Strengthening the “people aspects” of business organisations – humanise, nurture and actualise
Success of business organisations is predicated on human effort. And human effort is dependent on the agency of the individual. Agency, in turn, is influenced by the individual’s motivational states. Despite the excitement around the concept of “empathy”, motivational states are only understood in first person terms. Third person accounts are, at best, thoughtful surmises, estimates and approximations.
Yet, business leaders can make progress only by getting people around them to make progress. Which necessitates the third-person understanding of motivational states, and the third-person influencing of these states to generate agency. This situation is tantamount to performing a considerable task without the appropriate tools, yet striving to achieve the best possible outcome under suboptimal conditions. Therein lies the importance of “people aspects” of business organisations and the challenge of designing and managing these.
People aspects in business includes matters related to skills and capabilities, mindsets and behaviours, individual and organisational values, goal setting, team building and teamwork, and emotional and motivational states of employees. It is worth clarifying that we do not classify the design of people related processes under the category of people aspects. Processes such as “people performance management” and “rewards and recognition” are in the same vein as business processes such as “budgeting” or “business planning”, particularly in the manner they are designed and implemented, and hence classified under the category of structural aspects.
Ingrained in people aspects in definitional terms are all organisational matters that pertain to or involve the individual’s state of mind. The focus here is not just on “cognitive” states of individual minds, but also on the “affective” and “conative” states.
Driven by scientific temper and the tenets of experimental psychology, business leaders have provided emphasis on the cognitive or thinking states of employees to achieve tasks and overcome challenges. It is only during the last few decades that affective or emotional states have found a noticeable level of recognition. Organisations now emphasise the concept of “emotional quotient” – the individual’s ability to be aware of, to process and to harness emotional information. Unfortunately and inexplicably, conative states of mind such as hopes, fears and desires are yet to find their rightful place in business lexicon and deliberations.
Another notable oversight has been the failure to conceptualise and use the construct of “collective intentionality” in business. Business leaders have endeavoured to comprehend, measure and influence “individual intentionality”. However, not so with collective intentionality, notwithstanding the emphasis on teamwork and group performance. Collective intentionality is defined as the power of minds to be jointly directed at objects, matters of fact, states of affairs, goals, or values. The treatment of collective intent in business literature has been superficial, and has remained steeped in archetype-defining constructs such as that of “organisation culture”.
Early engagement on “people aspects” of business organisations was driven by industrialisation and mass production during the early decades of the 20th century. This period of investigation and engagement coincided with the rise of “behaviourism” in psychology, leading to a mutually beneficial period of coexistence and growth, earmarked by landmark events such as the Hawthorne studies. While behaviourism provided businesses with expedient ways to enhance frontline productivity, the industrial fraternity turned into a willing and enthusiastic champion of the “behaviourist school”. With the unfortunate outcome that the investigation into people aspects of business organisations remained at superficial levels of inquiry for decades, anchored to the premise that human agency and behaviour was the direct result of the availability or absence of external stimuli.
Humanism, with its emphasis on the holistic entity of the individual and her human context, free will, consciousness and intentionality, was a welcome relief to the hegemony of behaviourism during the second half of the 20th century. The final blow on behaviourism, in the academic world at least, was struck by extensive research conducted to prove the impact of “nature” in the area of linguistics, within the ambit of the “nature versus nurture” debate. Yet, despite its conclusive unravelling, businesses continue to retain the last vestiges of behaviourism as mere conveniences within their people processes.
The future of people aspects in business is discontinuously different from the past. Stimuli-dependent behaviourist approaches have turned anachronistic, and will simply not do. To transform people performance and maintain this at an elevated level, business leaders have no choice but to embrace the school of humanistic psychology, and engage with their peoples based on the constructs of individual free will, collective intentionality, and the three states of mind. With the consequence that successful business organisations will humanise the context and goals of its people; nurture through recognition, motivation and learning; and actualise positive human potential.