Recognition: A Business Case for Developing Through Relationships

Abstract

Organizations are becoming more flexible and transgressive in terms of organization of work, loosening of hierarchical ties, greater transparency and accessibility to information, dissolving of boundaries between private and professional lives, and more direct means of coming into contact with others. As these processes take place, the need for recognition and expectations toward others thereof are evolving from more formal, discrete and concrete to more personal, intimate and linked to one’s personal identity. People are confronted by their personal limitations, life-issues and (dis)illusions. While the quality of performance in return for a remuneration is and remains the essential of the relationship with the organization, questions of who we are come up, also during working time. However, we lack—until now—a frame of reference to reflect upon these needs and how to move about interacting with one another with respect for the essentials that motivate people in their lives, maybe not primarily for their work. Can this take place in the open space of organizations? Or are the borders beyond the organization the only available and proper ‘hosts’ of such events?

In this contribution, the deeply human drivers that inevitably underpin human motivation are discussed in terms of a communicative practice where recognition requires articulation of both desires and pain, thereby strongly influencing who we are at work and elsewhere.

… welch Glück, geliebt zu werden,Und lieben, Götter, welch ein Glück!

Willkommen und Abschied one of the Sesenheimer Lieder by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, 1775.