The Meaning and Role of Organizational Advocacy: Responsibility and Accountability in the Workplace

(Hardback)

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The term organizational advocacy offers a new way to look at the interaction between people and their organizations. What each of us thinks, says, does in the workplace, and the things we appreciate and the things that displease us-- according to organizational advocacy--really matter. Organizational advocacy puts responsibility and accountability for achievement where it should be, not with some distant manager but on us as individuals. Seiling's book is an easily understood tour of this challenging new concept and how it works from the ground up. Seldom has it been made so clear, as Seiling does here, that we and our organizations really are one. Seiling begins by introducing organizational advocacy and its foundation upon task performance and partnering relationships. Seiling agrees that readers will have questions and concerns, and that barriers to just understanding OA, let alone using it, do exist. She maintains that the activities contributing to or among high performance systems have been ignored in the past. Management simply assumed that the people they hired were automatically contributive and automatically capable of productive relationships. This serious misreading leads to misunderstood expectations of people, disconnection from the organization, and eventually to deteriorated productivity. Seiling summarizes all this in six subsets, making clear that personal responsibility, distributed accountability, and shared leadership are vital to an organization's health and performance. Using cases drawn from some of the nation's most respected companies and public organizations, Seiling makes an important contribution to the practice of human resource management, and to executive understanding of how to make organizations more productive.

Reviews

Drawing on and integrating a rich and diverse collection of recent research in the management and organizational behavior literature, the author effectively develops a common sense concept of advocacy in organizations. This book should appeal to the academic community, OD practitioners, and employees seeking to grow and enhance their contribution to the organization. This book shows it is not only possible, but highly desirable, to put responsibility, accountability for results, and personal growth where they should be: not with the distant manager but in the hands of all employees with their unique and critical roles. It's an important contribution to the field and an investment that should pay off handsomely in terms of professional growth.-Personnel Psychology
"Drawing on and integrating a rich and diverse collection of recent research in the management and organizational behavior literature, the author effectively develops a common sense concept of advocacy in organizations. This book should appeal to the academic community, OD practitioners, and employees seeking to grow and enhance their contribution to the organization. This book shows it is not only possible, but highly desirable, to put responsibility, accountability for results, and personal growth where they should be: not with the distant manager but in the hands of all employees with their unique and critical roles. It's an important contribution to the field and an investment that should pay off handsomely in terms of professional growth."-Personnel Psychology

Author Bio

Jane Galloway Seiling is founder of Business Performance Group, Lima