Chapter 9 – Creating and Maintaining High-Performance Organizations
Chapter Nine: Creating and Maintaining High-
Performance Organizations
Welcome to your guide to teaching Chapter Nine: Creating and Maintaining
High-Performance Organizations!
This guide will provide you with a chapter summary, learning objectives, lecture
outlines, solutions to in-chapter case questions and end of chapter discussion questions
and possible responses.
Chapter Nine Roadmap
We hope you find each chapter of your Instructor Manual practical and useful, but also,
exciting! You can adapt the chapter text, the PowerPoints, and the video to work in an online
class environment, a guided independent study environment, or a face to face or on-ground
environment.
When presenting Chapter nine, have the students first read the chapter and encourage
them to absorb the “big picture” of “Creating and Maintaining High-Performance
Organizations.”
Use the PowerPoint for Chapter Nine to frame your lecture.
Have students read and discuss the cases and their respective questions.
Have students validate their knowledge of the chapter by working through the discussion
questions at the end of the chapter.
Lastly, have students review, journal, or discuss the Key Vocabulary Terms at the end of
the chapter.
ROADMAP: THE LECTURE
CREATING AND MAINTAINING HIGH PERFORMANCE WORK SYSTEMS
Chapter Summary
This chapter summarizes the role of human resource management in creating an organization
that achieves a high level of performance, measured in terms such as long-term profits, quality,
and customer satisfaction. First, the chapter defines high-performance work systems and
provides a description of these systems’ elements and outcomes. Next, it discusses the
conditions that contribute to high performance. This is followed by an explanation of how the
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whole or part.
Chapter 9 – Creating and Maintaining High-Performance Organizations
various HRM functions can contribute to high performance. Finally, the chapter introduces ways
to measure the effectiveness of human resource management.
Learning Objectives
After studying this chapter, the student should be able to:
1. Define high-performance work systems and identify the elements of such a system.
2. Summarize the outcomes of a high-performance work system.
3. Describe the conditions that create a high-performance work system.
4. Explain how human resource management can contribute to high performance.
5. Discuss the role of HRM technology in high-performance work systems.
6. Summarize ways to measure the effectiveness of human resource management.
C. Job Satisfaction and Employee Engagement
1. In a high-performance organization, employees tend to experience job satisfaction –
that is, they experience their jobs as fulfilling important values or allowing them to
fulfill those values.
2. Employee Engagement is the degree to which employees are fully involved in their
work and the strength of their commitment to their job and company.
3. Brand alignment is the process of ensuring that HR policies, practices, and
programs support or are congruent with an organization’s overall culture (or brand),
products, and services.
4. Some organizations are moving beyond concern with mere job satisfaction and are
trying to foster employees’ passion for their work. Occupational intimacy refers to
people being passionate about their work and feeling that it is a part of who they
are.
Did You Know?
Three in Ten U. S. Workers Describe Themselves as Engaged
In a recent Gallup survey, about 30% of employees are engaged- involved in, enthusiastic
about, and committed to their work. About 52% are not engaged and 18% are actively
disengaged, meaning unhappy and unproductive. However, U.S. workers were more likely than
their counterparts in more than 90 countries to be engaged.
Discussion Question with Possible Response
1. Suppose you are the HR manager for a chain of restaurants, and you want to propose
that your company develop a highly engaged workforce. How could you use this chart to
promote your idea to the company’s business managers?
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whole or part.
Chapter 9 – Creating and Maintaining High-Performance Organizations
Answers will vary.
D. Ethics
1. Ethics establishes fundamental principles for behavior, such as honesty and
fairness.
2. Ethical behavior is most likely to result from values held by the organization’s
leaders combined with systems that promote ethical behavior.
3. A number of organizational systems can promote ethical behavior including a written
code of ethics, reinforcement of ethical behavior, channels for questions regarding
ethical behavior, and training for ethical decision-making.
4. Ethical behavior is a human resource management concern. The systems that
promote ethical behavior include such HRM functions as training, performance
management, and discipline policies.
IV. HRM’S Contribution to High Performance
1. Management of human resources plays a critical role in determining companies’
success in meeting the challenges of a rapidly changing, highly competitive
environment.
2. Compensation, staffing, training and development, performance management, and
other HRM practices are investments that directly affect employees’ motivation and
ability to provide products and services that are valued by customers.
3. To have the intended influence on performance, the HRM practices must fit well with
one another and the organization as a whole.
A. HRM Practices Contribute to High Performance
1. Job Design – For the organization to benefit from teamwork and employee
empowerment, jobs must be designed appropriately.
2. Recruitment and Selection aim at the kinds of employees who can thrive in this
type of setting. These employees are enthusiastic about and able to contribute to
teamwork, empowerment, and knowledge sharing.
a. Table 9.1 lists HRM Practices That Can Help Organizations Achieve High
Performance.
3. Training and Development – Extensive training and development are an important
part of a learning organization.
HR Oops
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whole or part.
Chapter 9 – Creating and Maintaining High-Performance Organizations
Few Companies Are Prepared for Future Needs
A survey conducted by the Institute for Corporate Productivity (i4cp) found that the top-ranked
companies outperformed the low performers mostly dramatically when it came to preparing for
their future talent needs. Less than one third of respondents stated they were prepared for the
future. I4cp has identified two activities strongly associated with high performance but rarely
used: identifying future leaders based on their influence rather than their job titles and taking a
strategic approach to workforce planning.
Discussion Questions with Possible Responses:
What elements of a high-performance works system (see Figure 9.1) would succession
planning and employee development contribute to?
Answers will vary. They all tie in some way to succession planning and employee
development.
What outcomes of a high-performance work system (see Figure 9.2) would succession planning
and employee development contribute to?
Answers will vary. Satisfied workers and satisfied customers tied to succession planning and
employee development.
4. Performance Management – To set up a performance management system that
supports the organization’s goals, managers need to understand the process of
employee performance.
a. Figure 9.3, Employee Performance as a Process, depicts the process of
employee performance.
b. The following guidelines describe how to make the performance management
system support organizational goals:
i. Define and measure performance in precise terms
ii. Link performance measures to meeting customer needs
iii. Measure and correct for the effect of situational constraints
5. Compensation – Organizations can reinforce the impact of this kind of
performance management by linking compensation in part to performance
measures.
B. HRM Technology
1. Human resource departments can improve their own and their organization’s
performance by appropriately using new technology. New technology usually
involves automation that is, using equipment and information processing to perform
activities that had been performed by people.
2. Information technology provides ways to build and improve systems for knowledge
generation and sharing, as part of a learning organization.
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whole or part.
Chapter 9 – Creating and Maintaining High-Performance Organizations
3. HRM Applications: As computers become more powerful, new technologies
continue to be introduced. Some of the technologies that have been widely
adopted are transaction processing, decision support systems, and expert systems.
a. Transaction processing – refers to computations and calculations involved
in reviewing and documenting HRM decisions and practices.
b. Decision support systems – computer software systems designed to help
managers solve problems.
c. Expert systems – computer systems that incorporate the decision rules
used by people who are considered to have expertise in a certain area.
4. Human Resource Information Systems: A standard feature of a modern HRIS is
the use of relational databases, which store data in separate files that can be linked
by common elements. The ability to locate and combine many categories of data
has a multitude of uses in human resource management.
5. HR dashboard is a display of a series of HR measures, showing human resource
goals and objectives and progress toward meeting them
6. Human Resource Management Online: E-HRM: During the last decade or so,
organizations have seen the advantages of sharing information in computer
networks. E-HRM can combine company-specific information on a secure intranet
with links to the resources on the broader Internet. A benefit of e-HRM is that
employees can help themselves to information they need when they need it instead
of contacting an HR staff person.
7. Not only does e-HRM provide efficient ways to carry out human resource functions,
it also poses new challenges to employees and new issues for managers to
address.
8. Cloud computing is another recent advance in technology that has several
implications for HR practices. Cloud computing involves using a network of remote
servers hosted on the Internet to store, manage, and process data. These services
are offered by data centers around the world and are collectively called “the cloud.”
These services offer the ability to access information that’s delivered on demand
from any device, anywhere, at any time.
A. Human Resource Management Audits
1. HRM audit – a formal review of the outcomes of HRM functions.
2. To conduct the audit, the HR department identifies key functions and the key
measures of business performance and customer satisfaction that would indicate
each function is succeeding.
3. Table 9.2 lists customer-oriented perspective of HRM and Table 9.3 lists examples of
these measures for a variety of HRM functions such as staffing, compensation,
benefits, training, appraisal and development, and overall effectiveness.
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whole or part.
Chapter 9 – Creating and Maintaining High-Performance Organizations
4. The audit may look at any other measure associated with successful management of
human resources such as compliance with equal employment opportunity laws,
succession planning, maintaining a safe workplace, and positive labor relations.
5. An HRM audit using customer satisfaction measures supports the customer-oriented
approach to human resource management.
6. After identifying performance measures for the HRM audit, the staff carries out the
audit by gathering information. The information for the key indicators is usually
available in the organization’s documents.
B. Analyzing the Effect of HRM Programs
1. Another way to measure HRM effectiveness is the use of HR analytics. This process
involves measuring a program’s success in terms of whether it achieved its objectives
and whether it delivered value in an economic sense.
2. HRM’s potential to affect employee’s well being and the organization’s performance
make human resource management an exciting field.
3. The field of human resource management provides tremendous opportunity to future
researchers and managers who want to make a difference in many people’s lives.
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whole or part.