that enough? Isn't the crucial policy issue finding ways to give employers enough flexibility to respond quickly to competitive challenges? Moreover, isn't it unreasonable to expect employers to attempt to address the full range of employee needs—social relationships and meaningful work, in addition to financial ones?
We believe research evidence shows that satisfying the needs of Americans for good jobs is important, if not essential, for the prosperity, health, and social well-being of the nation. If the economy does not provide a sufficient supply of good jobs, the United States will lose its competitive edge and, with it, the economic resources necessary to provide for the material requirements of a growing population. By all accepted standards, the world's wealthiest nations offer their citizens a preponderance of good jobs, while the economies of the poorest nations are characterized by bad jobs. In wealthy nations the value-added of each worker contributes to a nation's high overall productivity; in poorer nations the economic contribution of a worker is minimal, and the nation's wealth is relatively, and consequentially, meager. Especially in service- and knowledge-based economies like that of the United States, national productivity is determined by the efforts, initiative, and skills of employees. If workers are not committed, motivated, engaged, trained, and appropriately supervised, they will underperform. In economic terms, that results in an inefficient use of human capital, with disastrous consequences for a nation's global competitiveness. Hence, with over 90 percent of Americans employed today in nonmanufacturing jobs, it is absolutely essential for the nation's human capital to be efficiently utilized. While that also was true in 1973, today's global economy is so much more competitive, and the work people do so much more complex, companies today have far less margin for error than they did in the past.
The exigencies of global competitiveness are only a third of the story. Good work also is necessary to provide individuals with the opportunity for social and economic mobility—that is, the opportunity to pursue the American dream of realizing their potential. Finally, because work is a major source of identity, status, fulfillment, and meaning, a sufficient supply of good jobs is necessary for individual psychological and physical health. In sum, the costs of an insufficient supply of good work include a declining standard of living, a lower quality of life, increased social conflict, the loss of America's unique standing in the world as the leading economic power, and an inability to attract human and financial capital from around the world. Ensuring an appropriate mix and sufficient supply of good work is therefore an important issue for all Americans. So, how are we doing?
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The New American Workplace by James O'Toole, Edward E. Lawler III. Copyright © 2015 Society for Human Resource Management. Excerpted by permission of Palgrave Macmillan.
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Table of Contents
Acknowledgments vii
Foreword Susan R. Meisinger ix
Introduction
Work in America 3
Changes in the American Workplace
The Nature of Organizations 25
The Work Itself 39
The Employment Relationship 61
Consequences for the American Worker
Careers 83
Work/Life Balance 93
Health and Safety 101
Job and Life Satisfaction 107
Performance Pressure 111
Compensation 115
Employee "Voice" 121
Training and Development 127
Community and Commitment 133
Winners and Losers 139
Choices and Future Directions
Organizations and Competitiveness 151
Public Policy 185
Individuals 215
Conclusions
Future of the American Workplace 233
Authors of Papers Commissioned for this Study 245
Notes 247
Additional Information 255
Index 258