Senior Seminar in Human Resources Development

Management in Organizations (Week 1)

John Q. Adams

Senior Seminar in Human Resources Development (HR 491)

Mr. Christian Davis

March 27, 2015

Management in Organizations

        This week’s articles were focused around human resource management and how well organizations interrelate concepts of competitive advantage, implement steps towards a modern learning organization, and identify how much the relationships between an employer and employee change.  There are three articles used as references to help discuss these topics at hand.  The format of this reaction paper will have three separate paragraphs that focus on the issues discussed above, to include a summary as the conclusion at the end of the paper.  

        The first topic to discuss is competitive advantage.  One of the things an organization should take care of in order for it to continue to function and to progress and surpass its competitors is to make sure that their resources are taken cared of.  Vital resources of a company could be anything from machines, parts, materials, or in many cases—people.  In the article “Marcus Bingham Thinks your Boss has an Attitude Problem”, one of the main focuses was to analyze what Chief Executive Officers (CEOs) thought were their most important asset.  The majority of the time the answer was always the same, which is “people”.  But in a lot of cases, these same CEOs had no clue on what made their employees upset or how to get the best performance out of them, and that’s because of the level they work at compared to the level of each line worker.  The gap of communication and interaction is too extreme that it would be impossible for a CEO to truly know what drove their employees.  Therefore, it is always important to ensure that middle management is actively involved in the line workers’ day-to-day issues or concerns.

        The second discussion is focused on a learning organization.  What makes learning organizations different from traditional organizations?   One thing to keep in mind is that learning organizations will not always do things the same way all the time.  Even if there is an organization that others consider to use as a benchmark, it is impossible to be able to apply the same exact steps from one organization to another.  Even if it were within the same organization, that same organization would not always be able to apply the same steps to every situation.  That is why it is important to focus on the attitudes and actions of people in an organization to be able to determine what kind of value those people can bring forth for the organization (Weber, 2000).

        Lastly, one of the articles focuses on the changing relationship between an employer and an employee.  There are many times when employees feel like their employers are deceiving them and that is due to inconsistent messages that upper management relays to their workers (Babcock, 2000).  As a result of this, employees are found to be less engaged with the organization which means loyalty is not present.  If management could change their culture in the organization and build a trusting and helping relationship towards their employees—it would then be possible to create a solid foundation for everyone to continue building on and generally speaking, this would be the company’s vision.  Then as long as goals are met to reach certain objectives in order to get closer in reality with the vision and sustain it, then it is important for upper management to recognize and reward their employees so that the relationship becomes stronger.  Once a solid foundation has been created, then the next process is to continue to preserve it and build upon it.