Driving Fear Out of the Workplace: Creating the High-Trust, High-Performance Organization

Driving Fear Out of the Workplace: Creating the High-Trust High-Performance Organization.

Ryan, IC D., and Oestreich, D. K. (1998).

(Second Editon). San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Reviewed by David P. Moxley

IF ANY SOCIAL INSTITUTION has experienced considerable change in American society, it is the institution of work. Work is at center stage of almost everyone's daily life and the structuring and restructuring of work create numerous consequences for individual employees as well as their families, children, and communities. Work has become precarious, particularly since the decade of the 1970s, in which de-industrialization began to threaten what many Americans had come to view as an unalterable and stable situation, their jobs.

The loss of American preeminence in manufacturing heralded even more change in subsequent decades in which almost every sector of employment in the United States was undergoing considerable pressure to improve quality, increase productivity, and achieve efficiency. In addition to these growing expectations concerning performance, workers in the United States faced accelerating expectations concerning the advancement of competitive position while receiving few guarantees, if any, about their longevity with a particular company. Work restructuring, downsizing, outplacement, and layoffs became new features of the 1980s.

During the 1990s, the ushering in of one of the highest economic growth periods in United States history did not ease expectations concerning a worker's performance on the job. Workers in the United States have become some of the most harried laborers in the world. They work the most hours, take fewer vacations, and have less free time to either spend with their families or recreate than any other workers in the industrialized world. Many American workers experience considerable job-related stress and it is not surprising that places of employment have witnessed the emergence of threatening or menacing behavior, abusive conduct, and violence in organizations that were once seen as secure and stable environments.

The world of public and nonprofit social welfare has not been insulated from these trends as human service workers face spiraling caseloads with expectations for high quality and high productivity. In this day of "managed service delivery," legislators, funders, and regulators want more innovation, lower costs, and higher productivity in the provision of human services. The disappearance of full-time jobs and the emergence of contractual employment in the human services increase uncertainty among human service professionals about the stability and permanence of employment. Many human-service professionals wonder whether they will have permanent jobs even though these jobs are parttime, whether they will garner the benefits they need to support a decent standard of living, and whether they can build a career in one organization.

Considering this context, Driving the Fear Out of the Workplace is a timely contribution to the literature on organizational development. The content of the book is valuable to several audiences. It is valuable to professionals in the human services seeking to improve the environments of their own organizations, as well as to those human service professionals consulting with organizations to improve their performance or who help people who are coping with the negative consequences of employment. In sixteen chapters, the authors lay out fear in the work setting as a problem and reveal its dynamics before they turn their attention to substantive strategies to address this problem.

The authors organize the book into four major sections addressing the dynamics of fear (Part I, three chapters), how fear operates in organizations (Part II, four chapters), strategies for building a high-trust workplace (Part III, seven chapters), and a future of trust (Part IV, two chapters). The organization of the book lends itself to practical application by organizational leaders who want to develop an overall plan to foster trust in the work setting and, in the words of quality improvement theorists, "to drive out fear."

The authors truly achieve an original contribution to the organizational literature. They have a specific focus on the nature of the problem of fear and mistrust and they offer numerous lessons and reflections within each chapter to help frame the nature of the problem, document the dynamics of the problem, and advance the intervention skill set of readers. Although the authors do not offer a substantive theory to explain the problem and to link their strategies to what may be a problem of social change, they go a long way to elaborate a practical knowledge base. For example, in chapter 1, "The experience of fear," the authors fail to analyze the high level of stress American workers experience in the workplace. But they do make very practical observations about the nature of fear, the attributes of organizations in which there is considerable fear among workers, and the challenges inherent in understanding and assessing workplace-based fear and mistrust. The absence of a broad structural and cultural critique of work in American society gives the book a technical and "how-to-- quality." I do not highlight the absence of this critique as a weakness. I do so to emphasize that this is an action-oriented book, not one designed to enlighten the reader from a critical and theoretical perspective.

The authors refrain from pointing fingers in any one direction about the origins and perpetuation of fear and mistrust in the workplace. They seek to achieve a balance concerning dynamics and driving forces and examine how the perceptions, attitudes, and actions of managers and employees create and sustain this problem. In chapter 3, the authors define the aims of intervention, which is to build a trust-based workplace. With this end in mind, they reflect on the day-to-day actions that employers, employees, and managers can undertake to build a trustful workplace. The authors zero in on power differentials as an important contributor to fear and mistrust and they note that identifying and addressing the assumptions that feed fear and mistrust is necessary to make an organization more hospitable to trust.

This is a book about strategy and readers who are looking for specific interventions to form and advance trust within their workplace will want to consult this volume. It falls short of a critique of work. But it is a very practical guide for those individuals who seek to develop a trust-based organization. Organizational practitioners will want to include this book in their libraries since after a first read it will serve as a valuable resource supporting the design and implementation of intervention strategy, program development, and third-party consultation.

David P. Moxley, Ph.D.

Professor

School of Social Work

Wayne State University

Detroit, Michigan

Copyright Families in Society May/Jun 2001
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