Dive Brief:
- In an article at Harvard Business Review, HR guru Peter Cappelli makes a case that innovative business practices in the 1980s and 1990s were about redefining the role of supervisor—from controlling dictator to empowering coach—and tapping into the discretionary effort that employees could produce when they were engaged in their work.
- But look inside most companies today and you won't find those old strategies, he writes.
- Today, he says, much management is based on a model of formal authority and “hard” incentives: Bosses get bonuses when their units succeed or fired when their units fail. It’s as if businesses have forgotten that, in this case, the old ways actually work, he writes.
Dive Insight:
Business schools should do their part to remind businesses how they have gone astray. Understanding HR innovations, Cappelli writes, and figuring out which ones are effective is, sadly, a low priority in the world of scholarship.
In most companies, the HR staff is many times larger than the marketing department—yet while all leading B-schools have a marketing department, almost none have any HR-dedicated faculty at all.
Cappelli writes that schools need to step up, citing the State University of New York at Albany as one of the few trying to meet the market, with a program that blends information technology and human resources.
Other schools should follow suit if they want to help organizations and leaders thrive, he writes.
