Building the Human Centered Organizational Culture
Confronting a deep crisis provides a golden opportunity to assess new prospects and reinterpret the meaning of development. As Adela Cortina (2020) suggests: human beings must now consider the future and decide what they want: whether a united society in which all work together to make people better off or one marked by separation and conflict (Cortina, 2020)
A human centered development integrates economic growth with the wellbeing of people. Interpreting progress exclusively in terms of Gross National Product (GNP) is an incomplete view. Not everything can be summed up in economic variables, although growth, productivity and financial stability certainly matter. But there are other dimensions of development related to human wellbeing that concern the personal, social, moral, spiritual and cultural domains.
Many organizations are producing new measures of development to complement the shortcomings of GNP. The World Bank has defined human development as a core strategy to improve people’s lives and support sustainable development.1 The United Nations defines the Human Development Index (HDI) 2 as a summary evaluation of average achievement in key dimensions of human development, including life expectancy, education and income earning potential to attain a decent standard of living. It also produces the World Happiness Report, written by a group of independent experts from the Gallup World Poll data.3
The emphasis on all efforts to complement the GNP measure of development is on integrating new human development indices that provide a more comprehensive view of social progress. A representative list includes poverty prevalence, degree of inequality, social cohesion,
Human Centered Organizational Culture 109 quality of education, economic mobility, gender disparity, migrations, human and work security, citizen participation, cultural identity, preservation and care of the environment and water sanitation. The ideal is to use a wide variety of these dimensions, but proposed indices, such as HDI and others, are restricted to partial assessments of what human and social development entails.
