Abstract
At least as far back as the work of Mayo and his colleagues, which spawned the Human Relations School, scholars and practitioners have pursued the holy grail of discovering how to improve organizational performance while simultaneously enhancing the quality of employees’ working lives. Since the work of the Human Relations school, we have seen a variety of contributions including advocacy of post-Fordist production, post-bureaucratic organizations, empowerment, teamwork and more recently high performance work systems. What has united these approaches is an apparent belief that within capitalist work organizations it is possible to meet both managerial and employee needs to a significant extent, without fundamentally challenging managerial prerogative. Put another way, the emphasis has been on pursuing mutual gains for managers and employees through humanistic and developmental approaches to work and management.
Jody Hoffer Gittell’s Transforming Relationships for High Performance: The Power of Relational Coordination can be seen as another contribution to this broad body of work. The central argument put forward in this book is that if organizations are to succeed in increasingly competitive and volatile environments, they are more likely to do so by pursuing ‘high-road’ approaches – emphasizing mutual gains for employers and employees – than by pursuing ‘low-road’ approaches involving cost-cutting and work intensification. Hoffer Gittell contends that the key to a high-road approach is relational coordination, which she explains as involving ‘coordinating work through high-quality communication, supported by relationships of shared goals, shared knowledge and mutual respect’ (p. 4).
Relational coordination is facilitated by what Hoffer Gittell calls ‘relational interventions’, ‘work process interventions’ and ‘structural interventions’. Relational interventions are aimed at facilitating organizational changes to enhance communication, and appear in many ways to be similar to the kind of approach associated with the organizational development (OD) movement, in that facilitators work with employees to help them develop better relationships and communication mechanisms. Work process interventions involve a collaborative process of job and process redesign to improve effectiveness and communication. Structural interventions encompass the implementation of systems which support relational coordination, such as collective accountability and reward systems, systems for information sharing and inclusive team meetings.
Essentially the argument for relational coordination is that it integrates worker skills and tasks into a whole, thereby increasing effectiveness and efficiency, but also that it creates a shared sense of identity within organizations which employees find intrinsically rewarding and motivating. To deliver maximum gains in terms of performance, relational coordination must be extended to include customers in ‘relational coproduction’, buttressed by ‘relational leadership’ and by HR systems which encourage communication and cooperation.
The book is divided into three parts, the first of which comprises five chapters covering the conceptual framework of relational coordination. The second part of the book begins with a chapter which frames relational coordination in terms of organizational change, followed by four chapters each of which presents a case study of the implementation of relational coordination in a different organization. The final part of the book devotes four chapters to presenting guidance about how organizations might go about implementing relational coordination.
Readers familiar with earlier literature on humanistic approaches to management, as well as those familiar with the organizational change literature, might well ask what is new about what Hoffer Gittell presents here. Indeed, many of the ideas presented in the book seem to echo earlier work and a critical reader might well feel that they were being served ‘old wine in new bottles’. For example, the argument that ‘If human identity is relational, then relational coordination is, quite simply, an expression of our nature as human beings’ (p. 29) is similar to the claim by the advocates of the Human Relations School that group-based work was a natural form for humans. Similarly, much of the material on relational leadership would seem very familiar to those who are familiar with Barry’s early-1990s work on distributed leadership (Barry, 1991) (although in fairness Hoffer Gittell acknowledges the overlap) or Warren Bennis’ work on the role of leaders in empowering and ‘coaching’ teams (Bennis & Townsend, 1995). The argument that changes in relationships at work must be buttressed by effective structures and HR systems can be found in much earlier work on organizational change involving the implementation of teamwork (Wellins, Byham, & Wilson, 1993). More broadly, the argument that effective communication and interdependencies at work improve performance is so widespread in managerial literature as to be largely taken for granted. Those who are familiar with the OD literature will find much of the discussion of interventions very familiar indeed.
Some readers may also feel uncomfortable with the very limited discussion of the role of unions. While unions are not ignored and while the author rebuts the myth that unions represent an obstacle to positive workplace change, nonetheless the fact that they are largely absent from the book is surprising. Readers with a background in critical sociology and organization studies are likely to find the treatment of issues of power, control and conflict rather limited. It would also be helpful to see detailed discussion of the role of institutions in fostering or hindering the implementation of relational coordination.
While it is easy to be critical, the book also has significant strengths. Most importantly, this is not simply another pop-management text of the kind which fills airport bookshops. It is a serious and worthy attempt to take a body of research-based work and translate it into a form which might assist practitioners to implement change. Hoffer Gittell has previously published a good deal of primary research on relational coordination and this forms the foundation for the ideas which are expounded in this book. Anyone who has attempted to translate their research in this way recognizes that it represents a significant challenge and Hoffer Gittell does an impressive job of translating her knowledge into a form which is likely to be digestible by practitioners. As one might expect of a book which appears aimed primarily at practitioners, there is not a great deal of research data presented. There is summary data on various associations involving relational coordination and other variables and the case studies contain some results from surveys. The richest data are the qualitative data in the form of case studies, which provide good detailed accounts of change within organizations. Given the apparent target audience for the book, the focus on case studies and the very limited use of statistical data would seem to make sense.
My feeling is that this is a book which will appeal primarily to a practitioner audience, which is likely to find it informative and useful. Academic researchers looking for theoretical or empirical novelty, particularly scholars of a critical bent, are less likely to find value in the book.