People management rationales and organizational effectiveness

Abstract

Purpose–The purpose of this paper is to contribute to the debate over people management rationales and how they relate to organizational effectiveness.Design/methodology/approach– Drawing on the distinction between the “logic of consequences” and the “logic of appropriateness,” the paper explores one aspect of managing people – managers’ attempts to restore trust after an intra-organizational breach of trust. This is done on the basis of a systematic approach to a review of the literature on intra-organizational trust and organizational trust repair.Findings– The paper argues that in their trust repair efforts managers socially construct and enact a narrow business agenda for the firm, which is typically justified by a logic of consequences. Instead, the authors suggest that managers may be better advised to follow a logic of appropriateness in restoring trust among employees, which acknowledges the importance of context and managers’ lack of control over employees’ reactions to trust repair strategies.Practical implications– A key practical implication of the logic of appropriateness is that, in certain contexts, the most effective strategy for trust repair is inaction (rather than action), a strategy often neglected in people management practice.Social implications– The social implications of this paper highlight the social context in which people management strategies take place and the limitations of “one-size-fits-all” HRM prescriptions.Originality/value– The value of the paper is bringing a much neglected stream of research on the strengths of inaction as a positive strategy in organizational theory to current HRM scholars as a way of balancing the typical agentive approaches to HRM and intra-organizational trust repair.