29/07/2025
Preface
Co-operatives have the same structure, systems, and standards but some fail and others succeed. Success of co-operatives still boils down to leadership and ability of management to properly orient the staff in risk-taking. The bad orientation or misaligned perspective are similar issues in human resources amongst large, medium and small co-operatives. These could create either a smooth organizational culture or organizational turbulence. Co-operatives that have been ignoring the importance of human resources simply exist and cannot grow; if not, they totally cannot make it and just die the natural way. However, co-operatives that learned to identify and address these internal problems are advancing and cooperatives that do not provide premium on human resource development are lagging. Through constant reference and practice of the insights in this handbook, difficulties of managing co-operative and organizational problems are minimized.
This handbook will provide insights for co-operative officers on why other co-operative grow leaps and bounds and other just die the natural death. Officers of co-operatives are well-educated; if not, they attend all kinds of training; acquired several skills; and gained several experiences, but despite all of these, no one reminds them about their personal and individualistic tendencies. In like manner, despite the external training required by law and internal training required by a co-operative for its officers, co-operatives still face organizational problems. These are effects of individualistic tendencies of officers in co-operative business operations. These individualistic tendencies are common problems that are manifested because of poor practice of co-operative values and principles, lack of proper attitude, and poor behavioral conduct that misaligns their knowledge on co-operatives.
Officers are expected and are supposed to manage their co-operative with greater alignment, conformity, and harmony based on the co-operative values, concepts, and philosophy. But, on the contrary, officers tend to carry these individualistic tendencies in their work place, Attitudinal problems, for example, hyper critical for the sake of being one without proposing alternatives is only one problem of attitudinal-behavior and an individualistic tendencies in co-operative organizations. To other, this maybe small and insignificant, but this create conflicts that are not manifested at once, but in the long-run make the organization lag behind. Likewise, these poor values system are taken for granted because it is seen as insignificant factor, but it is the root cause of the bigger organizational failure because of the indifference to the unaligned values and conduct of officers.
Through this handbook and its equivalent training program or follow through, perspective of the user can be altered. The equivalent module of this handbook is training on values, attitude, behavioral, and managing change. This handbook is intended to renew perspective of officers, staff, and members in order to minimize organizational problems in co-operative.
This handbook is a compendium of long experiences while working with co-operative officers, co-operative managers, and co-operative staff. The insights are to provide options in countering the common problem – attitudinal-behavior and sometimes cultural misalignments in the organization. Regardless of the categories of the organization, whether large and small, these problems exist in their human resources. This is so because managers fail to motivate and help the staff determine their misalignments, hence, organizations consequently continue to face conflicts.
Benefits of Using the Handbook
In this handbook, common internal organization problems are pinpointed and the HOWs are elaborated to contain and to avoid them. It is not an overnight organizational change but through constant practice of the suggested insights in the handbook organizational peace and harmony can be attained.
The co-operative structure and concept is not the culprit, it is usually the bad perspective and bad values system of officers and staff in the organization. This means that the human resource, if well-oriented, will evolve as better human resource in the co-operative. However, if co-operative officers and staff have no handbook to provide them the insights, they get lost in managing effectively and efficiently their co-operative.
This handbook provides insights between successful and failing co-operatives. Case analysis on the success factors and the failure factors was done in order to arrive at the suggestions on the HOWs. This handbook is an organizational tool. If well executed and practiced by co-operative officers and staff, there is no other direction but towards a better operation. Officers and staff can also use the insights even in their personal life. In fact, some co-operative that have been using and applying the principles specified in this handbook have find organizational peace – a result of mutual conformity among officers, staff, and even members.
The author
