Jody Hoffer Gittell

Pure bureaucratic organizations don’t work well in dynamic environments due to their low bandwidth and limited adaptability - although they are known to be highly scalable, replicable and sustainable. Pure relational organizations are highly effective in dynamic environments given their high bandwidth, adaptability and support for collaboration - but they are challenging to scale, replicate and sustain over time. There has been much innovation in the fields of organizational sociology, organization design, and organizational consulting recognizing the advantages of both bureaucratic and relational organizations and suggesting potential hybrids - such as post-bureaucracy (Donnellon & Heckscher, 1994), enabling bureaucracy (Adler & Borys.1996), ambidexterity (O’Reilly & Tushman, 2008),

We focus in this essay on relational bureaucracy as a hybrid design that seeks to capture the advantages of the pure bureaucratic and the pure relational forms (Gittell & Douglass, 2012; Douglass & Gittell, 2012). Relational bureaucracy distinguishes between structures and relationships, while seeing structures and relationships as forming two ends of a continuum. Relational bureaucracy shows how to scale, replicate and sustain role-based reciprocal relationships using structures that are intentionally designed for this purpose, building on relational coordination theory.

Health care organizations are increasingly relying on interprofessional teamwork to deliver high-quality and cost-efficient care, to create disruptive knowledge, and to address grand population health challenges. Thus, understanding how we can deliberately manage such teams in order to effectively coordinate care across occupational boundaries and disciplinary domains is of growing importance. This chapter reviews the conceptual basis and multilevel determinants of successful interprofessional collaboration in the health care sector, and highlights the key themes of relational coordination, a theory of performance and change that aims at transforming workplace relationships to achieve sustainable and desirable outcomes. Finally, adopting a relational perspective on human resource management (HRM), it introduces strategic relational human resource management (SRHRM) as a promising approach for managing coordination in interprofessional teams. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the implications for both researchers and practitioners.

It may be surprising for HR scholars and practitioners to learn about the dysfunctional outcomes of HR practices that are currently seen as “best practices.” The chapters in Part III show how job redesign typically accomplishes the opposite of what is needed (McBride), how the lack of voice for health care workers further demoralizes and disengages them (Hague et al.), and how retention and recruitment challenges are exacerbated by the unnecessarily difficult nature of health care work (Williams). But these chapters also show how HR practices can be redesigned to fit the interdependent nature of the work and achieve better outcomes. One shows that high-performance work systems can be redesigned to address issues like workload and building connections across a status hierarchy (Kilroy). The final chapter shows how to design HR practices that build relationships across interdependent jobs, including those divided by the status hierarchy (Zhang et al.).

Relational coordination is a theory supported by a strong evidence base, with real-world applications for bringing stakeholders together to solve challenges of interdependence. Building on this work, the Relational Society Project has brought together communities from North America, Europe, Africa and Asia to develop relationships at the micro, meso and macro levels to solve the population health challenges they are facing. This Project will generate actionable evidence for change and a model of coordinated collective action that citizens and practitioners can implement to address challenges around the globe.

Changing one’s research path mid-career is humbling. I took an unexpected detour from ivory tower to action research. In this chapter I tell how the evolution occurred, how it was shaped by my personal life, and the three lessons I learned: (1) being humbled by starting from scratch, (2) gaining a new level of respect for practice, and (3) living in the “space between” academia and practice, facing the need to satisfy multiple stakeholders, each of whom requires something different from you.

Extensively revised and updated edition of the bestselling textbook, provides an overview of recent global airline industry evolution and future challenges: Examines the perspectives of the many stakeholders in the global airline industry, including airlines, airports, air traffic services, governments, labor unions, in addition to passengers
Describes how these different players have contributed to the evolution of competition in the global airline industry, and the implications for its future evolution
Includes many facets of the airline industry not covered elsewhere in any single book, for example, safety and security, labor relations and environmental impacts of aviation
Highlights recent developments such as changing airline business models, growth of emerging airlines, plans for modernizing air traffic management, and opportunities offered by new information technologies for ticket distribution
Provides detailed data on airline performance and economics updated through 2013

Relational coordination theory makes visible the relational process underlying the technical process of coordination, arguing that coordination encompasses not only the management of interdependence between tasks but also between the people who perform those tasks. This chapter introduces relational coordination theory, then proposes five potential directions for its further development, each of which deepens the contribution of the theory to positive organizational scholarship. The first proposed direction is to develop the social psychological foundations of relational coordination theory, placing it more firmly into the context of relational theory. The second is to extend relational coordination theory from its focus on role relationships to include personal relationships and to explore the interplay between them. Third is to broaden relational coordination networks beyond the core workers who have typically been considered, to include multiple other participants: so-called noncore workers, the customer herself, and participants outside the focal organization who are involved in the same value chain. Fourth is to extend the theorized outcomes of relational coordination beyond outcomes for the organization and its customers to include outcomes for workers as well. The fifth proposed direction is to go beyond the linear model of organizational change implicit in relational coordination theory toward a more dynamic and iterative model of change. These new directions will be previewed briefly in anticipation of their future development.