The Membership Organization: : Achieving Top Performance through the New Workplace Community

Citation

Takeda, Y. (1998), "The Membership Organization: : Achieving Top Performance through the New Workplace Community", Journal of Organizational Change Management, Vol. 11 No. 3, pp. 269-272. https://doi.org/10.1108/jocm.1998.11.3.269.1

The Membership Organization is a diamond in the rough. The book sheds light on issues that are critical to top performance in the workplace of the future. Can we build communities at work where the contributions of all members are valued and honored? How do we respond to the increasing diversity of organizations today? How should assigned leaders in the workplace lead where all members are encouraged to take active leadership? The language of membership helps give meaning to some of these important questions.

This book creates a bold and daring framework around the idea of membership. Most management consulting books on the market today say little about membership and instead focus on culture and teamwork. Why? This is because most management writers operate on the assumption that everyone who works for an organization is a member by definition. This book creates a framework that challenges this assumption. In many ways, the structure of the book is reminiscent of writings on group theory. All the chapter headings reflect issues that are also important in group dynamics: contribution, decisioning, relationship, leadership, and so forth. In this way, the book goes back to the basics of group interaction in order to show how to improve organizational functioning.

In fact, it is very instructive to look at the process of group dynamics to understand why this book identifies critical organizational issues that are ignored in most management writings. Anyone who has experienced an unstructured lab environment to learn about group dynamics will testify to the mysterious forces that come into play in group formation. There is almost a self‐perpetuating nature to the development of a group ‐ its identity is determined by what individuals bring to the common space. But there are often individuals who feel alienated by this process, and withdraw their commitment and contribution. The reaction of group members to such alienated individuals is often indignation. Members of the group urge these individuals to stop loafing and contribute more, and to start acting like a part of the group. Rarely do group members look back at the process of group formation that they went through, and entertain the possibility that group identity might be redefined to incorporate the perspectives of alienated individuals. One of the lessons of group dynamics is that a group is always forming; after all, a group can continue into eternity, and any end point is artificial.

This is a lesson that many management books miss. Many management thinkers instead emphasize the need to get beyond “forming, storming, norming” and reach the point of high‐performing successfully and quickly. This kind of thinking turns the process of group dynamics into the maintenance of a check‐list, with group operations being crossed off as they are executed. Membership is the first item on the list, and it needs to be eliminated as soon as possible. But a framework that is built around membership drives home the point that group formation is a continuous process that must be attended to time and time again. Moreover, it suggests that a group is able to achieve high performance to the extent that it explores the process of forming, storming, and norming with quality and depth. The greatest potential for productivity growth in an organization most likely rests in the people who are suffering from commitment and contribution problems. Following this logic, it would make sense for organizations who are trying to achieve higher performance to revisit the issue of membership with those people who are struggling to become members who are fully committed and contribute their best to the organization.

A membership framework also gives new meaning to the notion of valuing diversity in organizations. As shown above, such a framework focusses attention on the differences that keep people from identifying with their organizations. In order to maintain a membership organization, individuals have to be willing to go far beyond accepting differences to deep understanding and the creation of shared meaning. A lot of management books pay lip service to diversity, but they are mostly talking about ethnic and gender fairness. But this kind of diversity has already been discussed at length in American public debate, and most people have incorporated ethnic and gender diversity into their thinking. But the language of membership allows us to think beyond this limited definition of diversity, and also to look at exploring differences rather than simply tolerating or accepting them.

At its core, The Membership Organization is a book about the personal experience of a woman who has grappled with membership issues for a long time. The author, Jane Galloway Seiling, is in a unique position to provide some clarity to these issues. As a former executive secretary and as a speaker on labor‐management relationships, she can speak with authority about roles that have traditionally been undervalued in organizations. The author gives powerful personal accounts that explain the feeling of disempowerment in “status quo” organizations, and gives incidents where workers learn to create a membership organization by going “beyond participation.”

However, these gems of personal insight are buried in a mountain of concepts, charts, and quotations from other management consulting books. Strangely enough, this book is written in a way that runs counter to the points that it is trying to make. The author is a voice for those people in organizations that often go unheard. But she drowns out her voice and undermines her authority by incessantly quoting other scholars and using their words to explain her concepts.

This book has the potential to give very useful advice about how people can gain a greater stake in their work. The author speaks meaningfully about her personal struggles as an assistant to a CEO to constantly expand her role in the organizations for which she worked. She gives instances where she was successful in increasing her stake and performance and instances where organizational leaders had difficulty in seeing her in a different role. These personal experiences are fertile ground for new insight, and could be extrapolated more broadly to advice on how people can acquire a greater feeling of membership in their organizations. But the author never goes very far in explaining how she expanded her role from a secretary to a manager of many departments (beyond saying that she acquired an advanced degree), and how she turned her knowledge into action. Instead she falls into palliative descriptions of what good membership looks like. There are long lists in this book about what qualities a “courageous member” or a “consultative member” is supposed to exhibit. This only carries the reader so far, and it misses the aspect of struggle that comes out so clearly in the personal stories of which she gives us a small taste. It is easy to say that organizational members have a responsibility to commit themselves to their work ‐ management writers say this all the time. But it is altogether different to actually create an environment where members show full commitment. This book hints at some of the barriers and hardships that must be dealt with to create such an environment, but they could be explored much more deeply through the sharing and sense‐making of personal experience.

The labor‐management relationship is another area of expertise about which the author does not share very much knowledge in this book. Considering that the author has done some public speaking on these issues, it is strange that unions are referred to only three times in the entire book ‐ twice to quote other authorities on labor. The book does cite a fascinating case study about an organization that was going through a substantial reorganization effort that included unionization. It is said that this company successfully managed the change process by involving the employees in a 15‐month, work redesign effort. The author entices us into recognizing the importance of this case by quoting a manager involved with this company as saying, “We found new meaning in our work. Many of us had never felt more alive or creative.” One might think that an entire section would be dedicated to this case, but there is only a single paragraph. The conceptualization that follows the paragraph is only remotely connected with the case. It leaves the reader longing for much more explanation about how the author’s expertise and experience is pertinent to the ideas in the book.

In summary, The Membership Organization has a solid framework, but is not yet a complete whole. On the positive side, this work is innovative and different, and also echoes a rich tradition of group theory and signals its applications to organizational development. It also has potential to offer clarity and ideas to issues that are relevant to organizations today. Productivity, diversity, leadership, and followership are issues that can find new meaning in a membership framework. However, this book is still searching for its voice. There are too many insertions from other management writings that are distracting to the flow of the text. The author could rely more on personal accounts, and could show how her experiences connect with the concepts in the book. Although the book may not have fully realized its potential, it would be wise not to discount this work. In the future, it would not be surprising if management consultants were talking a lot more about membership in organizations.