Elmer H. Burack

Spirituality in the workplace

The rapid growth of spirituality in the workplace and organization generally, topically and applications, is of major importance for enterprise leaders, HR officials, organizational members and change agents. After providing a working definition of “workplace spirituality” some of the dynamic factors are identified which are contributing to its fast growth. This discussion includes some of the key behavioral ideas and models providing a foundation for these developments. Several case type summaries illustrate the richness and potency of spirituality applications in organizations. The concluding section provides a brief speculative discussion of future developments.

Changing the company culture—the role of human resource development

Abstract Human Resource Development (HRD) has a crucial, challenging role to play in successfully ‘orchestrating’ strategic culture change. Organization culture change has been attempted increasingly, unfortunately, quite often with poor results. Misapplication or poor understanding of culture structures and processes and its built-in ‘mechanism’ resisting change have contributed to these abuses. Widespread use of short range thinking and quick-fix solutions, lack of data on organizational processes, or failure to deal initially with more basic business problems have added further to these difficulties. This paper based on our research and consultive experiences, presents a framework for approaching and dealing with culture change models from our studies as well as selected literature based studies.

Book Review: Personnel: Human Resources: Organizational Entry: Recruitment, Selection, and Socialization of Newcomers

coverage of specific training techniques for particular employee groups, with an emphasis on responding to employer training and development needs. This is not to say that the practical application of training technology is unimportant. Rather, the point is that there is a critical need to stimulate further thinking and research into the broad issue of the desired relationship between workplace training and overall education and training policy in the 1980s. And, the Doeringer book should serve as a catalyst toward that end. While Doeringers book effectively accomplishes its limited objective of highlighting important policy and research questions concerning workplace training, it is not without its limitations. First, the volume does not adequately address the interconnections among education, training, and development. These terms are not synonomous and future research endeavors should take care to consider these differences and similarities as they are applied in the workplace. Second, the volume intermingles the training issues surrounding a rather heterogeneous group of individuals-disadvantaged, youth, bluecollar, and professional, technical, managerial, and so forth. This diversity was necessary and was an accurate reflection of the complexity of the internal labor market. However, it should be recognized that various societal and employee groups have diverse training and education needs. Thus, in addition to its broad, global focus, future research should be organized so as to permit analysis at an appropriate level of disaggregation. Finally, the case studies included in this volume highlight both the advantages and disadvantages of such an approach. The analyses presented in these case studies provide a useful framework for understanding better how training decisions are made within private industry. However, as the authors acknowledge, one should be careful not to generalize too much on the basis of such a small, selected sample. While a broad industry survey was clearly beyond the scope of this volume, it would have benefited from the inclusion of several additional case studies, which might have served to better illustrate the full range of industrial training in the United States. In sum, the above limitations are not grievous, and the pluses of this volume far outweight its weaknesses. Anyone, but especially researchers, involved in the training and development field should benefit considerably from reading it. Thomas G. Gutteridge Associate Professor of Human Resources School of Management State University of New York-Buffalo Personnel