The Meaning and Role of Organizational Advocacy

Book excerpt: The term organizational advocacy offers a new way to look at the interaction between people and their organizations. What each of us thinks, says, does in the workplace, and the things we appreciate and the things that displease us-- according to organizational advocacy--really matter. Organizational advocacy puts responsibility and accountability for achievement where it should be, not with some distant manager but on us as individuals. Seiling's book is an easily understood tour of this challenging new concept and how it works from the ground up. Seldom has it been made so clear, as Seiling does here, that we and our organizations really are one. Seiling begins by introducing organizational advocacy and its foundation upon task performance and partnering relationships. Seiling agrees that readers will have questions and concerns, and that barriers to just understanding OA, let alone using it, do exist. She maintains that the activities contributing to or among high performance systems have been ignored in the past. Management simply assumed that the people they hired were automatically contributive and automatically capable of productive relationships. This serious misreading leads to misunderstood expectations of people, disconnection from the organization, and eventually to deteriorated productivity. Seiling summarizes all this in six subsets, making clear that personal responsibility, distributed accountability, and shared leadership are vital to an organization's health and performance. Using cases drawn from some of the nation's most respected companies and public organizations, Seiling makes an important contribution to the practice of human resource management, and to executive understanding of how to make organizations more productive.