What Do HRD Scholars and Practitioners Need to Know About Power, Emotion, and HRD?

• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1002/hrdq.21191
• Date: 01 December 2014
• Published date: 01 December 2014

HUMAN RESOURCE DEVELOPMENT QUARTERLY, vol. 25, no. 4, Winter 2014 © 2014 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

Published online in Wiley Online Library (wileyonlinelibrary.com) • DOI: 10.1002/hrdq.21191 409

INVITED FEATURE ARTICLE

What Do HRD Scholars

andPractitioners Need to

Know About Power, Emotion,

andHRD?

Russ Vince

In this article, written for the 25th anniversary volume of HRDQ, I have

been invited to focus on emotion and power in the context of HRD. It is

hoped that my article will help to inform and to stimulate the future fl ow

of manuscripts in this area. My starting point is to suggest a simple rule,

which is that development is beset with contradictions. I argue that a

better understanding of the contradictions that are integral to HRD will

lead to improvements in the design and implementation of learning and

development practices within the messy, complicated, and power-fi lled

world of organizations.

Key Words: emotion, power, contradiction, human resource development

Introduction

In this article, written for the 25th anniversary volume of HRDQ, I have been

invited to focus on emotion and power in the context of HRD (which is a

consistent underlying theme of my own research and writing). The aim of this

article is to provide a “provocative” discussion of this topic, and it is hoped

that my article will help to inform and to stimulate the future fl ow of manu-

scripts in this area.

The starting point of a better understanding of the interplay among emo-

tion, power, and HRD is a simple rule: Development is beset with contradictions.

Any method for development, no matter how convinced we are of its effi -

cacy, is tied to organizational power relations and their effects. Power relations

create contradictions in how learning, training, mentoring and appraising