Jody Hoffer Gittell

"If you look at Southwest Airlines, and I admire what they do, they've been the most successful airline in the industry."--Gerard Arpey, CEO, American Airlines"Through extensive research Jody Hoffer Gittell gets to the bottom of what has sustained Southwest Airlines' positive employee relations and high performance through good and bad times."--Thomas A. Kochan, professor, MIT Sloan School of Management, MIT Global Airline Industry ProgramIn an industry with losses in the billions, Southwest Airlines has an unbroken string of 31 consecutive years of profitability. The Southwest Airlines Way examines how the company uses high-performance relationships to create enormous competitive advantage in motivation, teamwork, and coordination among employees. It then goes further to show how any company can foster these powerful cooperative relationships and explains how to:Lead with credibility and caringInvest in frontline leadersHire and train for relational competenceUse conflicts to build relationshipsMake unions its partners, not its adversariesBuild relationships with its suppliers

Whether from customers, supply-chain partners, policymakers, or regulators, organizations in virtually every industry are facing calls to do more with less. They are feeling compelled to provide higher-quality outcomes, more rapidly, at a lower cost. This book offers a road-tested approach for delivering these outcomes through positive organizational change. Its message comes just in time, for too many companies have gone the way of low-road strategies, such as cutting pay and perks, and working harder not smarter. Drawing on her path-breaking research, Jody Hoffer Gittell reveals that high performance is fundamentally relational―rooted in both human and social capital. Based on this insight, she provides a unique model that will help companies to build meaningful relationships among colleagues, develop smarter work processes, and design organizational structures fit for today's pressure test. By following four organizations on their change journeys, she illustrates how "relational coordination" unfolds in real-world settings. Tools for change guide readers as they learn how to implement this new model in their own workplaces.

This guidebook goes beyond people analytics to provide a research-based, practice-tested methodology for doing relational analytics, based on the science of relational coordination.We are witnessing a revolution in people analytics, where data are used to identify and leverage human talent to drive performance outcomes. Today’s workplace is interdependent, however, and individuals drive performance through networks that span department, organization and sector boundaries. This book shares the relational coordination framework, with a validated scalable analytic tool that has been used successfully across dozens of countries and industries to understand, measure and influence networks of relationships in and across organizations, and which can be applied at any level in the private and public sectors worldwide.Graduate students and practitioners in human resource management, health policy and management, organizational behavior, engineering and network analysis will appreciate the methodology and hands-on guidance this book provides, with its focus on identifying, analyzing and building networks of productive interdependence.Online resources include data appendices and statistical commands that can be used to conduct all these analyses in readers’ own organizations.

Nutidens organisationer står over for krav om at yde mere ved hjælp af mindre. Hvad enten kravet kommer fra kunder og klienter, partnere i leverandørkæden, aktionærer, politiske beslutningstagere eller myndigheder, så skal organisationerne levere bedre resultater af højere kvalitet hurtigere og billigere. Dette intense krav om effektivitet kræver store og omfattende organisatoriske forandringer, og som Jody H. Gittell viser i Relationers betydning for høj effektivitet, kan kravet imødegås med relationel koordinering. Bag dette begreb gemmer sig ganske enkelt de mønstre for kommunikation og relationer, som medarbejdere bruger for at integrere deres opgaver i et samlet hele.Men medarbejderne kan ikke gøre det alene, selv hvis de arbejder tæt sammen på tværs af funktions-, organisations- eller afdelingsgrænser. Kunder og klienter spiller en stadig vigtigere rolle, og organisationerne er nødt til at tænke dem ind i den relationelle koordinering. Sidst, men ikke mindst, kræver en succesfuld relationel koordinering også ledelsens fulde støtte - ledere, der forstår og respekterer kompleksiteten af det arbejde, deres medarbejdere udfører dagligt.Nøglen til at løse effektivitetsudfordringen - og forudsætningen for at medarbejdere, ledere og kunder kan koordinere og samarbejde - er, at organisationen har et kommunikationsniveau af høj kvalitet, understøttet af relationer med fælles mål, fælles viden og gensidig respekt. Dermed kan de tre centrale dynamikker - relationel koordinering, relationelt samarbejde og relationel ledelse - fungere optimalt og styrke organisationens effektivitet.