Hello OB and HR colleagues!
Apologies for cross-postings.
I want to share a new book from Julian Barling with you, since we no longer have book reviews. Many of you already know him well (and his previous book on The Science of Leadership). I attended Julian's talk yesterday based on his new book, Brave New Workplace! In his book/presentation, Julian highlighted how organizations and their employees must now adopt new ways of working to achieve productive, healthy, and safe workplaces following a period of tremendous societal upheaval.
Julian began with the premise that we have an opportunity to create the environments in which employees can flourish, and organizations can thrive. His work drew from research across I/O psychology, occupational health psychology, and organizational behavior. It's a great synthesis of almost a century of research and lessons from organizations. He identified seven elements integral to productive, healthy and safe workplace: high quality leadership, autonomy, belonging, fairness, growth, meaning, and safety.
Julian also touched on many contemporary issues organizations today, such as leadership during the COVID-19 pandemic, belonging and remote work, autonomy and electronic performance monitoring, the vicarious experience of fairness, whether training and development are cost-effective, meaning and "dirty work," young workers, and workplace safety. Julian also concluded with many pressing social issues that organizations face, including the climate crisis and Black Lives Matter.
I highly recommend the title for a grad OB seminar!
Reference:
Barling, J. (2023). Brave New Workplace: Designing Productive, Healthy and Safe Organizations (NY: Oxford University Press, 2023).
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Eddy Ng
Queen's University
Kingston ON
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