Strategic Human Resource

CHAPTER 2
Planned Strategies for
Change:
The Evolution of
Strategic Human
Resource Development
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Chapter Contents
I. Introduction
II. Learning Objectives
III. Organizational Design and the Management of Changes in the Twentieth
Century
IV. The Excellence Movement: The attempt to create permanent innovation and
enterprise
V. Empowerment
VI. Strategic Downsizing
VII. Programmed Approaches to Change: Total Quality Management, Business
Process Reengineering and Teamwork

Introduction
This chapter focuses on six strategies that became central to the development of
organizational efficiency in the twentieth century. These strategies are:
organizational design, innovation and enterprise, empowerment, strategic
downsizing, Total Quality Management and Business Process Reengineering, and
Teamwork, are identified as precursors to our understanding of the management of
change in the twenty-first century. These strategies have transformed our thinking
about management from the early twentieth-century blueprint promoted by the
Classical School. While the major political driver has been the process of
globalization, it has to be recognized that each strategy contains its own ideology for
managing change. A central argument is that all change contains its own
contradiction and these strategies for change are no exception.
Learning Objectives
The learning objectives for this chapter are:
1. Organizational design which discusses the emergence of bureaucratic
procedures and their application to the Fordist production process. The attempt to
dismantle bureaucracy is attributed to the Excellence Movement which sought to
redesign organizations as flexible structures driven by core values and leadership in
the pursuit of excellence.
2. The strategy of the Excellence Movement which focuses on the attempt to
create permanent innovation and enterprise, in organizations that were no longer
defined by bureaucratic rules and regulations and where leaders replaced
managers, and employees became empowered to meet the needs of increasingly
sophisticated customers.
3. The strategy of empowerment, which is noteworthy in not only attempting to
extend the arguments of the Excellence Movement but in seeking to solve the
problems of alienation. Strategies to achieve empowerment may include redefining
the nature of supervision or management; reward systems, job design, or even
changing the nature of the working environment. The critical determinant, however,
is the ability to take control of one‟s own work situation.

4. The fourth strategy, downsizing, was originally developed as a corporate strategy
for changing an organization‟s structure in order to enhance competitive advantage.
This was also a tactic driven by the global marketplace. In the attempt to move
production-based organizations from high volume goods with low profit margins to
niche markets providing high profit margins, downsizing appeared to be inevitable
but the strategy came to contradict the very idea that people were resources rather
than costs.
5. The fifth strategy, Total Quality Management (TQM) and Business Process
Reengineering (BPR), is distinctive enough. While each approach to quality
improvement has its own literature and advocates, they all, nevertheless share the
same objectives in seeking an holistic business improvement through a programmed
approach to change. Both TQM and BPR sought to achieve quality enhancement
through a top-down process of planned strategic change by borrowing fragments
from the Organizational Development literature. But each relied, unlike OD, on the
expertise of the advocate rather than the joint diagnostic relationship between
facilitator and client.
6. The final strategy for change is teamwork. Teamwork became one of the
fundamental approaches of contemporary management because it offered important
positive advantages for organizational development. Yet it was not until the neo-
Human Relations theories of the Excellence Movement and TQM that teamwork was
adopted as a technique designed to overcome the damaging consequences of the
separation of mental and manual labor. If teamwork was a valuable OD technique, it
was unfortunately also exploited in the attempt to downsize and delayer the
organization.

ORGANIZATIONAL DESIGN AND THE MANAGEMENT OF CHANGE IN THE
TWENTIETH CENTURY
Managing change in the early twentieth century was concerned with organizational
design. The progressive image for the design of twentieth-century organizations was
encapsulated in the metaphor of the machine. This was contrasted with the earlier
nineteenth-century image of wheel:
Over the literature of work in the nineteenth century broods one image above all – that of the
Wheel. We find it already in the description of alienation in Schiller’s Letters on the Aesthetic
Education of Man of 1795: ‘enjoyment is separated from labor, the means from the end, exertion
from recompense. Eternally fettered only to a single little fragment; ever hearing only the
monotonous whirl of the wheel which he turns, he never develops the harmony of his being,
and, instead of shaping the humanity that lies in his nature, he becomes a mere imprint of his
occupation, his science’. (Meakin, 1976:19)
By contrast to the image of the wheel, the machine was the image of progress fro the
twentieth century. Through it, change was seen as positive and forward-looking. This
image was consistently contrasted with the negative and pre-industrial communities was
viewed as a barrier to change that had to be overcome by its destruction (ibid.: 3).
Modern organizations were seen as the social inventions above all others. They
came to be defined as social units (or human groupings) that were deliberately
constructed and reconstructed to seek specific goals. These were either profit
maximization or public accountability. Twentieth-century organizations therefore came
to be characterized by:
1. Divisions of labor, power, and communication responsibilities, divisions which are
not random or traditionally patterned, but deliberately planned to enhance the
realization of specific goals.
2. The presence of one or more power centers which control the concerted efforts
of the organization and direct them towards its goals; these power centers also
must review continuously the organization‟s performance and re-pattern its
structure, where necessary, to increase its efficiency.
3. Substitution of personnel, i.e., unsatisfactory persons can be removed and others
assigned their tasks. The organization can also recombine its personnel through
transfer and promotion. (Etzioni, 1964:3)

Modern organizations were consistently defined as rational because they were much
more in control of their nature and destiny than any other social grouping had been
throughout history. Bureaucracy became a synonym for modern organizational
change. This change focused on producing the following:
1. Standardized products.
2. Interchangeable parts and people.
3. Routinized work processes.
4. Impersonal work relationships.
In the first half of the 20th
century the pacesetters of modernity were „big business
and industry, big government, massive armed forces, and, in recent years, big labor‟
(Charles Page, in the Foreword to Peter Blau‟s Bureaucracy in Modern Society, 1965).
These new organizations resulted from, and in turn stimulated, the „unprecedented
growth in modern society of large-scale formal organizations within which must be
developed hierarchical administrative and operating social machinery, if their tasks are
to be achieved‟ (Page on Blau, 1965).
As we noted in the previous chapter, some social scientists became „social
techinicians‟ preoccupied with organizational improvement and efficiency, on the one
hand, yet driven by wider concerns about alienation and anomie on the other. The three
disciplines: Functionalism, Behaviourism, and Scientific Management, informed every
organizational design from car assembly line to the training of the fighting machine – the
army, navy and airforce. But unlike many, Max Weber, at least, expressed concern at
the reverse side of bureaucratic efficiency: that is, in the moral and
political implications of standardization and routinization, impersonality
and interchangeability. These processes not only led to efficiency, they
also presented „an imposing threat to freedom, individualism, and
spontaneity‟. In other words, these „cherished values‟ of a „liberal
society‟ were contradicted by man‟s „greatest social invention‟ (Page,
1965:5). For sociologists in particular, it was necessary to explain
patterns of human behavior in terms of relationships between people
and their shared normative beliefs (Blau, 1965: 23). These patterns

later became a focus for the more populist writings and pronouncements of the
Excellence Movement. The various Excellence writers, as we shall see in due course,
were attempting to raise a challenge to the earlier 20th
century ideas of change
management because they came to recognize the unintended consequences of rational
change – planned from the drawing board, managed from the centre and leading to a
malevolent repression of the workforce. As Clegg noted:
If organizations are form of our modern condition, one cannot help but note that this
frequently represented less as an opportunity or benevolent phenomenon but more as
something which is constraining and repressive. These elements can be attributed to a
pervasive strand of modernist thinking, clearly articulated as a representative experience of
modernity in the work of Max Weber and his vision of bondage, of the ‘iron cage’. (1990:2-3)
Although many textbooks on management see Weber as an advocate of bureaucracy,
his views were, in fact, in opposition to a more conservative view prevalent in
organizational discourse in his time. As he put it: „the passion for bureaucracy is enough
to drive one to despair‟ because it results in a „parcelling out of the soul‟ (Felts and Jos,
1996: 24). Bureaucracy was nevertheless inevitable because the modern forms of
human associations were located in the nucleus of the modern state and modern
capitalism. It is certain that Weber saw legal-rational authoritative rule as central to all
organizations, including those in the private sector, and not-for-profit organizations. In
opposition to the conservatives of his time Weber sought to remove the sacred halo of
bureaucracy (Beetham, 1985) and viewed the bureaucrats as a separate power group
in society (Felts and Jos, 1996: 24).
Of particular concern to Weber was the issue of power and compliance. Why
people obeyed others was the central question for Weber and was reflected in his
writings on bureaucracy, religion and politics. Because of the postmodern attempt to go
beyond the traditional paradigm of classical management towards flexible organizations,
getting work done by others has remained a compelling issue. For Weber, the idea that
managers in bureaucratic organizations could be leaders was an oxymoron (DiPadova,
1996). The rise of „managerial leadership‟ during the course of the 20th
century has,
however, challenged certain aspects of the bureaucratic organization by re-engineering
the manager‟s role from a controller of the system to „corporate stewardship‟, „facilitator‟
and „entrepreneur‟. Such descriptions portray managers as leading actors in a drame

with a revolutionary plot. Through the years, while management theorists and
researchers have focused on motivation and the influence of managers and leaders to
influence subordinates within that process Weber attempted to look at the issue the
other way round by asking what it was about the situation that induced individuals to be
obedient. One of the problems of bureaucracy, for Weber, was that bureaucratic
administrators were not equipped to be leaders: „Weber‟s well-known description of the
“functionary” who is incapable forming his or her own ends allows little room for
leadership. In a speech given in 1909, Weber lamented the dominance of “these little
cogs”, whose one preoccupation in life is becoming a bigger cog‟ (Felts and Jos, 1996:
24).
Fordism came to require bureaucracy since, once employed in organizations, the
professional bureaucrat „is chained to his activity in his entire economic and ideological
existence. . . in the great majority of cases he is only a small cog in a ceaselessly
moving mechanism which prescribes to him an essentially fixed route of march‟ (Weber,
1968: 988).
THE EXCELLENCE MOVEMENT: THE ATTEMPT TO CREATE PERMANENT
INNOVATION AND ENTERPRISE
By the 1980‟s Peters and Waterman (1986) argued that bureaucracy
alone was ineffective in dealing with the
management of people and processes. They cited
authors such as Bennis (1968) and Toffler (1980)
who advocated „adhocracy‟ in order to deal „with all
the news issues that either fall between bureaucratic
cracks or span so many levels in the bureaucracy that it‟s not clear who
should be doing what‟ (Peter and Waterman 1986: 121). By contrast, their idea of
„excellent‟ organizations were of fluid organizations:
The concept of organizational fluidity, therefore, is not new.
What is new is that the excellent companies seem to know how
to make good use of it. Whether it’s their rich ways of

communicating informally or their special ways of using ad hoc devices, such as task forces, the
excellent companies get quick action just because their organizations are fluid. (ibid.: 121)
Their views represented the popular concern at that time that modern organizations
were becoming the dinosaurs of the 20th
century because they were:
slow to make decisions;
inflexible in their adaptation to the environment;
unimaginative in their thinking;
incapable of learning beyond basic stimulus and response processes that failed
to question their raison d’etre; and most importantly,
their command and control style of leadership failed to inspire a sense of
corporate community.
In 1982, In Search of Excellence became a best-seller and the most popular
book of its time. By 1990 more than five million copies had been sold. One
consequence was „its ability to create a niche for the one-spinning Excellence
Movement‟ (Clutterbuck and Crainer, 1990: 218)
Both Peters and Watermsn‟s In Search of Excellence (1982) and Peters and
Austin‟s A Passion for Excellence (1985) were supplemented by others books such
as Thriving on Chaos: Handbook for the Management Revolution (1987), Liberation
Management: Necessary Disorganization for the Nanosecond Nineties (1992), as
well as a range of his other published works (periodicals, journals, videos). The
Excellence debate was enhanced further by arguments for innovation and
entrepreneurship (Kanter, 1983; 1989), and the need to think ahead to a Post-

Capitalist Society (Drucker 1993). Thus, if stability was a thinking of the past,
managing change in times of uncertainty and turbulence became the received
wisdom. The core of the early work was the famous McKinsey 7-S Framework
which served to demonstrate the interconnectedness of structure, strategy, skills,
staff, style and systems revolving around a central concept of shared values.
The investigations by Peters and Waterman led them to challenge the rational
model by advocating eight attributes or principles:
1. A bias for action - a preference for doing something – anything – rather than
sending a question through cycles and cycles of analysis and committee
reports.
2. Staying close to the customer - learning his preferences and catering to them.
3. Autonomy and entrepreneurship – breaking the corporation into small
companies and encouraging them to think independently and competitively.
4. Productivity through people – creating in all employees the awareness that
their best efforts are essential and that they will share in the rewards of the
company‟s success.
5. Hands-on, value driven – insisting that executives keep in touch with the firm‟s
essential business.
6. Stick to the knitting – remaining with the business the company knows best.
7. Simple form, lean staff – few administrative layers, few people at the upper
levels.
8. Simlutaneous loose-tight properties – fostering a climate where there is
dedication to the central values of the company combined with tolerance for all
employees who accept those values.
These eight principles find their way into the later work of Tom Peters. Three things
were attacked:
Rational Model of Classical Management;
Human Relations Theories;
more recent Contingency Theories.

As a result, four themes emerged in the work of the Excellence Movement. These
were:
a) a focus on customers;
b) the need for constant innovation;
c) that employees should be regarded as a resource rather than a cost;
d) that leadership should be inspirational.
How can we account for the success of the Excellence Movement? One argument is
that such populist literature simply provides busy managers with a shortcut to many
complicated issues which are more contentious than they admit.
On the other hand it would seem that the Excellence Movement can be defined by a
common thread running throughout their books and other resources. The most repeated
theme was the importance of the human side of enterprise. Despite its weaknesses in
methodology, the strength of the movement was its ability to capture and critique more
than fifty years of management. This led it to challenge the worst attributes of Fordism
by advocating a neo-Human Relations movement. This focus on human resources as
the driving force behind the other seven principles listed above does not explain the

success of the movement in terms of its popularity. The following reasons as provided
as a polemic in order to encourage further debate.
First, the Excellnce writers tell a story similar to the script-writers of a contemporary
soap opera. This is not intended to demean their work but to indicate the mechanics of
writing a moving plot. Thus, if the central strategy is the place of humanity in an
organizational drama that occurred over the 20th
century and which was essentially
characterized by the metaphors bureaucratic, modern, machine culture (which we now
refer to as Fordism), then this story is told through a simple plot and exemplified through
numerous examples that celebrate the plot.
The narrative informing the plot emphasizes the need to understand the service
encounter as a qualitative process through which the customer/client needs are not only
met but exceeded. This is a reminder that the customer must be seen, not as statistical
data, but as a meaningful slice of human interaction that has critical implications for the
development of the organization. Attention to customers‟ needs requires the
organization to cultivate an awareness of customer perceptions in a way that could not
be achieved by more traditional analyses of market trends. The emphasis on the
qualitative dynamics of the service encounter were central to the development of an
excellent organization. For example, „Peters‟ books are full of examples where bad
service or a needles lack of consideration towards the customer has “soured” the
customer relationship. A Passion for Excellence has a chapter entitled “Mere
Perception: On the Irreducible Humanness of the Customer” (Barter, 1994: 7).
Second, the need for constant innovation emerged out of the debate about
customers. To focus on customers required a focus on quality and not quantity and on
niche markets rather than mass markets. Therefore, the message was anticipate
customers’ needs and differentiate the product or service from that provided by others.
In order to do that establish organizational flexibility.
Third, was the argument that employees should be treated as resource and not a
cost. This people-focused approach to empowerment suggested that empowered
employees require a managerial revolution akin to a leap of faith. This was to be

achieved by restructuring the organization from a bureaucratic hierarchy to an organic
collection of teams with a fluid exchange of internal customer relationships. The
difficulty was in dismantling the role conformity and mechanistic attitudes of the
bureaucrat in favour of an empowered future. This was the only way, we are told, to
create a workplace of experimentation and intrepreneurial activity.
Fourth, leadership was the key to empowerment. In a Passion for Excellence Peters
and Austin argue that:
The concept of leadership is crucial to the revolution now under way – so crucial that we
believe the words ‘managing’ and ‘management’ should be discarded. ‘Management’, with its
attendant images – cop, referee, devil’s advocate, dispassionate, analyst, naysayer, pronouncer
– connotes controlling and arranging and demeaning and reducing. ‘Leadership’ connotes
unleashing energy, building, freeing, and growing. (1985: Introduction: xvii)
This is interesting given the amount of time that had elapsed between Weber‟s
concerns about the nature of bureaucracy and leadership. For example, Weber argued
that while bureaucracy came to represent modernity as technically efficient it was not
conducive to effective leadership because true leaders were not likely to make it up the
hierarchy because the „conventions and internal peculiarities of the bureaucratic
hierarchy severely impede the career opportunities of precisely such talents‟ (Weber,
1968: 1414)
For the Excellence Movement leadership was simple. It was about listening,
facilitating, and coaching and, above all, reinforcing values (Peters and Austin, 1985:
37).
EMPOWERMENT
Empowerment is an idea and focus for organizational change.
Although empowerment lacks a universal definition, the
term has come to describe a variety of interventions that
give more autonomy and an increase in power to
subordinates. Hopfl has argued that in the management

literature the term „appears to have come into general usage in the early1980s. by the
mid-1980s it had become a commonplace expression used in both practical
management texts and in the vocabularly of oragnizations‟ (1994: 39). One problem,
however, is that „writers on empowerment seem to be quite coy when examining the
concept‟ (Collins, 1995:29). Thus, the attempt to define empowerment in a universal
way is problematic.
Although the term may not have been used until the 1980s, if we see
empowerment as the opposite of alienation, then the origins of the process go back to a
much earlier period of time. In this case our understanding of empowerment must be
located in the international debates – Britain, America, Scandinavia, Germany, Japan –
over alienation, on the one hand, and industrial democracy on the other. One thing is
certain: that despite the uncertainty of the term „empowerment has emerged as an idea
and focus for organizational change‟ (ibid.: 32).
The employer/employee relationship during the early phases of industrialization
was based, with few exceptions, on distrust between employer and employee. This
relationship was regulated through formal control systems such as clocks, fines and
supervisory management. One consequence was that industrial unrest remained high
since the natural response to the controls employed was the withdrawal of labour. Such
direct labour control strategies were enhanced further by the standardization of the work
environment. Employees were generally viewed simply as a „unit of labour‟. The
emergence of Human Relations Theory, however, seemed to establish a link between
employee involvement and productivity levels by studies of organizational behavior that
focused on employee morale and motivation. Studies appeared to suggest that
performance would be improved by managers needs. Mayo‟s findings resulted in the
displacement of utilitarianism by the more appealing aspects of Unitarianism which
sought to „construct relationships within a unity of purpose and ideology between
managers and employees in the pursuit of common goals‟ (Ackers et al., 1992).
The Human Relations School represented a significant shift in organizational
theory thus superseding Taylorism in favour of a more democratic and humanistic
approach to the management of labour within organizations. By recognizing the

importance of employees relationships and environmental influences, management was
encouraged to consciously intervene in the informal organization in order to build a new
„moral order‟ based more on consent than conflict. From these early organizational
experiments of the Human Relations School, the social and behavioural sciences
became an integral part of organizational management and an extensive body of
academic research flourished around the key theme of „understanding the dynamics of
human relationships‟.
The later focus on job enrichment and job enhancement schemes were based on
Maslow‟s (1954) earlier work on motivation. Attention was focused on how employees
could be motivated to expend effort in particular directions to achieve the organizational
goals. There was a recognition that control of the labor process was not possible
through coercion or economic incentives alone.
New work practices such as the Volvo experiment with work groups (the Kalmar
plant in the early to mid-1970s abandoning the production line and the Uddevalla plant
in the mid to late 1980s with a small team building a complete car) attempted to reverse
the alienating effects of the Fordist production process by attempting to find more
fulfilling ways to enrich emotional, psychological and social needs of employees. Job
rotation, as promoted by Sweden and her Scandivian neighbours, was an attempting to
„redesign work to give workers greater autonomy and more possibility of deriving some
sense of satisfaction and achievement from their labours‟ (Brown, 1992: 173).
In the 1960s the „Quality of Working Life‟ programmes were developed in an
attempting to establish that performance was linked to „involvement and satisfaction‟
(Blumberg, 1968: 123). During this time France appointed a Minister for Job
Enrichment, the Swedes set up a Commission on Industrial Democracy, and the
International Labour Organization proclaimed the need to prioritize the humanization of
work. (Thompson and McHugh, 1995).
While some authors seem to use the terms employee involvement and
empowerment interchangeably (for example, Bowen and Lawler, 1992), the latter is
focused more on the idea of „winning commitment‟ than simply extending decision-

making. Empowerment has come to imply a „moral‟ commitment at an emotional level
within the organization. Seen this way, it is possible to see the Excellence Movement as
exemplars of this attempt to encourage managers to reach into the realm of feelings.
Thus, requiring latter and leaner structures is one thing but the management of
meanings is of quite a different order since winning the hearts and minds of employees
requires a redistribution of power from the top downwards. Such empowerment requires
cultural change. For example, if it was possible to draw up a list of characteristics of
empowerment we might include a series of items ranging from access to information,
involvement in decisions through to actually making decisions, share ownership and
redistribution of rewards. The further we move long the continuum towards a
redistribution of rewards, the more empowerment has to mean more to employees than
the permission to „delight the customer‟, as the Excellence Movement implies.
Empowerment has been conceptualized as both a relational and a motivational
construct‟ (Andrews and Herschel, 1996: 180). The relational perspective views
empowerment as a function of relationships between managers and subordinates. It is
therefore more a function of delegated power or power sharing (Burke, 1986). This has
been the focus of the of the participative management approach from McGregor (1960)
and Likert (1961) through to Quality Management, teambuilding and self-managed
teams. As Andrews and Hersche point out, „leaders‟ intentions and subordinates‟
perceptions may on occasion differ thus an employee may not desire the responsibility
of participating in the in the decision-making process‟ (1996: 180). As a function of
power, empowerment would be characterized by a concern to accomplish the task
rather than by a delegation of formal authority through status: „Power would be used to
get the job done, rather than to stand over others‟ (Pacanowsky. 1987: 378). Such a
view corresponds to Etzioni‟s (1975) comparison of moral compliance compared to the
utilitarian compliance of the wage/effort bargain.
Within the psychological literature empowerment has also been viewed as a
motivational construct Andrews and Herschel, 1996: 180) through which individuals are
assumed to have a need for power (McClelland, 1975). From this perspective „an
individual‟s sense of empowerment grows from managerial strategies and techniques

that serve to strengthen the employee‟s feelings of self-determination or self-efficacy‟
(Andrews and Herschel, 1996: 180). Andrews and Herschel‟s discussion of Conger‟s
work suggests than to empower is to create „a process of enhancing feelings of self-
efficacy among organizational members through the identification of conditions that
foster powerlessness (and by eliminating those conditions)‟ (Conger, 1986: 474). Thus,
factors that contribute to feelings of powerlessness may arise from several sources,
including the organizational environment supervisory style, reward systems, or job
design. Conversely, the absence of empowerment is characterized by feelings of
powerlessness, alienation, and helplessness (Rappaport, 1984).
Finally, it is noteworthy that empowerment has been located as a direct attempt
to so;ve the problems of the alienation datable in the 1950s and 1960s. Thomas and
Velthouse (1990), for example, reflect this earlier debate about technological
determinists, such as Blauner (1966) by identifying four components of work – impact,
choice, competence and meaningfulness – that relate closely to Blauner‟s original
components of experienced alienation:
impact – whether accomplishing a particular task or job will make a difference
in the scheme of things, it addreses problems associated with „self-
estrangement‟ by involving people in decisions related to work processes;
choice – the degree to which personal behavior inself-determined, it addresses
problems associated with powerlessness by creating more control over the work
processes;
meaningfulness – is a direct corollary of meaningfulness;
competence – referring to level of skill, it does not appear to have a direct
equivalent to Blauner‟s characteristics of alienation.

STRATEGIC DOWNSIZING
Organizational restructuring or downsizing has usually taken the form of closures,
mergers and acquisitions. Downsizing has been defined as „one tactic within a
corporate strategy for shifting the organizational structure from what it is now to what it
has to be in order to sustain competitive edge and satisfy customers‟ needs‟ (Band and
Tustin, 1995: 36). Downsizing is also „one of the most disruptive and dramatic types of
organizational change which most leaders are likely to experience‟ (Drew, 1994: 1).
These initiatives are thought to represent „an early stage of a continuing, long-term,
socio-economic evolution. More than simply shrinking the workforce of an organization,
much of the change seems to represent a permanent shift in social, economic, and
organizational structures‟ (Lewin and Johnston, 1996: 1: McKinley et al., 1995). Certain
environmental pressures are said to lead to downsizing resulting in a paradigm shift
from mass production/high volume (from „bigger-is-better‟) to niche markets („lean-and-
mean‟).
But is downsizing simply another name for getting rid of employees in the desire
to be increasingly efficient? If so, then this would contradict the aims of the Excellence
Movement. However, if it is seen as a strategic organizational objective and involves
employees in the process, then it takes on both an ethical and a pragmatic role. This
leads Band and Tustin (1995) to argue that: „If the objective of downsizing should be to
raise productivity per head‟, then
Strategic downsizing can achieve this – layoffs cannot. It is possible to plan to reduce a
workforce. In the absence of severe financial and environmental factors, which usually dictate
an immediate layoff, downsizing can be carried out with the full commitment of the workforce to
the long-term benefit of the company. (1995: 45)
Consequently, it is suggested that employee involvement is possible under certain
conditions which, following Cameron et al. (1991) requires that everyone sees the
urgency of organizational survival.

When downsizing is viewed as a strategic necessity, it becomes known as
rightsizing. Organizational rightsizing therefore seeks to reshape the organization by
establishing core and peripheral employees. The flexible firm is then, in theory, able to
respond to the flexibility of the marketplace. Two types of employees emerge: core
workers with guaranteed job security, and a ring of flexible labour that expands or
contracts as the need arises.
The Excellence Movement was said to be a paradigm shift marking a break with
the past. It appeared to become the post-bureaucratic solution by redesigning
organizations with „flatter structures‟ and „flexible‟ ways of working. However, the post-
bureaucratic form of adhocracy and fluidity encouraged by empowerment programmes
and by the Excellence Movement in particular has also become identified with the
problems of downsizing. The latter carry behavioural and perceptual implications
detrimental to the aims of the former. Thompson and O‟Connell Davison (1995)
illustrate these implications as follows:
1. Organizations decentralize by breaking up their bureaucracies into smaller or
independent units.
2. One solution is to outsource or disaggregate to increase „flexibility‟.
3. To replace bureaucratic structures and rational strategic planning in order to deal
with unpredictable environments (Kanter, 1989) – disorganization – with
tactical planning.
4. Delayering to create leaner and meaner organizations that have „downsized‟ to
the essential core by removing whole layers of middle management.
Each has implications for Strategic Human Resource Development. For example,
disaggregation requires a deconcentration of capital thus reversing „the historic trend
towards vertical integration‟ (Thompson and O‟Connell Davidson, 1995). Delayering and
downsizing often provide a neutral language to legitimate sacking employees and yet
require more effective communication by those who remain through self-managed
teams. In addition, career paths and rewards are transformed from an individualized
employment relationship to a greater reliance on other collective means for managing
each other.

Although the justification for restructuring often takes the form of a discourse
about organizational crisis, it also reflects a dimension of organizational change that
views efficiency in terms of redefined flat organizational structures and new
management strategies based on empowerment. Of major concern is the way in which
the „accountancy‟ of downsizing – focusing on reducing costs – contradicts the
approach sought by the Excellence Movement. The predominance of the debate on
cost reduction has led to an unhealthy cynicism regarding the motives for organizational
change. Although turbulent environments are becoming the norm, McHugh has stated
that „management within organizations stands accused of looking at the needs of the
organization and overlooking the needs of employees‟ leading to an imbalance between
organizational needs and employee needs (1997: 345). The failure rate of downsized
organizations appears to be high for a variety of reasons that include:
a. The failure of key decision-makers to estimate the complexity of change issues
related to the integration of organizations with diverse working practices and
organizational cultures;
b. A significant drain on resources that impairs performance; and
c. An under-estimation of the depth of human issues triggered in a merger or
acquisition (Marks, 1997).
One estimate suggest that less than 20% of merged organizations achieve their goal of
maximizing financial and strategic objectives (Davidson, 1991). Another estimate has
reported that „more than half the 135 major U.S. companies that attempted massive
restructuring failed to achieve significant increases in their value relative to their
competition‟ (Tomasko, 1992: 1).
Many factors account for this failure rate including: „paying the wrong price,
buying for the wrong reason, selecting the wrong partner or buying at the wrong time.
Another reason, however, that contributes to the high failure rate is managing the post-
merger integration process inappropriately‟ (Marks, 1997). However, many
organizations that failed to achieve the desired cost reductions often do so because
they fail to consider the human side of the process (Koonce, 1991).

Some of the worst examples of management strategies of downsized
organizations result from the „mafia model‟ (Stebbins, 1989: 46) in which change is
badly planned and executed and carries severe psychological implications both for
those who lose their jobs and for the organization‟s survivors who, in their different
ways, suffer insecurity and loss. At an organizational level „a poorly executed
downsizing operation can traumatize a company for years‟ (Drew, 1994: 1). At an
individual level it can lead to mixed feelings of psychological survival in the form of
„survivor guilt‟ and „survivor envy‟ (ibid.). Remaining employees may only marginally feel
that they are the lucky ones since downsizing can significantly affect commitment by
instilling a sense of insecurity and alienation. Consequently, this may lead to
„distraction, disloyalty and the withdrawing of any form of commitment to the goals and
values of the organization‟ since those who remain „may also experience high anxiety
as to their own job permanence, guilt from the loss of friends among their co-workers or
even deeply rooted anger arising from any insensitivity shown in the downsizing
process‟ (Zeffane and Mayo, 1994: 7). An example of psychological survival is provided
by Doherty et al. in their study of survivors at British Telecom. As they point out, the
scale of the downsizing was enormous:
On 31 July 1992, 20,000 BT employees left the company in a voluntary downsizing exercise
which cost BT many millions of pounds inredundancy payments and hurt its share price. Since
then BT has run annual ‘relase schemes’ each involving over 10,000 people. Twelve thousand
more job losses were targeted for the financial year ending in March 1996. BT has cut its
workforce from 244,000 in 1989 to 120,000, at a cost of about L24 billion, with further cuts in the
pipeline. (Doherty et al., 1996: 53)
In the BT case the survivors has, first, to come to terms with the sudden loss of
colleagues and close friends. Second, they had to reconcile themselves to possibility
that they might lose their own jobs at some point in the future. Third, they had to accept
an increase in workload that in turn led to increased stress.
A series of contrasts emerged. At the organizational level survivors saw a
positive future for the organization, yet at the individual level, survivors expressed „a
marked decrease in motivation‟ because „confidence in a personal future with the
organization was eroded‟. Thus loyalty to the organization diminished as job insecurity

increased. As the work group „became the focus for BT survivors‟ their „friendships with
colleagues and support from their line manager became their means of survival‟. Line
managers in particular suffered from anxieties since „Not only did they have their
personal worries about their own jobs, but they felt they were frequently blamed by
subordinates as the cause of their distress‟ (Doherty et al., 1996: 54). Such experiences
demonstrate discontinuity at both the organizational and individual levels. Individuals
cope in different ways but such uncertain transitions become „passages of adjustment‟.
PROGRAMMED APPROACHES TO CHANGE: TOTAL QUALITY MANAGEMENT,
BUSINESS PROCESS REENGINEERING AND TEAMWORK
TOTAL QUALITY MANAGEMENT (TQM)
TQM is a system of management based on the principle that every staff member
must be committed to maintaining high standards of work in every aspect of a
company’s operations.
The history of quality management has moved beyond
its original focus on engineering systems theory to
incorporate both social and behavioural science. This
has resulted in a hybrid form combining a mixture of the
engineering components (quality systems, statistical
process control) with behavioural processes (Action
Research, Soft Systems Theory, Team Building, and
Culture Management). In the UK, empowerment was introduced in order to facilitate
ownership of specific ideas and actions as they developed at appropriate levels
throughout the company.
Although there is no universally accepted definition of the concept, the general
principles are widely agreed. The concept is aimed at getting the organization, and
everyone in it, to concentrate on doing the right things, then finding efficient methods
of performance to eliminate faults and constantly seeking more effective approaches
to management and more efficient methods for achieving performance. This means

that each person must recognize how their individual actions will affect others who
depend upon their outputs.
The general concept of quality management evolved internationally from existing
management practices. However, the main ideas have been attributed to major
Japanese companies who adopted quality assurance principles from American
specialists such as Juran and Deming who developed quality improvement
programmes in the late 1940s and early 1950s and was a direct result of the
Marshall Plan to redevelop the Japanese economy. Juran, for example, introduced
the idea of fitness for purpose and Deming developed the application of statistical
process control associated with quality management practices. In recent years, a
whole range of quality tools and techniques have been introduced for decision-
making, problem-solving and data gathering. These include: force field analysis,
cause and effect analysis, Pareto analysis, brainstorming, mind mapping and
creativity techniques.
The word quality has a variety of meanings which can be a source of confusion.
The Oxford Dictionary describes quality as ‘degree of excellence’, ‘relative nature or
kind or character’. But this definition does not cover all uses of the word and leaves
room for further interpretation. For example, form a manufacturer‟s point of view,
quality provides complete customer satisfaction if it matches the agreed
specification. From a marketing viewpoint, quality is the ability to provide goods or
services valued by customers. From the customer‟s viewpoint, quality is defined by
how well his or her individual need are satisfied. The British Standards Institute
provides guidance for the use of quality. This is shown to be used for several distinct
purposes:
A comparative sense or degree of excellence, whereby products and
services may be ranked, or a relative basis, sometimes referred to as
‘grade’.
In a quantitative sense as used in manufacturing, product release and for
technical evaluations, sometimes referred to as the ‘quality level’.
In a ‘fitness for purpose’ sense which relates the evaluation of a product or
service to its ability to satisfy a given need.

For the purpose of quality management the definition used is „the totality of
features and characteristics of a product or service that bears on its ability to
satisfy stated or implied needs‟.
The predominant history of quality management in the past 20 years can be
encapsulated by three major trends:
Quality assurance, particularly the notion of „conformance to specifications‟
which focused on control. Authors such as Shewart, Feigenbaum and Juran
provided advice from the 1930s onwards to demonstrate the importance of
quantifiable and measurable techniques.
The amorphous and absolute definition of excellence provided by the Excellence
Movement.
The service characteristics of quality which originally emerged from the service
marketing literature but has more recently been driven by the European Quality
Foundation.
The main vehicle for continuous improvement, however, was not so much the tools and
techniques but the application of neo-Human Relations Theories. These focused mainly
on teamwork, leadership, motivation, and culture management. In the West, however, in
the eager attempt to catch up with the progress of Japan‟s leading manufacturing
industries of the 1970s and 1980s the quality management agenda adopted the ideas of
planned change from the discipline of Organizational Development. Unlike the
Japanese concept of kaizen, quality management was more like a transformational and
messianic movement that needed to introduce a whole raft of techniques through new
behavioral and attitudinal lenses.
As a result, quality management became a planned change intervention which
sought to do the following:
1. Obtain an organizational consensus about values regarding political interests as
unitary. This was reinforced by a central philosophy that sought a unity of
purpose for all employees. This became difficult to sustain in the face of
differences in physical conditions, earnings, pay and rewards.

2. Identify the sequence or steps of change leading from the current dysfunctional
state to one with enlightened quality practices. Change therefore represented, in
the Lewinian sense, sequential linear stages beginning with:
a. unfreezing of the present state moving to
b. a transitional state represented by the internalization of the quality
programme to
c. refreezing the new state of normality represented by enlightenment.
Unfortunately quality came to be seen more as an event despite its often cited
use of the rhetorical journey metaphor characteristics of OD.
3. Use the organization‟s culture as a technique to manage attitudes, behaviours of
work practices. The advantage was the attempt to move the locus of control from
classical bureaucratic approaches with their heavy emphasis on supervision and
managerial mindwork to neo-Human Relations approaches of empowered teams
who came to control their own activities and behaviours. One of the major
problems, however, was the top-down, paternalistic and democratized
consensus required by this type of culture change programme.
These assumptions are common to all planned Organizational Development
approaches and have their origins in the application of the planning models of Lippitt et
al. (1958) and Kolb and Frohman (1970).
A number of problems are evident in these assumptions which include the
following:
1. The requirement to achieve value consensus fails to address key political issues
such as, who makes the decisions? How much transparency exists in the
decision-making process? Whose interests are served? The assumption that
organizational values are unitary rather than pluralistic leads to an unhelpful
intervention that fails to deal with the organization‟s dynamics. Thus, to recognize
the importance of social and interpretive dynamics in change situations is
fundamental to the skills and activities of the change agent.

2. The formulaic way that quality management has often been introduced to
organizations. In such cases consultancy packages are installed in different
types of organizations which different external and internal operating
environments. Consequently, they may fail to deal with different contingencies
and the specific needs of the client system.
3. The tendency to view change as an event leading to the illusion that once
introduced, quality has been successfully achieved and can be demonstrated
through quality assurance. Consequently, such an approach may be inflexible
and fail to deal with critical management and operational processes required for
continuous improvement.
4. There is often a tendency, especially in the public sector, to view quality as
simply another administrative control mechanism rather than a highly dynamic
learning oriented process. Public sector organizations such as hospitals,
universities, local authorities, etc. often spend too much time demonstrating the
traceability of the quality system rather than continuously improving
organizational effectiveness. This may be catastrophic when it causes people to
satisfy the needs of the system rather than the customer. This is not only a
contradiction in terms, it also represents a return to the problems originally
identified by Robert Merton in the 1950s with his critique of bureaucratic
dysfunctions.
BUSINESS PROCESSING REENGINEERING (BPR)
BPR is a fundamental rethinking and radical redesign of business process to
achieve dramatic improvements in critical contemporary measures of performance
such as cost, quality, and speed.
Business Process Reengineering (BPR) emerged in 1990n from a paper on
business process redesign by Davenport and Short (1990). The term became
referred to as BPR as a result of Hammer‟s (1990) paper „Reengineering Works:
don‟t automate, obliterate‟ in the Harvard Business Review. In the 1990s BPR
became the most cited technique for organizational transformation despite the fact

that results were not tried and tested over time. By the late 1990s disillusionment
had set in:
To most business people in the United States, re-engineering has become a word that
stands for restructuring, layoffs, and too-often failed change programmes. At a recent
Boston forum, in fact, Michael Hammer gathered a group of business journalists to
explore why re-engineering had become such a trained term…The rock the re-
engineering has foundered on is simple: people. Re-engineering treated the people
inside companies as if they were just so many bits and bytes, interchangeable parts to
be re-engineered. But no one wants to be re-engineered. (Deakins and Makgill, 1997: 81)
These views are reminiscent of the earlier critical debate about Scientific Management.
Whether intended or not, the technique was adopted in a highly mechanistic way with
little or no regard for the unintended consequences that would affect the subjects of
BPR. People became increasingly suspicious of the motives, techniques, and objectives
of BPR.
Although BPR was initially viewed as pioneering by addressing organizational
change through process activities and work redesign, BPR interventions, in practice,
lacked humanistic values, focused on short-term financial gain, and lacked an agreed
methodology. Like TQM, the transformational stages tend to follow the typical BPR
programme:
1. Establishing the vision and cascading the concept
 From the top of the organization in order that employees understand the
purpose and rationale of the initiate. This process requires top
management to demonstrate commitment to the process.
2. Identification of key business processes in need of redesign
 By establishing project teams who identify measurable objectives for
redesigning the critical processes.
3. Evaluation of the problems and benchmarking for improvement
 The project team clarify the critical problems and identify opportunities to
be gained from redesigning processes.
4. Transformational actions
 Which should begin in a small controlled environment moving sequentially
through the process chain? To be successful the transformational actions

are seen to require critical management processes of leadership, training,
redeployment of technical and human resources and motivation.
5. Evaluation of the programme
 In order to identify the extent to which the objectives have been achieved.
BPR has become synonymous with downsizing, layoffs, and viewing people as
expendable costs. It was this last point, in particular, that made it different from the
claims of the Excellence Movement, and TQM which viewed people as assets or human
resources to be cultivated and developed. BPR in the 1990 came to represent the return
of Leviathan despite the original intentions of its advocates. In its worst manifestations
BPR encouraged a return to social engineering, so reminiscent of the first half of the
twentieth century, which resulted in people being seen as costs. The concept of change
management became tainted with failure.
In the USA, for example, a survey of 1,468 restructured companies conducted by
the Society for Human Resource Management estimated that more than half reported
that employee productivity either stayed the same or deteriorated after layoffs resulting
from BPR (Guimaras and Bond, 1996). Reasons for failure include:
processes applied to intangible targets;
root causes of business problems inadequately defined;
too radical and fails to establish positive organizational learning during the
transitional state;
changes fail because attitudes, behaviours, and values are not addressed
effectively;
the pressure to produce quick results leads to a failure to identify unintended
consequences of actions;
alienation of employees;
creation of a less friendly working environment;
loss of expertise becomes expensive to company;
survivor syndrome in which remaining employees are more introspective and risk
averse and distrust management.

While organizations do report some benefits in improved productivity, quality, profits,
customer satisfaction, down time, etc., on average, surveys reveal that as an
intervention strategy, BPR seems disappointing.
TEAMWORK
Teamwork has become one of the fundamental approaches of contemporary
management. Teams have been promoted and popularized because they are seen
as a focus for unification and as a means of making the organization more efficient
and productive. Countless books and articles have
been written on the virtues of teamwork and
numerous consultants have earned their living
from the courses, books and packages they have
sold to clients. Teams have proliferated to include
task forces, cross-functional teams, action teams,
steering committees, problem-solving teams, self-
managed teams, etc. Teamwork is a relatively
recent phenomenon, but one that has been driven by four of the six key strategies
identified in this chapter – excellence, innovation and enterprise; empowerment;
downsizing; TQM and BPR.
The psycho-dynamics of groups have long been the subject of investigation by
OD practitioners and by Tavistock researchers in particular. Yet it was not until the
neo-Human Relations Theories of the Excellence Movement and TQM that
teamwork was adopted as a technique designed to overcome the damaging
consequences of the separation of mental and manual labour designed on the
drawing board of Frederick Winslow Taylor.
During the past 20 years or so, the use of teams within organizations has grown
dramatically. The experimental origins of teams go back to the 1960s with the
development of the T-group and most authors attribute the functional development
of teams in organizations with the Volvo Kalmar plant that reduced defects by 90%
in 1987. Quality improvement became popularized by quality circles in almost every
industry but their effectiveness was doubtful. Like many other quality initiatives they
„started with a great fanfare and then fizzled‟ (Bounds et al., 1996).

In the attempt to reverse the problems of alienation typified by high volume mass
production lines of earlier periods, autonomous self-managed work teams emerged
in the 1990s and sought to link employee involvement to decision-making. They
sought to empower teams by abolishing the role of supervisors and acquiring all
managerial functions such as being accountable for their actions, and planning and
scheduling of tasks. According to Sexton:
the study of autonomous work groups continued from a socio-technical systems
perspective… and was also incorporated into job design studies as ‘self-regulated’ or ‘self-
managed’ work groups. The members of the group had the authority to handle the internal
processes as they saw fit in order to generate a specific group product, service, or decision.
(1994: 46)
In so doing, it moved the locus of control away from the manager or supervisor, who
previously had responsibility for planning, record keeping, and scheduling of tasks to the
team.
If teamwork was a valuable OD technique, it was unfortunately also exploited in
the attempt to downsize and delayer the organization. This has also led to charges of
teamwork as neo-Taylorism. For example, it has been argued that the incorporation of
teamwork into programmed approaches to managing organizations, such as quality
management and BPR, has led to an ideology of empowerment which sought to alter
the mind-sets, values and culture of the organization in the attempt to utilize the „same
tired manipulation and productivity agendas which fill the diary of modernist business
history‟ (Boje and Winsor, 1993: 57). As a result, what really has changed according to
this argument is not a real increase in empowerment but a self-imposed control by the
team. It has been suggested that teamwork may perpetuate surveillance and control
and that employees become their own „thought police‟ with the team gaze representing
Bentham‟s Panopticon (Steingard and Fitzgibbons, 1993: 32). While there are
wholehearted advocates of teamwork, it is important t recognize that the critics are more
critical of the rhetoric and ideology of late 20th
century capitalism than teamwork per se.
Advocates argue that teamwork facilities collaborative efforts to solve quality-
related problems by placing responsibility for quality improvement with the team. From
the perspective of quality management it is claimed that it permits greater sharing of

information and facilities greater co-operative approaches to continuous improvement
(Oakland: 1989).
The benefits of teamwork are usually said to include:
a) increased employee motivation through enhanced employee involvement;
b) increased productivity by teams creating synergy;
c) increased employee satisfaction through collaborative interactions rather than
individualistic self-interest;
d) increased commitment to goals because of the social pressures exerted by the
team;
e) expanded job skills and organizational flexibility through multi-skilling, job
rotation; and
f) the creation of a more customer-focused culture that improves communication
and the quality of service provided to the customer.
Against this, it can be argued that in recent years, the introduction of teams in most
organizations has been associated with cuts in staff in the form of downsizing with fewer
people doing more work.
The dangers of teamwork also need to be stated and as Drew and Coulson-
Thomas argue, teamwork is not risk free:
There have been notable disappointments and critical re-evaluation of teamwork
since…the…1980s. For instance: although Florida Light and Power was the first non-apanese
winner of the Deming prize for quality in 1989, with 1,00 quality teams involving three-quarters
of employee, in 1990 CEO Jim Broadhead abandoned most of these quality process teams,
citing a loss of customer focus and excessive rigidity as the reason for this decision. Others
have also cautioned against transplanting notions of teamwork form observation of Japanese
firms to the more individualistic cultural and social setting of North America or the UK.
High-energy team effort has enormous potential for promoting change. However, it is
rapidly becoming an overworked nostrum – the benefits are all-too-often exaggerated and the
difficulties underestimated…Despite the instances of outstanding success by empowered and
self-managed teams, there are numerous (but less well publicized) disappointments. (1996: 8)
The recent preoccupation with team work can lead to a collective amnesia about the
creative ability of individuals who do not work in teams. Furthermore, there is some
evidence that individuals operating within a loose network or coalition regularly achieve
more effective results than formal teams (ibid.). but rather than see teamwork as a

universal solution to a variety of problems, it may be better to consider alternatives such
as „communities of practice‟ (Marshall et al., 1995) that relate to knowledge shared by
loose coalitions of people who develop their own tacit knowledge and methods for doing
things. This is more common among certain professions such as lawyers, barristers,
GPs, or academics whose conduct is regulated by professional associations and who
share a similarity of attitudes and conventions.
The self-managed work team is associated with the more pro-active
organizations that have moved away from the need to maintain management or
supervisory control over the team. It has, on the one hand, been defined as the
productivity breakthrough of the 1990s (Sexton, 1994). The most popular reasons cited
for the development for the self-managed team include: quality improvement, cutting
service errors and reducing defect rates.
Self-managed teams have been implemented to improve quality, productivity and
quality work life. They can be defined as teams of interdependent members who self-
regulate their behavior (Cumming and Griggs, 1976; Goodman et al., 1988) through:
a) face-to-face interaction (Goodman et al., 1988);
b) the inter-relationship of tasks and responsibilities in the co-production of a
service and/or a product; and
c) discretion over decision-making of tasks, methods for achieving them and work
scheduling (ibid.).
Unlike quality circles, self-managed work teams move responsibility for quality down
to the point of production. This creates a tension between the needs of the productive
system and the needs of the social group. For example, if the purpose of the self-
managed team is (a) to improve the quality of the working life of its members by
meeting their socio-psychological needs on the one hand and (b) to increase
organizational effectiveness and productivity by restructuring working relationships, on
the other, then a balance between the two will inevitably be a movable feast.

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