Muddy Realities of Organizational Existence: Should HRD Dive in or Take an Ostrich Defense from the Sidelines? Review of Literature, Framework Development and Future

Abstract

Workforce management goes beyond the management of people and the management of human resources processes and projects, to deciphering organizational climate of operation, activities and behaviors that could hinder organizational progress thereby negating good strategy implementation plans. This chapter intentionally selected several challenges that usually entangle organizations, throwing them into muddy pools where entangling meshes of corruption, workplace incivility, stigmatization, crises and management failure among others envelope and bring some of these organization to their perilous ending. The chapter asserts that the field of Human Resources Development (HRD) could play a meaningful role in the identification of organizational challenges and the initialization of the designing and implementation of interventions that could address systems blockages. By getting inside the challenging muddy pools, HRD would assume a strategic position in redefining its purpose of existence by decoding organizational bottlenecks and introducing interventions that could create new paths and new avenues for organizational effectiveness and sustainability even during environmental turbulences. Through a detailed discussion of negative issues bedeviling organizations, including the crisis brought by the corona virus pandemic that has not spared organizations either, this chapter asserts that HRD cannot take an ostrich defense of burying its head in the sand while chanting the ‘I see no evil, I hear no evil’ slogan pretending that challenges bedeviling organizations are not HRD’s concern. The chapter asserts that through new research pathways and the provision of appropriate interventions, HRD has great potentialities of removing systems blockages and supporting both leadership and the workforce to be flexible and adaptable to environmental turbulences of organizational operations.