個案總覽

RJ Tuckerton, a graduate student, claimed in October 2019 that the student's privacy and other university rights were violated when a faculty member "outed" Tuckerton, who was gender transitioning. The protagonist in the case, John Schuler, was now faced with investigating Tuckerton's claims of university policy violations and a claim of retaliation for filing a complaint. The events of this case present the reader with claims made by Tuckerton, the statements by those alleged to have violated Tuckerton's rights, the statements of other witnesses, and with the university's relevant human resource policies. In studying the case, students will be confronted with an array of input, and will have to place themselves in the position of Schuler and determine if there are policy violations and make policy recommendations. The case presents an emerging issue in organizations-that of non-discrimination of transgender employees, and, with it, privacy and other protections asserted by an organization-and how an organization's policies are or are not responsive to employees.

On March 20, 2020, in an effort to stem the transmission of the COVID-19 pandemic and under the direction of government officials, Canada’s Stratford Festival halted work on its 2020 productions and ultimately postponed the entire season. Additionally, social justice issues had come to the forefront with the killing of George Floyd on May 25, 2020 in Minneapolis, Minnesota, United States. Watching the protests unfold across North America, the Stratford Festival’s executive and management team recognized the pain their black colleagues were experiencing and set their sights on doing something meaningful to champion anti-racism. The executive team offered the Black Caucus and the Indigenous Circle—two informal groups of the Stratford Festival artists and administrators—the opportunity to take over the Festival’s social media channels for a 48-hour period and to conduct a town-hall session on the Stratford Festival’s YouTube channel. The question remained, however, whether turning over the social media channel was a prudent strategy, given the difficulty of predicting the outcomes of activities that start out with good intentions.

Supplement for product 9B21C010.

The three cases provide a longitudinal account of the transformation of the Human Resource (HR) division of Mahindra's Automotive and Farm Equipment Sector (AFS). An aspirational nudge from the Managing Director about the need for a more strategic HR role triggered the transformation exercise. The follow-up diagnostic study revealed significant gaps in the readiness of the HR division for the future. The redesigned HR organisation with three pillars of Shared Services, HR Business Partners, and Centre of Excellence turned out to be quite successful. The efficiency improved, and HR gained a reputation for being a strategic partner to the business. With a high degree of standardised processes, the HR organisation seemed ready for digitisation. The three cases have been written in a way so as to provide the readers a detailed description of the diagnostic process in Case A, the restructuring and change process in Case B, and the impact of the transformation exercise in Case C.

This case describes the transformation of the HR organisation of Mahindra's AFS sector from 2013 to 2017. The CHRO and his team designed and implemented a blueprint aimed at enhancing the strategic role of HR. The migration from a traditional to a strategic role entailed anticipating and allaying apprehensions related to the change process. The case offers an opportunity to understand the interventions aimed at building and institutionalising new capabilities and making the change process acceptable to all stakeholders. Case C encapsulates the assessment of the transformation exercise from the perspective of the CHRO and the Managing Director.

This case describes the transformation of the HR organisation of Mahindra's AFS sector from 2013 to 2017. The CHRO and his team designed and implemented a blueprint aimed at enhancing the strategic role of HR. The migration from a traditional to a strategic role entailed anticipating and allaying apprehensions related to the change process. The case offers an opportunity to understand the interventions aimed at building and institutionalising new capabilities and making the change process acceptable to all stakeholders. Case C encapsulates the assessment of the transformation exercise from the perspective of the CHRO and the Managing Director.

#MeToo has become a global phenomenon since 2017, when many famous women came forward with allegations of sexual harassment (SH) against many famous men. Our purpose here is to help managers of both sexes understand their role in the wake of the #MeToo movement. We reviewed recent research on SH and #MeToo from both academic and practitioner outlets to get a pulse on what is currently being written on these topics. We also studied data we collected on current attitudes and behaviors men and women are experiencing in the wake of #MeToo, as well as examined one of the newer forms of harassment, namely online SH. We use our data and research to explore actions managers can take to prevent SH and respond to it when it occurs. In doing so, we provide new insights for business practice that both managers and scholars need to be aware of, and act upon, in the wake #MeToo.

In 2019 Southwest was the only US airline to remain profitable for nearly 50 years in a row, to never file for bankruptcy, and to never furlough or lay off employees. At the core of its profitability was a commitment, unlike other airline carriers, to keep only Boeing 737s in their fleet, thereby streamlining operational costs and training practices. This keep-it-simple corporate strategy was supported by a strong sense of community and shared values that fostered a cross-functional cohesion among Southwest employees-a culture that other low-cost carriers found difficult to replicate. However, The company's keep-it-simple corporate strategy was tested in March 2019 when Southwest (along with other airlines ) was forced to ground 34 of its newest 737 MAX aircraft, after the Federal Aviation Administration cited safety concerns following the crash of two 737 MAX planes. As a result, Southwest considered parting with its long standing single carrier policy. In this case, students will be asked to consider what ripple effect a move away from a single-source vendor might have on the company's highly efficient operations and organizational culture.

Despite the high rate of churn in the labor market today, many companies pay scant attention to offboarding employees. That's a mistake, say the authors, who argue that offboarding is an increasingly vital part of talent management--and an opportunity to create long-term value. Drawing on their scholarly research and interviews with HR professionals, the authors recommend a number of best practices. One is to plan well in advance for employees' departures: Because few people stay at one company for their whole career, it's important to have frank conversations throughout their tenure about their goals and prospects for advancement. When employees do choose to leave or get laid off, managers should acknowledge their contributions, provide resources to support them through the transition, and use exit interviews as an opportunity for mutual learning. Companies should also create formal alumni programs to keep former workers connected to the organization. Together, these offboarding practices can create a cadre of ex-employees who become valuable customers, suppliers, boomerang employees, mentors to current workers, and ambassadors for the firm.

The skills needed in many roles are continually changing--and sources of talent are too. PLUS a silver lining for female founders, bankruptcy in the time of Covid, the psychology of jargon, and more.

The owner of Hailey’s Handbags, a New England-based online business selling handmade products, had successfully grown her company using a limited-release sales model. However, by early 2019, complaints posted to her business’s social media accounts had become abusive and personal. The emotional impact on the owner was severe, and before she could decide how to manage the comments, she needed to first determine whether they represented legitimate complaints or if she had become a target of cyberbullying.

In 2018, the LEGO Group defined a new way of leading to enable the company to move more quickly, to make the right decisions, to deliver its mission and the commercial momentum that sustained it, and to shape the LEGO® culture in a positive way. This new way of leading would need to be modeled at the top of the organization. That was certain. But CEO, Niels Christiansen, and Chief People Officer, Loren Shuster, believed that the task of defining the new way of leading should not be done by the Executive Leadership Team or by HR. It should be developed bottom up. The LEGO Group was no longer the patriarchy it had once been under its founder, but Shuster saw that patriarchal assumptions about leadership lingered in its culture. If the LEGO Group was going to move towards a balanced system where leadership responsibility was more distributed and less hierarchical, it would be ironic to impose this top down. A better way to start would be to invite people from different levels and different functions of the organization to answer the question: What kind of leadership do we need in the LEGO Group and how can we embed the new way of leading into the fabric of the organization so that it can be self-generative? Case A describes the process that the LEGO Group used to create what they called The Leadership Playground and bring it to life in the company.

In 2018, the LEGO Group defined a new way of leading to enable the company to move more quickly, to make the right decisions, to deliver its mission and the commercial momentum that sustained it, and to shape the LEGO® culture in a positive way. This new way of leading would need to be modeled at the top of the organization. That was certain. But CEO, Niels Christiansen, and Chief People Officer, Loren Shuster, believed that the task of defining the new way of leading should not be done by the Executive Leadership Team or by HR. It should be developed bottom up. The LEGO Group was no longer the patriarchy it had once been under its founder, but Shuster saw that patriarchal assumptions about leadership lingered in its culture. If the LEGO Group was going to move towards a balanced system where leadership responsibility was more distributed and less hierarchical, it would be ironic to impose this top down. A better way to start would be to invite people from different levels and different functions of the organization to answer the question: What kind of leadership do we need in the LEGO Group and how can we embed the new way of leading into the fabric of the organization so that it can be self-generative? Case B describes how the LEGO Group brings the Leadership Playground to life in the company.

inFeedo leveraged its understanding of artificial intelligence (AI), NLP, and machine learning (ML) techniques to develop a chatbot named Amber. With CEO sponsorship within client organizations, Amber engaged with employees at pre-defined periods as a "virtual assistant of the CEO." The aggregated chat sentiment provided employee engagement analytics to the leadership team. The platform predicted disengaged employees and identified the attrition risk. Besides, compared to the annual engagement surveys, the broad-based sentiment analysis was more effective in reporting employee engagement. Employee engagement measurement involves massive spending by organizations. However, these engagement surveys are costly, face delays in translating information to action, and lack actionable insights for the practitioners. The case touches upon issues such as the use of "Amber" as a replacement for the conventional practices within HR, the changing role of HR, the efficacy of the use of AI in transactional HR work, ethics of using AI, and challenges of instituting a culture change within the HR divisions. Can leveraging AI help the function break out of its "administrative" image and emerge as a strategic contributor to the organization's direction-setting exercises? Additionally, the ethics around the use of AI-based chatbots and the resulting data analytics present challenges to both the users and the advocates of this new system.

VA Tech Wabag, an Indian MNC firm was an industry leader in total water management. The case presents an alternative method of talent development that focuses on leveraging an individual's strengths against the practice of focusing on functional and behavioral competencies and develops training need analysis (TNA). This approach appears to be contrary to the ongoing deficit culture, which concentrates on weaknesses. The HR head of the organization resists the paradigm shift in the approach to capability development. The case addresses three principal issues. 1. Understanding the strengths-based approach to capability building 2. Clarifying the competency-based approach to talent management 3. Building leadership capabilities by understanding and leveraging individual strengths and appreciating the role of competencies in enabling success. All of this raises the question of the role of competency frameworks, the TNA approach's limitations, and synergizing both ideologies. Some specific questions raised by this case are: Is it possible to build capability by adopting either approach? What are the challenges of adopting strengths-based approach for recruitment? How can the organization leverage team strengths? Understanding these dichotomies can help L&D functions manage the best out of their talent and build effective leaders.

In this article, we describe how the black ceiling upheld by the powerful institutional logics of patriarchy and white supremacy, inordinately challenging and interlocking systemic barriers to leadership advancement leads to the dearth of Afro-Diasporic women in senior corporate leadership positions and pathologizes Afro-Diasporic women as multiple outsiders. As a result, Afro-Diasporic women's well-being in the workplace is compromised and many adopt coping and survival strategies to navigate a myriad of relational and environmental phenomena, such as spirit murder, emotional taxation, social closure, white privilege, and white fragility. To navigate and ameliorate these dynamics, we advance several individual, relational, and organizational strategies that support Afro-Diasporic women thriving in the workplace.

Companies increasingly embrace the new types of work associated with coworking spaces. Coworking spaces started with the idea of a melting pot of open social interaction, collaboration, entrepreneurship, and innovation for freelancers, new ventures, or solo entrepreneurs. Companies may use coworking spaces to invigorate targets and further motivate and inspire their employees. Fundamental to achieving those targets is the coworking space's interior design and architecture that incorporates emotional and social values that may benefit companies. Our sociomateriality perspective helps to analyze conditions in coworking spaces and guides suggestions on how companies revitalize by using coworking spaces. The purposeful design of the different social and work areas in coworking spaces can improve communication, collaboration, and innovation in companies.

Many organizations are curtailing or even abandoning performance management because of difficulties measuring performance and disruptions in performance-based pay due to the COVID-19 crisis. Contrary to this growing and troubling trend, we argue that it is especially important during the crisis to not only continue but also strengthen performance management to communicate a firm's strategic direction, collect valuable business data, provide critical feedback to individuals and workgroups, protect organizations from legal risks, and retain top talent. To do so, we offer a solution to overcome the challenges associated with measuring performance during a crisis. Specifically, we extend and expand upon the well-established Net Promoter Score measure in marketing and introduce the Performance Promoter Score (PPS) to measure performance. We offer evidence based recommendations for collecting PPS information for individuals, workgroups, and other collectives, computing a Net Performance Promoter Score (NPPS); using multiple sources of performance data, and using PPS for administrative and developmental purposes as well as to provide more frequent performance check-ins. PPS is a convenient, practical, relevant, and useful performance measure during a crisis such as the COVID-19 pandemic, but it is also an innovation that will be useful long after the pandemic is over.

Workers who come from lower social-class origins in the United States are 32% less likely to become managers than those who come from higher social-class origins. That represents a disadvantage even greater than the one experienced by women compared with men (27%) or Blacks compared with whites (25%). Social class disadvantage in the workplace prevails in every major economy around the world. In discriminating against people who come from a lower social class, we're discriminating against a majority of the work­force--a grossly harmful indulgence, especially when you consider what happens if you don't discriminate. According to the author's research, GDP is higher per capita in countries where more managers come from lower social-class origins. Companies pay a lot of attention to issues of gender and race, and for very good reason. In this article, the author argues that it's time to focus equally on social class disadvantage. In doing so, he notes, firms reinforce their efforts to combat other forms of disadvantage. He explores the root causes of the problem and lays out the most promising interventions that are emerging from research and practice to help remediate it.

Across society, volunteerism has been stagnant or trending slightly downward in recent years. In the corporate world, however, it has been on the rise. In fact, paid time off for volunteering is one of the few employee benefits that has increased significantly over the past five years. The benefits of well-designed corporate volunteer programs have been clearly established: They boost productivity, increase employee engagement, and improve hiring and retention, to name just a few. But too often, firms' programs fall short. In designing their volunteer programs, companies fall prey to common pitfalls: They blindly copy what other firms are doing, prioritize leaders' pet projects, or pressure employees to participate, essentially making volunteering mandatory. Such errors diminish the value of the programs to the company, employees, and society. Instead, firms should prioritize meaning, balance top-down structure with bottom-up passion, and seek to involve a variety of stakeholders in their initiatives.