Exploring Employee Engagement, Globalization, and Christian Worldview
Ella Gael Njike
School of Business
Liberty University
Shaping the Future of HR
When employees become unhappy with an organization, the tend to develop behaviors that hamper profits and productivity. Gupta & Sharma (2016) stated that employee engagement appears to be critical in this volatile global economy. The role of HR here is to engage the employees to invest effort in their behavior towards the organization and deliver the desired business results needed. In this paper, we will try to explore strategies essential for the HR to improve the workplace performance. We will also explore the integration of a Christian world view at work with various approaches.
What drives growth, success, and profit in an organization is innovation. Innovation comes with HR committing to the recruitment, retention, and strategic support of the employees (Agrawal, 2012). The way the HR treats the employees and the respect they show to them may set the pace for performance acceptance and retention. Also, globalization and offshore outsourcing help the HR to internationalize activities, which has also created management issues as the workplace become full of skillful candidates (Karjalainen, 2010). He also argued that globalization has affected and changed functions of organizations. However, Valentine et al (2020), perceived that the HR must help the employees understand what skills are needed to ne able to fit in the roles or the positions within the organization. This initiative can truly help improve job satisfaction, employee engagement and employee retention.
HR-Practice Implications Strategic Recruitment and Selection
An important HR-implication relates to diversity consideration. When we talk of diversity, we mean fostering for equal opportunity, equal employment, and equal laws. Keller (2012) describes this implication and put the employees at the center of the organization’s problem-solving process. The employees are considered the most important people in this diversity implication. Hardy (1990) and (Eddleston, Kellermanns & Kidwell, 2018), talk of stewardship. Stewardship serves as a support to relationship-centered collaboration between the employees in the organization. Most firms that apply it as a facilitator of trustworthy and organizational behavior in managers. It also fosters moral obligations that bind the employees and their respective organizations to work together on specific goals without trying to double cross anyone. Hardy (1910) also maintained that God’s intention in the beginning was to make people interdependent to foster collaborative work and service to each other. It is important for employees to find their own place in their workplace with a system of mutual support, so that they could implement God’s way of caring for humans by investing themselves not only in the divine economy but also in the environment in which they find themselves.
Employee relations are important for HR practices. HR must provide the counselling, and the coaching which will determine which adequate responsibilities should be assigned to which employee. They must implement different metrics to help understand the strengths and weaknesses of the employees as well as helping them develop new skills. Well-trained employees would bring good and effective results to the organization as their work quality and ethics would continue to improve.
Christian Worldview
Hardy (1990) traces the theological evolution of Christian thoughts relative to work in God’s world. Work should be intended in unlocking potentials, giving people a purpose, promoting human flourishing in the society. Keller, (2012) stated that work should not be a necessary evil but rather a way a serving God. People should understand God’s intention when he created work; that of blessing rather than harming. People were created in God’s image as it is written in the book of Genesis, to use work in a way that uniquely blesses the world. The more people discover the intended goodness of work, the more one realizes how to use their gifts to serve God’s purposes for creation.
References
Eddleston, K. A., Kellermanns, F. W., & Kidwell, R. E. (2018). Managing family members: How monitoring and collaboration affect extra‐role behavior in family firms. Human Resource Management, 57(5), 957-977.
Gupta, N., Sharma, V., (2016). Exploring employee engagement. A way to better business performance. Global business review. https://doi.org/10.1177/0972150916631082
Hardy, L. (1990). The fabric of this world: Inquiries into calling, career choice, and the design of human work. Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans.
Karjalainen, H. (2010). Can an organizational culture solve multicultural human resources management problems? Management International, 14, 99-114. doi:10.7202/044662ar
Keller, T. (2012). Every good endeavor: Connecting your work to God’s work. New York, NY: Dutton/Penguin Group.
King James Bible. (2008). Oxford University Press. (Original work published 1769)
Lin, C. H. V., Sanders, K., Sun, J. M. J., Shipton, H., & Mooi, E. A. (2016). From Customer‐Oriented Strategy to Organizational Financial Performance: The Role of Human Resource Management and Customer‐Linking Capability. British Journal of Management, 27(1), 21-37.
Valentine, S.R. et al. (2020). Human Resource Management (16th ed.). Boston, MA: Cengage.