Journal of Organizational Effectiveness: People and PerformanceOrganizational effectiveness, people and performance: new challenges, new researchagendasPaul Sparrow Cary Cooper

Article information:To cite this document:Paul Sparrow Cary Cooper , (2014),"Organizational effectiveness, people and performance: newchallenges, new research agendas", Journal of Organizational Effectiveness: People and Performance, Vol.1 Iss 1 pp. 2 - 13Permanent link to this document:http://dx.doi.org/10.1108/JOEPP-01-2014-0004

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Users who downloaded this article also downloaded:Randall Schuler, Susan E. Jackson, (2014),"Human resource management and organizationaleffectiveness: yesterday and today", Journal of Organizational Effectiveness: People and Performance, Vol.1 Iss 1 pp. 35-55 http://dx.doi.org/10.1108/JOEPP-01-2014-0003Susan Albers Mohrman, Edward E. Lawler III, (2014),"Designing organizations for sustainable effectiveness:A new paradigm for organizations and academic researchers", Journal of Organizational Effectiveness:People and Performance, Vol. 1 Iss 1 pp. 14-34 http://dx.doi.org/10.1108/JOEPP-01-2014-0007Ingmar Bjrkman, Mats Ehrnrooth, Kristiina Mkel, Adam Smale, Jennie Sumelius, (2014),"From HRMpractices to the practice of HRM: setting a research agenda", Journal of Organizational Effectiveness:People and Performance, Vol. 1 Iss 2 pp. 122-140 http://dx.doi.org/10.1108/JOEPP-02-2014-0008

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Organizational effectiveness,people and performance: new

challenges, new research agendasPaul Sparrow and Cary Cooper

Lancaster University Management School, Lancaster, UK

Abstract

Purpose As founding editors of the Journal of Organizational Effectiveness: People andPerformance, this paper welcomes the beginnings of a new academic community. The purpose of thispaper is to outline why both academic researchers and organizational practitioners need to enter intoand be guided by a new debate and new set of expertise. It signals the sorts of research agendas thatneed to be addressed in this field.Design/methodology/approach The paper establishes the future research agenda fororganizational effectiveness. It reviews historic literature and traces the development of the fieldof organizational effectiveness from: early analysis of political judgements about effectiveness; systemicanalysis of the intersection of profitability, employee satisfaction and societal value; debates overstakeholder, power, social justice and organizational fitness, resilience and evolution; the importanceof mental models of senior managers; how organizations use changes in work system design andbusiness process to modify employees mental, emotional and attitudinal states; and the use of anarchitectural metaphor to highlight the locus of value creation perspectives.Findings There are many echoes of the debates and concerns today in the past. The paper showshow current concerns over strategic and business model change, organization design, talentmanagement, agile and resilient organization, balanced scorecard, employee engagement, advocacyand reputation can be informed, and better contextualized, by drawing upon frameworks that havepreviously arisen.Research limitations/implications The paper argues that the authors must adopt a broaddefinition of performance, and examine how the achievement of important strategic outcomes, such asinnovation, customer centricity, operational excellence, globalization, become dependent on people andorganization issues. It signals the need to focus on the intermediate performance outcomes that arenecessary to achieve these strategic outcomes, and to examine these performance issues across severallevels of analysis such as the individual, team, function, organization and societal (policy) level.Practical implications The audience for this paper and the journal as a whole is academics whowork on cross-disciplinary research problems, the leading human resource (HR), strategy or performanceresearch centres, and finally senior managers and specialists (not just HR) from the internal centres ofexpertise inside organizations who wish to keep abreast of leading thinking.Originality/value The paper argues the need to combine human resource managementperspectives with those from decision sciences, supply chain management, operations management,consumer behaviour, innovation, management cognition, strategic management and its attention tothe resource-based view of the firm, dynamic capabilities, business models and strategy as practice.It argues for a broadening of analysis beyond human capital into related interests in social capital,intellectual capital and political/reputational capital, and for linkage of the analysis across time, toplace the novelties and contexts of today into the structures of the past.

Keywords Employee engagement, Performance, Organization effectiveness, Business model change,Agile organization, HR architecture

Paper type Research paper

IntroductionOrganizations are facing complex performance drivers, such as the globalizationof their organizational capabilities, the need to pursue strategies of innovation,

Journal of OrganizationalEffectiveness: People andPerformanceVol. 1 No. 1, 2014pp. 2-13r Emerald Group Publishing Limited2051-6614DOI 10.1108/JOEPP-01-2014-0004

The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available atwww.emeraldinsight.com/2051-6614.htm

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the need to build ever more lean, productive, but intelligently efficient and effectiveprocesses and to shift the focus of their organizations so that they are customer centric.Those responsible for people management need to be able to look into theirorganization its strategy, mission, business model and performance priorities andbe able to articulate how the management of people can serve to create value for theorganization, capture that value, leverage it, whilst also protecting and preservingwhat is of value. However, the human resource (HR) function has been looking in atbusiness strategy and performance, and at its own internal transformations formany years now. This is still hugely important, and HR academics will continue toexamine the competitiveness challenges faced by organizations. But in an age ofconstrained growth we have returned to an era when HR functions also havea responsibility to start looking out again to understand the changing nature ofwork and its place in society, and the issues that cut across organizations but willstrongly impact the internal world of any of them. We need HR academics to alsoestablish this looking out agenda.

These challenges require increasingly cross-disciplinary insight, and yet the academicliterature, and much organizational practice, still tends to be structured aroundnarrow and specialist lines. Inevitably, this leads to a fragmentation of organizationalcapabilities and resources which, in turn, impact upon effectiveness and performance.There is a need, therefore, to understand the implications that these problemsof organizational effectiveness have for both the people and organizational processes,and to seek to challenge these through research lenses that synthesize and integrateimportant logics of action, theories and models. To the extent that they address issuesof people and performance, we need to tap disciplines beyond those typically associatedwith organization effectiveness and HR, such as consumer behaviour, operations,risk and crisis management, political economy, population ecology, industrial sociology,amongst others.

Therefore our dialogue needs to be undertaken in a new way: through differentdisciplinary lenses and against different paradigms; across disciplines; and acrossdifferent levels of analysis. We want this journal to cross-fertilize academic debates,forging points of common understanding and informing respective disciplines ofknowledge that can co-opted and applied to new settings.

We have chosen the term organization effectiveness for a reason, but we need tostress that whilst all disciplines have an interest in this issue, it is the people andperformance aspects that this journal will focus on. To capture this work, the journalwill adopt a broad definition of performance, beyond of course just financialperformance hence the term organization effectiveness and tapping into theachievement of important strategic outcomes, such as innovation, customer centricity,operational excellence, globalization. It will focus on the intermediate performanceoutcomes that are necessary to achieve these strategic outcomes. The journal willpublish research papers that tackle performance issues that have relevance at theindividual, team, function, organization and societal (policy) level. It will not be focusedon the effectiveness of people and organizations, but rather on the role of peoplein the effectiveness of organizations. We also seek papers that are concerned with theexperience of workforces and the productivity and performance of employees, or thataddress the impact of important management functions and processes. Papers shouldbe capable of contributing to strategic (and policy) thinking and identifying the long-termperformance issues that confront workforces and organizations, with findings that canprovide guidance on the best ways forward.

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Organization effectiveness in retrospect and prospectThere is a golden thread that connects people and their performance to organizationaleffectiveness. This thread connects many issues. To help signal the territory andthe sorts of issues that we welcome to this new journal, we trace some of the maindevelopments in the study of organization effectiveness. As we look forward to animportant research agenda, we therefore also briefly look back. The study oforganizational effectiveness has a long and distinguished history. We can find manyechos of the debates and concerns today indeed from one perspective there nothingnew under the sun the path towards a broad and multi-disciplinary understandingof organization effectiveness has been trodden by our predecessors. As we lookforward, it is important to recognize that we can learn from the established principlesof the past.

Organization effectiveness became more central to organization theory when in thelate 1950s and 1960s systems models took over from more goal-based ways of thinkingabout it. Sociologists viewed organizational effectiveness within a systems model thatneeded to jointly understand the interplay between productivity, flexibility andan absence of organizational strain (Georgopoulos and Tannenbaum, 1957). Today wegive much attention to the need for organizations and their leaders to manage in thebroad context of strategic and business model change, balanced by concerns aboutthe sustainability of such strategies. Yet from the beginnings of the field oforganizational effectiveness, when Katz and Kahn (1966) argued that whilst seniormanagers could attend to activities associated with internal issues of efficiency from aneconomic perspective, it was evident that effectiveness was a political judgement madeabout organizations best viewed externally. The key issue was how to align the twoviews of an organization in ways that led to growth, storage, survival and control overthe environment.

As more systemic ways of thinking about effectiveness took hold, Friedlander andPickle (1968) said that organizational effectiveness should be seen as the intersection ofprofitability, employee satisfaction and societal value, whilst Mahoney and Weitzel(1969) argued that we needed to focus on the level of productivity in, support for,reliability of and utilization of the organizations business model. Blake and Mouton(1964) saw it needing to focus on the simultaneous achievement of high production andhigh people centred enterprise, and for Gibson et al. (1973) organization effectivenesshad to be concerned with the alignment of structure, process and behaviour, bestjudged in terms of short-run productivity, efficiency and satisfaction, intermediateadaptability and development and long-run survival.

Today we give much importance to talent management models (Sparrow et al., 2014).Many of the debates today about the importance of, but also limitations of, talent areechoed in a finding by Lieberson and OConnor (1972) which showed that leadershipsuccession in large corporations bore only a limited relation to performance.Indeed, organizational effectiveness as a topic had its beginnings in the contribution ofindividuals to organizational success. Similarly, coming from a selection perspective,it was argued that the success of such talent and therefore measurement of organizationaleffectiveness was best seen in terms of an ultimate criterion, such as productivity,net profit, mission accomplishment or organizational growth (Thorndike, 1949).

But organizational effectiveness requires the satisfaction of multiple constituencies each having an influence on the priorities against which organizational performanceshould be judged. Many of the debates we have about this today trace back to the1970s, when more critical voices first began to be heard. For Hirsch (1975), a sociologist,

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organizational effectiveness was determined by two things: first, the alignment betweenthe organizations (internal) task environment and the institutional environment thatconditioned and set the context for industry profitability; and second, the way that theexternal environment influenced senior management decisions over strategy. At the sametime and in the same journal, Steers (1975) reviewed 17 different models of organizationaleffectiveness. He found little consistency, concluded understanding was rudimentary andidentified eight problems. Measures of organizational effectiveness were generally used inisolation, with the most popular being productivity, profit or rate of return, employeesatisfaction and employee withdrawal or turnover (the latter two being seen as beingvalue-laden and less objective). Todays attention to the agile organization was evidentthen ten out of the 17 models of the time used adaptability and flexibility as the maincriteria, followed in order of importance by productivity, satisfaction, profitability,resource acquisition, an absence of strain, control over the environment, development,efficiency, employee retention, growth, integration, open communications and survival.It could be argued, based on these findings, that attempts to measure organizationaleffectiveness are fruitless. The conclusion arrived at then (Steers, 1975), as today, was thatthe effectiveness construct is so complex as to defy simple attempts at modeldevelopment. The bottom line questions, then, as now, were whose preferences should beweighted most heavily in reaching a judgement about organizational effectiveness [y][and] whose preferences should an organization attempt to satisfy through thedistribution of performance outcomes (Zammuto, 1984, p. 606).

There were four ways of answering these questions. By the 1980s, the first 30 years ofthinking about organizational effectiveness had been shaped by shifts in the expectationsof the public and the areas of management attention. There were four ways in whichpeople thought about organizational effectiveness and judged its desirability.As a forerunner to todays balanced scorecard thinking, the first answer was that it isall relative, so ask the main stakeholders as consumers of the organizations performanceto each evaluate against their own criteria, and use a collated set (Connolly et al., 1980).

The second answer was a power one, which argued that there are dominantcoalitions at any one time who negotiate what the performance outcomes should be(Pennings and Goodman, 1977), this negotiation reflects the relative power each has interms of control over strategic resources (Pfeffer and Salancik, 1978), and thesedemands have to be met in order to ensure the survival of the organization.

The third answer took a social justice perspective (Rawls, 1971). Arguing that socialvalues determine organizational effectiveness, and place limits around what a society canseek and the means by which it is attained, effectiveness must be judged by the extentthat it ensures equal distribution of key resources for self-respect such as liberty,opportunity, income and wealth. The yardstick of organizational effectiveness was thatthe organization passes the regret principle ( Keeley, 1978) i.e., it seeks to minimize anylevel of regret that its constituents have over participating in the organization.

The fourth and final way of thinking about organizational effectiveness was to see itin evolutionary terms. What is effective at one time becomes ineffective at others as thecontext changes, so effective performance is that which increases the adaptability ofthe organization the ability to satisfy a continual process of divergent definitionsof effective organizational performance over time (Zammuto, 1982). Researchers talkedabout resilient organizations yes, a term back in vogue seen as those who couldsurvive because they had the foresight and capability to anticipate and prepare for thefuture (Connors, 1979; Ross and Goodfellow, 1980). Organizational fitness needed tobe tested, which meant seeking sharpened skills and self-correcting responses.

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Today, in the wake of a global financial crisis, we question and challenge thedirection of business development and the financial and economic models that drive it.Such challenges again follow an important intellectual heritage. By the late 1980s,concern was growing over the failure of management and narrowness of the criteriaused to organizational effectiveness in practice, triggered mainly by challenges to UScompetitiveness and poor growth in productivity. It was Hitt (1988) who first noted thedual problem of there being a discrepancy between actual organizational health andreported health in financial metrics, being created by an over reliance on financialmeasures of performance and short-run profits on the one hand, but an equalreluctance of academics to link any measures of organizational effectiveness to theirown research, ignoring or working on assumed models of effectiveness. Accountingdetermined measures such as return on investment, assets, equity or assets andearnings per share were highly inter-correlated but were subject to distortion, and didnot take account of risks to the reported finances. Whilst capital asset pricing models,or shareholder return models, were argued to be a more reliable longer term way ofthinking about organizational effectiveness from a financial perspective, looking at thesecurities market and adjusting the returns based on the risks and capturing long-runperformance potential, these too reflected a narrow stakeholder base. For Hitt (1988),the financialization of organizational effectiveness measures was still creating sealedboxes and closed loop thinking in addressing the problem.

At this point, as there is again now, there was a shift towards thinking aboutorganizational effectiveness by design. This question is as live today as it was then.From an organization design perspective (Butler, 1991), organizations were seen asbeing constrained by their environments and therefore had to set the criteria foreffectiveness via performance norms underpinned by essential values. It wasaccepted that there may be competing or contradictory norms, but management havethe crucial task of translating the norms into an internal ideology which provides thefoundations for decision making and actions (Huber and Glick, 1996). Themes ofinformation and organization design also led us into risk and management cognition,and from this the mindset and capital of top talent. Hodgkinson and Sparrow (2002)argued the importance of mental models of senior managers.

Today it is evident that organization designs continually erode in their efficiency, soa re-design capability is important an ongoing and crucial need (Lawler, 2005; Mohrman,2007). As HR professionals move into the topic of HR design (Ruona and Gibson, 2004),it brings with it renewed attention to a range of developments that have a bearing onpeople and performance: the redesign of strategic organizational processes; the competingvalue of information inside the organization and how structures can help make suremanagers attend to the most important information. Attention is being given again tochanges in the organization form defined as the combination of strategy, structure andinternal control and co-ordination systems that provide an organization with its operatinglogic, its rules of resource allocation and its mechanism of corporate governance.Meanwhile, as organizations are being designed around strategically importantinformation markets, strategists are highlighting the importance of the integrationmechanisms that bring together the varied knowledge of individuals to produce importantorganizational solutions (Hansen and Haas, 2001; Bryan and Joyce, 2007).

Human resource management (HRM), people and organizational performanceReturning to the golden thread that links people and performance to organizationeffectiveness, as researchers took an increasingly broad perspective on what is meant

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by effectiveness, psychologists too have begun to concern themselves with the mostimportant contributions that individuals make to organizational effectiveness(Robertson et al., 2002). This work again presages todays interest in topics such asemployee engagement and advocacy, and employer brands (Albrecht, 2010; Truss et al.,2013). As attention was given to the need to link employees more deeply to theorganizations products and services, processes and performance, the performancecriteria applied to effectiveness became more diverse, managerial but also reciprocal(Rousseau, 1995). Sparrow and West (2002) noted these ranged from basic taskcompetence or proficiency, through to delivery of performance against efficient orcost effective performance metrics, impacts on organizational competitiveness on thebasis of speed or time, the creation of internal or external customer perceptionsof added value, the challenge of longer term strategic risks or costs associated witherror or inappropriate organizational decision making, and the collateral damagecreated by current actions in terms of the future constraints on actions that they mightcreate. Organizations needed to develop organizational cultures that created themental, emotional and attitudinal states that precede effective employee performance.Once these states were established in a positive direction, then employees couldbegin to exhibit a series of salient organizational behaviours, i.e. the behavioursthat actually generated effective performance. People were attracted to specificorganizational cultures, culture acted as a stabilizer of individual behaviour.Psychologists there began to look at how organizations could use changes in worksystem design and business process to modify employees work orientations andresponsibilities, and therefore the extent to which the appropriate mental, emotionaland attitudinal states could be seen as discretionary, or as an inherent part of the joband organizational life.

The changes in the structure of employment, job stability and employmentoutcomes and quality of the employment relationship that was by this time evident,led to organizational psychology mobilizing interest in a range of new areas ofresearch (Herriot, 2001; Sparrow and Cooper, 2003). The initial conceptualizationof psychological contributions to organizational effectiveness being based aroundcommitment, absenteeism and turnover (Mowday et al., 1982; OReilly and Chatman,1986; Meyer and Allen, 1991) had shifted focus. Sparrow and Cooper (2003) structuredattention to the employment relationship around eight issues. Driven by discussionof the psychological contract and shifts in the nature of careers, and an increasingindividualization of the employment relationship, attention began to focus on theimportance of a series of individual-organizational linkages and bonds (Pierce et al.,2001). In addition to the traditional interests in commitment, discussion picked upquestions of identification, internalization and psychological ownership.The management of work-life balance, well-being and generational shifts in workvalues were also becoming mainstream (Robertson and Cooper, 2011).

Finally, from the late 1980s onwards, we began to the systemic relationships amongHRM practices and their relationship to specific approaches that organizations coulduse as they strove to gain competitive advantage (Schuler and MacMillan, 1984;Schuler and Jackson, 1987). This perspective argued that HRM practices could not bechosen based on technical merits alone. Rather, it should be in terms of their ability tofacilitate strategy implementation. From an organizational effectiveness perspective,a key point of interest was to understand how HR practices might be differentiated inrelation to intermediate strategic performance outcomes, such as innovation, cost(efficiency and effectiveness) or quality. Contingency models were used to identify the

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essential role behaviours that needed to be engineered amongst employees, with HRMpractices configured and packaged differently to support these role behaviours.

By the late 1990s, researchers began to use an architectural metaphor to highlightthe locus of value creation in strategic HRM (Becker and Gerhart, 1996; Lepak andSnell, 1999; Wright et al., 2001; Wright and McMahan, 1992; Becker and Huselid, 2006;Kang et al., 2007). The language of HR architecture was used to reflect a combinationof systems, practices, competencies and skills needed to develop and manage anorganizations strategic human capital (Becker and Huselid, 2006). As this workdeveloped, research began to focus on the different intermediate strategic performanceoutcomes (e.g. innovation, customer centricity, lean management) that were centralto organizational effectiveness. These performance outcomes were understood toemphasize different internal business processes in terms of competitive advantage(Lepak and Snell, 2007). Hence, an important agenda is one of understanding the skillsets that become critical for value creation across these different outcomes. Similarly,we need to understand which sets of skills, competencies, knowledge and deliverymechanism enable the HR architecture to exert strategic influence over the executionof organizational strategy (Jackson et al., 1989; Barney, 1991; Wright and McMahan,1992; Huselid, 1995).

An example of attempts at more strategic application would be talent management,defined as the process through which employers anticipate and meet their needs forhuman capital (Cappelli, 2008). Coming from a strategic talent pools perspective,research notes that decisions around talent are rarely optimal (Boudreau, 2010;Boudreau and Jesuthasan, 2011). For Cascio and Boudreau (2010), the answer to theseproblems is to use a risk optimization, management and mitigation framework to lookat HR strategy and strategic workforce planning (SWP). Human capital strategieshave to be built on the reduction of uncertainty, elimination of bad outcomes andinsurance against bad outcomes. Whilst cautioning against the illusion ofpredictability, this might still include efforts at increased precision in predictionsabout future supply and demand for skills, or the application of quality-control tools toimportant HR processes (such as talent management) to achieve the same low-defectrigour seen in engineering and operations processes.

Flowing from such developments, another important area of research now is toshow how organizational effectiveness can be aided by practices associated withhuman capital management. The word capital reflects a concept from economicswhich denotes potentially valuable assets (Nahapiet, 2011). These include a numberof evolving practices. One of these is human capital (or workforce) analytics oraccounting, which typically blend techniques such as forecasting principles andscenario planning to create forecasts of the current and future workforce. This in turnis evolving towards SWP, which attempts to identify the characteristics of humancapital needed to achieve important strategic objectives, and create insight into relativevalue of specific talent to the execution of an important strategies, alongside necessaryinvestments and actions needed to avoid any loss of value.

What should be evident from all the historical perspectives outlined above is that theyall bring cross-disciplinary insights into the process of linking people, performanceand organizational effectiveness. We see now the need to combine perspectives fromdecision sciences, supply chain management, operations management, consumerbehaviour, innovation, strategic management and its attention to the resource-basedview of the firm, dynamic capabilities, business models and strategy as practice. We seea broadening of analysis beyond human capital into related interests in social capital,

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intellectual capital and political/reputational capital. In order to be clear what the realproblem is, we see the need to link analysis across time, and to place the novelties andcontexts of today into the structures of the past. This has implications for the style ofresearch that is now needed.

The style of researchBuilding on these areas of interest, in this journal we seek research that hasa performance connotation, either by including hard performance data or by focusingconceptually on key processes and capabilities considered central to performance.The issues that are of interest in thinking about the performance context of any topicmight include:

(1) The implicit models of performance within the phenomenon being examined.

(2) The broad direction of causation that is argued exists between the topic andperformance.

(3) The performance range that is created by the topic. We might think of threedifferent and increasingly more complex performance outcomes: proximalperformance outcomes (e.g. task performance, contextual performance,commitment, satisfaction, turnover intentions); intermediate performanceoutcomes that capture the delivery of a strategy (e.g. customer service or valueproposition, innovative behaviour, understanding of a broader business modeland performance context); or distal or organisational performance outcomes,e.g., measures of quality or financial performance.

What are the important antecedents that bring the topic about, and therefore what isthe most appropriate fulcrum around which organizational performance interventionswill pivot and should be designed?

The journal will carry a range of papers synthetic and state-of-the-art reviews,conceptual pieces and critiques of existing theory and practice, and empirical studies ofboth quantitative and qualitative method on performance and people managementprocess issues. We are keen to attract papers that have a reflexive, evidence-basedstyle, rather than focusing on a theoretical-only dialogue. We seek research data andinsights of specific relevance and utility to HR academics and practitioners, functionalspecialists and academics involved in research that has strong people managementimplications from cognate fields (e.g. marketing and customer services, operationsmanagement and work systems). We also invite applied research based on new ideasand emerging trends that have the potential for impact and address real-world needs(research linked to current and emerging practices).

In this opening issue, we have five excellent contributions that help to establish ouragenda and the research style. The first paper, from Susan Mohrman and Ed Lawler,reflects the perspectives of some of the first scholars who argues for an integrationbetween HRM and organizational effectiveness. It focuses on the need to designorganizations for sustainable effectiveness. They note that we are another momentin history when the choices we make about building sustainable global economy willneed system-wide changes, and will require deep changes in organizational design.The three papers each come from different HR traditions, and signal important areasthat we wish to be active in. The paper by Randall Schuler and Susan Jackson,embedded in the link between strategic context and source of competitive advantage,employee role behaviours and organizational effectiveness, reminds us that the debate

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about HRM can be seen in the context of HR strategy. The paper by Robert Kase, JaapPaauwe and Sasa Batistic examines the intellectual structure of the HRM-performancedebate more broadly how HR as a strategic function and its HR systems contribute tosuperior organizational performance and how competition of business models andrapid technological change is once more altering the people-technology equilibrium.The paper by Wayne Cascio and John Boudreau builds on the human capital managementtraditions within organizational effectiveness. In todays world, those researching thecontribution that human capital can make to organizational effectiveness need toincorporate learning from the field of risk management as they argue, risk-mitigationmay overshadow risk-optimized decisions. They examine the concepts of uncertainty,risk and opportunity, again drawing links back to the importance of mental models,as noted in the earlier work on management cognition and organization design. Finally,the paper by Jim Quick, Ann McFadyen and Debra Nelson from an organizationhealth and well-being perspective focuses on high-risk employees, and the way that HRprofessionals can advance health, well-being and performance while averting dangerby identifying and managing high-risk employees, anticipating their needs and actionsbefore damage is done.

We welcome those who wish to join in the agenda of this journal and look forward toa rich and informative academic and practitioner dialogue.

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Further reading

Arthur, J.B. (1994), Effects of human-resource systems on manufacturing performance andturnover, Academy of Management Journal, Vol. 37 No. 3, pp. 670-687.

Mowday, R.T., Porter, L.W. and Steers, R.M. (1979), The measurement of organizationalcommitment, Journal of Vocational Behavior, Vol. 14 No. 2, pp. 224-247.

Corresponding authorProfessor Paul Sparrow can be contacted at: p.sparrow@lancaster.ac.uk

To purchase reprints of this article please e-mail: reprints@emeraldinsight.comOr visit our web site for further details: www.emeraldinsight.com/reprints

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