LESSON 26: CARING ORGANIZATION

Today we are going to learn about Caring Organization.

Points to be covered in this lesson:

Concept and Characteristics of CaringOrganizationWhat is a company that cares? According to Marci Koblenz, a founder of Companies That Care, “A company that cares is one that sees creating a positive work environment for employees, andbeing an active corporate citizen, as integral components of their identity. Their day-to-day business practices clearly reflect thosepriorities.”

The Center for Companies That Care acknowledges the leadership of organizations that take social responsibility for their internal and external communities seriously. “A company that cares embraces social responsibility as a duty, but is also quick to acknowledge that the caring they demonstrate is returnedto them many times over in the form of greater employeecommitment and better business results. In this way, ethics andeconomics drive Companies That Care because both are requiredfor a sustainable future,” adds Koblenz.

10 Characteristics of Caring OrganizationsThose Companies who have deep commitment to elevating the quality of the work environment for their employees and the quality of life for people in the broader community. By definitiona “Company That Cares,”

1. Sustains a work environment founded on dignity and respect for all employees

2. Makes employees feel their jobs are important

3. Cultivates the full potential of all employees

4. Encourages individual pursuit of work/life balance

5. Enables the well-being of individuals and their families through compensation, benefits, policies and practices

6. Develops great bosses who excel at managing people as well as results

7. Appreciates and recognize the contributions of people whowork there

8. Establishes and communicate standards for ethical behavior and integrity

9. Gets involved in community endeavors and/or public policy

10. Considers the human toll when making business decisions.

Organizational Practices that Promote Care

• Change the culture - talk about these issues without being worried about being a cry-baby

• Address risk management issues in a proactive, timely and thorough way

• Aggressively promote good self-care behaviours

• Aggressively address safety and security concerns of staff

• Institutionalize psychological/spiritual support at all stages for assignments (prior to, during and after)

• Provide education and support for home office staff to provide quality services

• Provide support to immediate family members

We have so far looked at organizations as having two

aspects:

• First, we have considered organizations as hierarchical collections of autonomous individuals who are connected to each other and to the organization by contractual agree-ments. The employee signs a contract agreeing to carry out thetasks spelled out in the “job description” in return for a wagethat the employer agrees to pay him or her. Employees taketheir orders from ranked tiers of managers arranged in a hierarchy of authority, at the top of which sit the CEO and his or her top management staff, and at the bottom ofwhich stand the workers who perform the actual labor of the organization. The whole organization pur-sues the goal of profit. We have called this aspect of the organization the “ra-tional” organization.

• Crisscrossing the rational organization’s formal lines of authority is a second system of power, which we have called the “political” organization. The political elements of the organization consist of the network of power relationships, coalitions, and informal lines of communication through which individuals seek to achieve their personal goals and seek to get others to help them achieve their personal goals through the exercise of power.

• It is possible to conceive of organizations as consisting of yet another quite different set of relationships. Recent thinkers have suggested that orga-nizations can and should be thought of also as networks of relationships in which“connected selves” form webs of on-going personal relationships with other “connected selves.”

In this aspect of the organization the focus of em-ployees is not on the pursuit of profit, nor on the pursuit of personal goals,but on caring for those particular individuals who make up theorganization and those with whom the organization interacts.We encounter this aspect of the organization when we makefriends with the people with whom we work, come to care forthem, look out for their well being, and seek to deepen andpreserve these caring relationships. Employers, too, may growclose to their employees, deepening their relationships withemployees, and coming to seek ways of caring for the particularneeds of these particular individuals and of develop- ing theirfull potential.

When a fire destroyed the main plant of Malden Mills, for example, the CEO, Aaron Feuerstein, refused to layoff the idled workers but continued to pay them from his own pocket even though they were not working, saying that they were “part of

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the enterprise, not a cost cen-ter to be cut. They’ve been with me for a long time. We’ve been good to each other, and there’s a deeprealization of that.” The members of an organization may befriend even their clients and customers, truly caring for them andgen-uinely seeking to develop and improve the well beingof those particular cus-tomers whom they encounter. Such caringfor the well being of customers is most evident, perhaps, inorganizations of professionals that provide services for their clients, such as hospitals, law firms, and consulting firms that have on-going relationships with their clients, as well as of pharmaceutical compa-nies that provide life-saving medicinesfor people. Merck, Inc., a very suc-cessful pharmaceutical company, for example, developed and gave away at no charge a cure for river blindness that it saw one group of customers desper-ately needed but could not afford.

This aspect of organizational life is not adequately described by the con-tractual model that underlies the “rational” organiza-tion, nor by the power no-tions that underlie the “political” organization. It is, perhaps, best described as “the caring organization” in which the dominant moral concepts are those that arise from an ethic of care.

Jeanne M. Liedtka describes the caring organiza-tion as that

organization, or part of the organization, in which caring is: a.Focused entirely on persons, not “quality,” “profits,” or any of

the other kinds of ideas that much of today’s “care-talk”seems to revolve around;

b. Undertaken as an end in and of itself, and not merely a means toward achieving quality, profits, etc.

c. Essentially personal, in that it ultimately involves particular individuals engrossed, at a subjective level, in caring for other particular individuals;

d. Growth-enhancing for the cared-for, in that it moves them towards the use and development of their full capacities, within the context of their self-defined needs and aspirations.

It has been argued that business organizations in which such caring rela-tionships flourish will exhibit better economic performance than the organiza-tion which restricts itself to the contractual and power relationships of the rational and political organization. In the caring organization trust flourishes because“one needs to be trusting if one sees oneself as interdependent and connected.” Because trust flourishes in the caring organiza-tion, the organi-zation does not have to invest resources in monitoring its employees and try-ing to make sure that they do not violate their contractual agreements.

Thus, caring lowers the costs of running an organization and reduces the “costs of disciplinary actions, theft, absenteeism, poormorale and motivation.” (In the genuinely caring organi- zation,of course, caring is not motivated by the desire to reduce suchcosts but is pursued for its own sake.) It has also been argued thatbusiness organizations in which caring flourishes develop aconcern for serving the customer and for creating customer valuethat in turn enables such organizations to achieve a competitiveadvantage over other organizations. For in such a businessorganization the focus is not on producing differentiated or lowcost products for growing markets, but on

creating value for particular customers and remaining tuned to their evolving needs. Such a focus on know-ing and serving the customer, it is argued, enables the company to continually adapt to the rapid changes that characterize most markets today. Moreover, the caring that gives rise to a focus on the customer, can also inspire and motivate employees to excel in a way that contractual and power relations do not. Bartlett and Ghoshal, for example, argue:

“But . . . contractually based relationships do not inspire the extraordinary effort and sustained commitment required to deliver consistently superior performance. For that, companies need employees who care, who have a strong emotional link with the organization.”

There may be few, perhaps even no organizations that perfectly em-body the caring organization. But some well-known firms come close. W. L. Gore & Associates, Inc., for example, the extremely successful company that invented and now manufac-tures the well-known “GORE-TEX” line of fab-rics is an organization, which has no managers, no titles, and no hierarchy.

In-stead, every employee is left free to decide for him or herself what job each will voluntarily commit to do according to where each feels he or she can make the best contribution. Leaders emerge when employees are willing to follow them because they are convinced the leader has a worthwhile idea or project. Every employee has one or more “sponsors” who work closely as coaches to help the employee develop to his or her full poten-tial, and who serve as the employee’s “advocates” when a“compensation team” (consist-ing of fellow employees) reviewsthe contribution the employee has made in order to decide whatcompensation the employee should receive the follow-ing year.Company units are kept small (under 200 people) so thateveryone can get to know everyone else and so that allcommunications are open, di-rect, and person-to- person. Insuch an unstructured and unmanaged organi-zation, all workdone within the organization must ultimately rely on therelationships that employees form with each other. And, overtime, employ-ees come to care for each other and for the customers for whom they are try-ing to create value.

Although organizations like W. L. Gore are rare, still most organizations, to a greater or lesser extent, have aspects of the caring organization. In some organizations, such as W. L. Gore, the caring organization dominates the ra-tional and political aspects of the organization. In most others, however, the contractual and political aspects are more prominent. Yet in many, there are at least some employees and managers who respond to the demands of caring by nurturing the relation-ships they have with each other and by attending to the concrete and particular needs of each other and of their customers.

In the contractual model, the key ethical issues arise from the potential for violations of the contractual relation. In the political model, the key ethi-cal issues arise from the potential for the misuse of power.

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What are the key ethical issues from the perspective of the caring organization?

There are two: the potential for caring too much and the potential for not caring enough.

1. The moral problems of caring too much. The needs of those for whom we care can demand a response from us that can overwhelm us, leading, eventually to “bum out.” Here theconflict is between the needs of others and the needs of theself. Several writers have argued that the ethic of care requiresachievement of a mature balance between caring for the needsof others and caring for one’s own needs.

Others have argued that “burnout” occurs not because people are over-whelmed by the needs of others, but because organizations place bureaucratic bur-dens on caregivers and limit their autonomy and influence in decision-making. In addition to conflicts between the needs of the self and the needs of others, the demands of caringcan lead to a different kind of conflict: the needs of those forwhom we care can demand a response that conflicts with what we may feel we owe others. This is the problem of balancing partiality toward those for whom we care, with the impartial demands of other moral considerations, such as theimpartial de-mands of fairness or of moral rights. Aperson, for example, may be tom be-tween caring for a friendwho is violating company policy, and fairness toward the company that requires that such violations be reported. Which demand should be satisfied: the demands of caring partiality or the demands of impartial morality?

2. The moral problems of not caring enough. More pressing,however, are failures to live up to the demands of caring. Thismay happen on a personal basis or on an organizational level.We may personally see a fellow employee or a customer inneed, but fatigue, self-interest, or simply disinterest, may leadus to ignore that need. Or, on a broader organizational level, the entire organization may system- atically drive out caring,through indiscriminate layoffs, through the creation of largeimpersonalized bureaucracies, through the use of managerial styles that see employees as disposable costs, or through theuse of reward systems that dis-courage caring and rewardcompetitiveness.

How should these kinds of moral issues be resolved? At this time, un-fortunately, the answers are not clear. Research and thinking on the caring or-ganization and caring in organizations is so recent that no clear consensus hasemerged on how issues such as these should be resolved. Wehave come here to the very edges of current thinking in ethics.

Overview• “A company that cares is one that sees creating a positive

work environment for employees, and being an active corporate citizen, as integral components of their identity. Their day-to-day business practices clearly reflect those priorities.” ~ Marci Koblenz

ActivityWhat are the characteristics of Caring Organization? What are the organizational practices that promote care?

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