Industrial/Organizational Scholar-Practitioner Gap

Current Industrial/Organizational Practices

Any organization's success depends on the accomplishments and contributions of its workforce. Each employee's input impacts the organization's revenue, brand, engagement scores, retention, operational excellence, and consumer market. Today, organizations worldwide emphasize the importance of further developing their employees by investing in programs that enhance existing knowledge, help obtain new knowledge and skills, and increase engagement so that employees remain committed to their work and the organization. Such programs depend on proven methodologies through research, best practices, and practicality. To institute programs that positively impact the development of employees, talent development professionals, and human resources management (HRM) professionals depend on industrial/organizational practices. Industrial is "devoted to the goal of increasing productivity" (Landy & Conte, 2016, p. 19), while organizational places emphasis on the behavior of the employees in the organization when exposed to common goals (Landy & Conte, 2016, p. 19).

Ben Cardenas, a scholar-practitioner, is the Sr. Manager of Enterprise Learning & Talent for Harbor Freight Tools. In his role, Cardenas impacts talent development solutions across the enterprise. He conducted research on current I/O practices to better understand the scholar-practitioner gap. This research identifies three current industrial/organizational practices instituted across many organizations: talent management, performance management, and employee engagement. Organizations must institute practices that develop the associate's skills and knowledge to impact productivity positively. Talent management, performance management, and employee engagement practices are critical to maintaining consistency with developing talent and planning for future essential roles of the organization.?

Talent management (TM) focuses on assessing the organization's talent to determine top talent for future critical roles. The talent management process is comprised of "applying specific measurement methodologies to employees in order to determine their potential current and longer-term competencies and contribution to the organization, for the purposes of facilitating talent management" (Lee, 2018, p. 3). Many organizations commonly follow a nine-box grid model to assess and manage existing talent. The model identifies high potentials, high performers, core, low performers, and low potential. Sometimes, talent is determined by plotting the Y-Axis representing potential and the X-Axis describing performance and results. Talent review can take place semi-annually with the senior leaders of the department in partnership with the talent development team. The existing controversy can lie in the transparency of the plotting results with the impacted groups. At times senior leaders of the organization do not want to share the results of the talent management process with the impacted groups.

In contrast, some talent management professionals encourage the transparency of the process with the impacted groups because it can lead to opportunities to re-engage or sustain the engagement of top performers and high potentials. The controversy is common among many other organizations. According to the research, "the advantage of revealing talent status to individuals is that this potentially affords motivation and commitment to those identified in talent pools or higher measurement categories" (Lee, 2018, p. 8). Cardenas believes organizations should institute a more transparent process because a high performer can become a flight risk liability. Engaging the impacted groups and being transparent can potentially continue to retain the top talent, eliminating the flight risk threat. Talent is indispensable; therefore, organizations must leverage their talent management process to retain top talent.

Performance management (PM) focuses on managing the performance and expectations of the employees. "PM is seen as a broader set of ongoing activities aimed at managing employee performance" (Schleicher et al., 2018, p. 2210). Through formal and informal processes, performance management benefits organizations in aligning employees, resources, and systems to meet their intentional goals. Cardenas is experienced with three stage performance management process. Stage one and stage three are the formal feedback and rating process. Stage two is the informal performance feedback process, where managers coach and provide additional support to the employee to ensure that they are trending positively with their performance and expectations.?

In the first stage, which happens at the beginning of the fiscal year, the manager establishes goals and development activities based on strategic department objectives for the fiscal year.?

?Stage two enables the managers to address potential performance issues through informal discussions. During this time, managers work out a plan to help the associate improve and check in regularly to ensure performance is improving.?

The third stage is the formal process. The manager takes time to assess performance and assign a performance rating to the associate. This stage objectively assesses the associate's performance and progress against their year-long objectives. The manager provides feedback to the associate based on personality strengths and performance opportunities.

Best practices of formal performance management can lead to a mutual understanding of goals and activities based on needs to be accomplished during the calendar or fiscal year. Such goals align with the team or department's strategic yearly goals that trickle up to the organization's strategy. An informal performance management process enables managers to review progress on assigned activities and goals based on specific key measured indicators through regular check-ins, team meetings, or one-on-one formal conversations.

There are numerous definitions of what employee engagement means. "Cognitive, emotional, and behavioral energy an employee directs toward positive organizational outcomes" (Shuck et al., 2014, p. 240). There are also many different approaches that organizations take to engage and sustain the engagement of their workforce. However, based on vast experience working in diverse organizations, trust is one common factor that fosters employee engagement in the organization. Trust between the manager and their associates establishes mutual respect and fosters long-term loyalty, which leads to sustained employee engagement.

Leaders that are loyal, authentic, and resourceful are qualities that make them trustworthy. These qualities enable them to influence their teams to perform and achieve individual and team objectives. When teams perform at their best, they feel a sense of meaningful accomplishment. Employees pursue the opportunity to do meaningful work and contribute to the team's and organization's success; when that is achieved, it sustains engagement. For organizations to determine the level of engagement among their workforce, there needs to be a measurement strategy in place. There are many different approaches to measuring employee engagement. For example, conducting focus groups, stay interviews, or electronic surveys. To accurately assess the employee engagement level of the organization, all employees need to be able to participate in the measurement approach. Engagement being critical to the success of any organization, talent development partners consult their leaders on the best way to measure the engagement and what resources to use. Some companies leverage their internal departments, while others outsource.?

"Many consultancy firms are offering engagement surveys and citing case studies on increased profitability and customer satisfaction through high levels of employee engagement" (Shrotryia & Dhanda, 2020, p. 172). Commonly with organizations, employee engagement is measured through a yearly engagement survey in partnership with a third-party vendor. The survey is open for 2 weeks allowing ample time for all associates to complete and provide feedback. Anonymity is essential to enable associates to offer honest and transparent feedback. Scores are aggregated by the department and shared with the department leader. In partnership with the HR business partners, talent development team, and department leader, action plans are developed based on the engagement results to ensure actionable items are implemented to improve the areas specified by the survey results.

I/O Practices Comparison Analysis

Scholar practitioner Gap

Organizations have diverse (different generations) workforces. Employees bring different values, attitudes, and motivators into the workplace. Traditionalist and baby boomer generations "are characterized as having a hard work ethic, being loyal to their employers, serving as long-term employees, and striving to build a legacy" (Brown, 2012, p. 29). Brown (2012) states that the younger generations, such as Generation Y and Generation Z, embrace diversity, work-life balance, and meaningful work.?

To maintain employees engaged in their work and committed to the organization, leaders need to focus on identifying the generational breakdown in their workforce. Doing so will allow customizing employee engagement studies that understand each generation's diverse values and motivators. To better understand the employee's engagement level, leaders need to recognize that "each person is unique, has individual influences, ethics, and values come from different cultures and countries and may have been raised differently" (Cekada, 2012, p. 40).?

Understanding the engagement level breakdown from a diverse workforce enables organizational leaders to develop and institute processes, structures, and job positions that offer meaningfulness in the scope of responsibility and work expectations. High levels of employee engagement and continuing to improve performance require organizations to acknowledge that every employee wants to do work that is meaningful to them and contributes to the team's and organization's success.??

Based on current employee engagement practices that Cardenas has experienced through his profession, the gap identified is that some organizations are not focusing on the generational breakdown in the workforce to determine commonalities between the generations that can lead to higher engagement levels. Organizations are focused on understanding the workforce engagement levels as a collective entity versus taking an approach to identify commonalities. Commonalities are essential in developing engagement solutions because it permits the opportunity to institute comprehensive solutions that create a desire for the workforce to perform at its best and remain committed.

Conclusion

Each employee's input impacts the organization's revenue, brand, engagement scores, retention, operational excellence, and consumer market. Industrial/organizational practices aid in developing the talent of the organization. As noted in this research, talent management, performance management, and employee engagement are methods organizations worldwide leverage for talent development—proven methodologies through research, best practices, and practicality.?

Organizations emphasize the importance of further developing their employees by investing in programs that enhance existing knowledge, help obtain new knowledge and skills, and increase engagement so that employees remain committed to their work and the organization.?

To institute programs that positively impact the development of employees, talent development professionals, and human resources management (HRM) professionals depend on industrial/organizational practices.

References

Brown, S. E., F.A.C.H.E. (2012). Attracting, challenging, and leading a multigenerational workforce-A perspective. Frontiers of Health Services Management, 29(1), 29-33.

Cekada, T. L. (2012). Training a multigenerational workforce. Professional Safety, 57(3), 40-44.

Cote, R. (2019). Motivating multigenerational employees: Is there a difference??Journal of Leadership, Accountability and Ethics, 16(2), 15-29.?

Goodman, H. (2022) The Evolution of Performance Management. Better works.?https://www.betterworks.com/magazine/the-evolution-of-performance-management/

Landy, F. J., & Conte, J. M. (2016).?Work in the 21st century: An introduction to industrial and organizational psychology?(5th ed.). Wiley.

Lee, G.J. (2018). Talent measurement: A holistic model and routes forward.

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Schleicher, D. J., Baumann, H. M., Sullivan, D. W., Levy, P. E., Hargrove, D. C., & Barros-Rivera, B. A. (2018). Putting the system into performance management systems: A review and agenda for performance management research.?Journal of Management,?44(6), 2209-2245.?DOI: 10.1177/0149206318755303

Shrotryia, V. K., & Dhanda, U. (2020). Exploring employee engagement using grounded theory: Experiences from the best firms in India.?Vision (New Delhi, India),?24(2), 171-183.?DOI: 10.1177/0972262920915070

Shuck, B., Twyford, D., Reio Jr, T. G., & Shuck, A. (2014). Human resource development practices and employee engagement: Examining the connection with employee turnover intentions.?Human Resource Development Quarterly,?25(2), 239-270.?DOI: 10.1002/hrdq.21190

Swailes, S. (2016). The cultural evolution of talent management: A memetic analysis.?Human Resource Development Review,?15(3), 340-358.?DOI: 10.1177/1534484316664812

Meyers, M. C, & Woerkom, M. V. (2013) The influence of underlying philosophies on talent management: Theory, implications for practice, and research agenda.?Journal of World Business.?DOI:10.1016/j.jwb.2013.11.003

Vaidyanathan, G. & Maheshwarit, U. (2016) Employee Engagement: A Literature Review.?International Journal of Human Resources, 9(1), 63.?DOI:10.5296/ijhrs.v9i1.14167