Solution Manual For Introducing Organizational Behaviour and Management 4th Edition by David Knights

Instructor's Manual and Workbook Chapter 1 – Introduction The aim of this chapter is to introduce you to the analytical framework that you will encounter throughout the textbook and the course as a whole.

Course text

As stated in the course information, this is not a typical organizational behaviour (OB) course, so it is important that you understand how and why it is different. The main point of difference is that each chapter comprises an overview of key contributions to the mainstream study of its topic, followed by a reappraisal of those contributions from a more critical perspective.

What is organizational behaviour?

OB draws upon a range of social scientific disciplines.

• Sociology examines behaviour in relation to social, political, psychological and economic conditions that affect it, but in turn are reproduced or reproduced by it.

• Psychology concentrates on how individuals think and behave.

• Politics focuses on competitive struggles for political power andinfluence.

• Economics examines how wealth is produced and distributed.

Each discipline produces a distinctive way of understanding organizations and the behaviour of people in them. Most OB textbooks are dominated by a psychological perspective, which means that core OB topics have tended to focus on individual and group processes (motivation, leadership, teamwork, etc.). The textbook for this course incorporates the psychological view but draws more heavily on sociological and political perspectives than typical OB courses. This gives an appreciation of how seemingly ‘psychological’ factors are shaped by and embedded in social relations that stretch beyond organizational members and the boundaries attributed to organizations. For example, when considering a topic such as motivation, which draws heavily from psychology, we are also invited to consider the economic and political conditions of work that shape an individual’s motivation, as well as any relevant historical and cultural forces.

A common reaction to introductory courses in OB is it’s all just ‘common sense’. For instance, it is ‘common sense’ that effective managers require a high level of technical expertise, are able to plan and organize well, are skillful communicators and team builders etc. One of the aims of this course is not only to move beyond these ‘common sense’ understandings of organizations, but to challenge ‘common sense’ itself. When something is considered to be ‘common sense’, we tend to treat it as an unquestionable truth that leaves no room for debate and discussion. For example, it is ‘common sense’ that human nature means people will act in their economic self-interest. Many theories in organization behaviour and in related disciplines such as economics are based on this assumption. In this course, you are encouraged to challenge taken- for-granted knowledge such as this. For instance, it can be argued that economic self- interest is not an essential quality of human For use with Introducing Organizational Behaviour and Management 4e David Knights and Hugh Willmott © 2022 Cengage EMEA

nature, but rather an effect of how, in western materialistic societies, the individual and wealth are elevated as key values. This has become so pervasive that it has created a ‘common sense’ understanding that humans are inherently economically self-interested. Once we are prepared to challenge ‘common sense’, we can then begin to explore why human nature is identified in particular ways that appeal to ‘common sense’.

What is the relevance of this to OB? Typical OB courses focus on providing ‘common sense’ techniques and prescriptions that claim to make people more effective managers, through such things as better communication and planning. This approach is managerialist in that it assigns to managers the exclusive power to define the goals of the organization and their means of achievement. In its extreme form, it proposes that everything can be managed efficiently through the application of the right techniques.

Knights and Willmott believe this approach is highly idealistic, fails to capture the complexities of human behaviour in organizations and is therefore likely to be of little practical value. So, why do most OB courses present a ‘common sense’ view of management? Knights and Willmott suggest it presents a positive and glamorous imageof management that is attractive to students because it portrays management as a responsible and respectable profession where the manager’s role is ‘simply’ to enable others to achieve the shared goals of the organization. They argue that this fails to recognize the complexities and difficulties of managing. Often those being managed do not share management’s goals for the organization and these people might have a very low opinion of managers.

Activity

Think of examples from history where knowledge gained the status of ‘common sense’but was later found to be deeply flawed (e.g., the view that the world was flat). Can you think of examples related to managing organizations?

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What is an organization?

It is common in introductory chapters in OB textbooks to provide a definition for‘organization’.

Knights and Willmott provide three different ways in which ‘organization’ can be defined, identified and analyzed.

In the entity view, organizations are unified entities consisting of a set of characteristics, such as rules, structures and hierarchies. Attention is focused on aspects of organizing that coincide with the concerns of senior management, with little attention given to conflicting interests of other members of the organization. This view is criticized for being politically naïve and simplistic and for constructing a ‘common sense’ view of OB. In the process view, the focus is not on organizations as entities, but on processes of organizing wherever organized activities occur, such in families, sports teams and so on. Organizations are made up of processes of organizing, but these processes are not confined to organizations. These processes give rise to the activities which the entity view describes as tasks, roles, structures etc.

Knights and Willmott prefer a concept view of organizing, which understands that ‘organization’ is a word that can assume a variety of meanings and can exert a number of different effects. These meanings are always partial and political. It is partial in the sense that it reveals only one aspect of ‘organization’ and political because it encourages people to see and organize the world in particular ways. For example, there is a long tradition within management thinking of conceiving of organizations as being like machines – with parts (departments) which take inputs (money, labour, etc.) to produce outputs (products). These parts sometime breakdown (through poor communication) and sometimes require heavy maintenance (restructuring), with new parts being added or removed. From a concept view of organization, this is partial because it downplays the significance of human emotions, anxieties etc. and political because it encourages us to think about solving management problems and issues in particular ways. When a particular concept of organizations becomes dominant, it becomes ‘common sense’.

Mainstream and critical perspectives on OB

The curriculum of OB courses usually gives priority to ideas that are conservative and promanagerial. For example, it is assumed that managers alone have the knowledge and the right to determine how work should be organized. This perspective is the mainstream or orthodox view. It is what most people currently recognize as a legitimate way of doing or thinking about management and organization. It regards managing as a technical activity and organizations as a neutral instrument for achieving shared goals. As a consequence, OB can become a technology of control, with each topic (such as leadership, motivation) presented as an element of a control toolkit.

Efficiency and profit are seen to inform everything that happens in organizations, while social and moral responsibilities are forgotten, except when recognizing these responsibilities becomes a profit-maximizing strategy (as is often the case with ‘corporate social responsibility’).

In each chapter of the text, the presentation of the mainstream approach is followed by a critical perspective. Here ‘critical’ has a particular meaning of challenging received wisdom or orthodoxy in some way. For example, whereas the mainstream focus is on shared goals in an organization, the For use with Introducing Organizational Behaviour and Management 4e David Knights and Hugh Willmott © 2022 Cengage EMEA

critical view regards organizations as a political instrument for achieving contested goals. It should be noted that ‘mainstream’ and ‘critical’ are not sealed ‘boxes of knowledge’. What is considered critical, radical and even subversive thinking at one point of time can, in the future, become part of the mainstream. An example is the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa led by Nelson Mandela. His views were at one time considered so critical that those in authority considered that they warranted his imprisonment, but these views eventually became mainstream thinking to the extent that Mandela became president. Another example is ideas around corporate social responsibility and the view that organizations have responsibilities aside from the maximization of profit. This was initially considered acritical view but has largely been adopted by the mainstream.

Internet task

Visit the critical management portal at www.criticalmanagement.org The portal provides a single point of access to resources about the critical study of all aspects of management.

Activity

After reading this chapter consider the expectations that you had coming into this course. How much was it aligned to a mainstream or ‘common sense’ view of organizations? What is your response to the idea of a critical view? How might it encourage you to think differently about organizations that you are familiar with?

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Key words Sociology Economics Managerialist Process view Critical

Psychology Commonsense Organization Concept view

Politics Taken-for-granted Entity view Mainstream

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Instructor's Manual and Workbook Chapter 2 - Motivation and the Self Introduction

There is a large gap between what employees have to achieve to satisfy the terms of their employment contract and what they can achieve if they are working to their highest potential. It is this performance gap that is the subject of motivation theory.

Both employees and employers have incentives to increase motivation. Employees want more satisfying jobs and employers want higher productivity.

The history of mainstream approaches to motivation is a history of increased recognition of the social needs of employees and their desire for autonomy as individuals. Mainstream approaches assume that by creating work environments in which employees are empowered, they will be motivated to expend a lot of energy and produce high quality work.

The critical approaches challenge this story, by investigating the nature of the capitalist system in which today’s organizations operate. One approach suggests that motivation is always a problem because the nature of the capitalist system is such that employees are alienated and exploited. Another approach challenges the notion of the autonomous, empowered individual, stating that our sense of self is socially constructed and maintained. We judge ourselves based on the views of others and this provides a way in which our conduct can be controlled. This approach argues that motivation stems from processes of self-discipline in which we judge ourselves against an internalized standard of how we should be.

Course text

By the end of this chapter should understand key mainstream approaches to motivation, including scientific management, content and process theories as well as their limitations.

You should also have an understanding of key critical approaches, including Marxist analyses and theories which investigate ‘the self’, as well as their applications to the study of motivation.

Mainstream approaches

Taylor’s scientific management is seen by many to be a theory of motivation. Scientific management involved the separation of conception from execution – it was the For use with Introducing Organizational Behaviour and Management 4e David Knights and Hugh Willmott © 2022 Cengage EMEA

manager's job to do the thinking about how work should be performed, and it was employees’ job to perform those tasks. Taylor believed that gains in efficiency from the application of scientific management could be shared with employees in the form of higher wages. Taylor believed employees would be motivated to work harder because of these economic incentives. In short, he believed that employees are motivated by money.

Taylor’s theory about what motivates employees was challenged by the Hawthorne experiments undertaken at the Hawthorne Electric Company in the 1920s and 1930s.

These experiments showed that an individual’s social needs are also important.

Without recognition, belonging, involvement people will be disengaged and unmotivated.

Internet question

Visit www.greatplacetowork.co.uk and take a look at the UK’s 50 best places to work, as well as the 100 best workplaces in Europe. Find out what these companies do to motivate their staff.

Content theories

The contributions of Abraham Maslow, Douglas McGregor, David McClelland and David Burnham, Frederick Herzberg and David Hackman share a concern with the human needs of employees. They are described as content theories of motivation because they focus on ‘what’ motivates people. They assume that if we can identify these needs and meet them, then we can motivate them towards a goal. Content theories of motivation show that Taylor’s emphasis on economic rewards was based on a set of assumptions that provide a limited view of motivation. Taylor assumed that people are lazy and dislike work, which meant they needed to be closely controlled and monitored. This removed many of the intrinsic factors that provide motivation and was compounded by the design of work under scientific management, which fragmented tasks, reduced skill levels and created dull, monotonous jobs.

Maslow claimed that people had an ascending set of needs and would be motivated by the lower level needs until these were satisfied. These are physiological, safety, belongingness/love, esteem and self-actualization.

McGregor developed Maslow’s idea in a new direction, arguing that lack of motivation might be the unintended consequence of how managers think about employees.

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McGregor focuses on the assumptions management make about employees and the effect of these assumptions on employees. Theory X includes beliefs that people are lazy, lack ambition, prefer to be led and dislike responsibility. Theory Y is a set of assumptions with a more positive view of human nature. McClelland noted that once embedded in organizations, these assumptions have effects on how people behave.

Activity

Think about your own assumptions about employees. Do they correspond more to theory X or Theory Y? How might these assumptions influence your management style and in particular, your efforts to motivate people you manage?

McClelland and Burnham developed a theory of what motivates managers – their needs for achievement, for power and to be liked. They concluded that effective managers typically have a high need for power, providing they have their ego under control.

Herzberg believed that the most important drivers of motivation are intrinsic to the job a person does. These include recognition, responsibility and achievement. The extrinsic rewards of work, which he called hygiene factors, such as salary and job security, are related to dissatisfaction. Removing sources of dissatisfaction will not produce satisfaction but rather an absence of dissatisfaction. The theory suggests that the key to unlocking high levels of satisfaction lies with the intrinsic motivators, the nature of the work itself.

Activity

Write down what motivates you, in relation to the needs that you have. Compare your responses with the theories described above.

Are you motivated by needs other than money?

Do you think of your needs as existing in a hierarchy, as Maslow described?

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Process theories

The second group of motivation theories are called process theories, because they ask ‘what is the process by which motivation occurs’? In contrast to content theories, process theories acknowledge that the employee is not just a needs-driven entity but rather a self-conscious person making sense of their experiences and adjusting their effort in the light of earlier experience.

Vroom highlighted the importance of expectation in motivation. Motivation depends on what the person expects the outcome of their efforts to be and how much they value the perceived outcome. Vroom argued individuals consider three factors when deciding to commit effort to something – valence, instrumentality and expectancy. This theory demonstrates that behaviour is not just shaped by needs, but by an active process of thinking.

Process views of motivation were further developed in the 1980s as Japan emerged as a major competitor in the world economy. Compared to the West’s concern with monitoring and control, Japanese organizations were seen to focus more on teamwork, creating commitment and encouraging high performance. This led to the recognition that people need to motivate themselves, and it is the task of management to create the conditions that support this. The theories of Levinson, Bandura, Locke and Latham and Luthans develop this theme.

Critical approaches

The history of motivation theory suggests a progressive movement towards a promised land of healthy, productive and satisfied employees. This history starts with Taylor’s assumption that only money motivates, which led to the design of low-skilled, boring jobs. It then progresses first to a recognition that individual social needs are also sources of motivation, and then to a discovery that employees should be encouraged to manage themselves, with the support of management.

The unspoken story in mainstream studies of motivation is about power. Critical approaches suggest that managers have an interest in getting the most out of their employees and there is a tendency to see people as a means to an end, as something to be exploited. They challenge the view that the shift towards self-motivating and selfdirective employees is necessarily a positive development for employees, arguing it can be seen as an even more intense and intrusive form of power. Critical views of motivation challenge the mainstream from two theoretical approaches – Marxist analyses and theories of the self.

Marxist analyses

Marxist analyses focus on the role that economic interests have in the workplace, within a capitalist system. Mainstream theories of motivation emphasize the unitary nature of interests in organizations, that is, the belief that managers and employees share common goals, such as the ongoing profitability and growth of the organization.

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For Marx, capitalism involves an essential conflict of economic interests between ownership (which include management) and those who must sell their labour in order to live. Workers seek to maximize their wages, while owners and managers seek to maximize profits, which is achieved by paying labour less than the value they create for the organization.

If the interests of labour and managers are fundamentally opposed, what are the implications for motivation? From a Marxist perspective, the motivation problem is inherent in capitalist organizations and will never be solved because of various forms of alienation. These include: • • • •

Alienation from the product – employees are no longer free to produce what they need. This is determined by the search for profit.

Alienation from the process of production – work is no longer an end in itself but rather means to ends that are external to work.

Alienation from others – employees are considered individuals rather than social creatures and are forced to compete with others.

Alienation from the self – employees subordinate their social needs to the pursuit of individual goals.

Two important empirical studies have drawn inspiration from Marx’s analysis of capitalism. Braverman (1974) sees Taylor’s scientific management as a deskilling process driven by capitalist imperatives to cut costs and increase production with the ultimate aim of profit maximization. The effect of scientific management is to shift control of the labour process from labour to ownership. Previously, in a craft system, employees were in control of the way work was done and the speed at which it was done. Scientific management, through its separation of conception from execution and the assigning of conception tasks to management, took control of the labour process from employees, with the end result being deskilling and alienation.

Burawoy’s (1979) study sought to explain why, given the conflict of interests between owners/managers and labour, there is little resistance by labour to its exploitation. In the organization Burawoy studied, employees played games amongst themselves to maximize bonus payments. These games provided employees with a sense of autonomy and choice, relieved the boredom of work and gave employees feelings of accomplishment. However, Burawoy concluded that by playing these games, employees inadvertently reinforced the system and their own disadvantage, by working harder but still not being in control of the labour process.

Power and the self

While Marxist analyses focus on the creation of economic insecurity, another set of ideas explores how insecurity about the self, and management’s power to create this insecurity, is used to motivate. These ideas involve questioning the notion of ‘individual’ autonomy and suggest that power works to shape our notion of what it is to be an individual.

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It is ‘common sense’ to talk about the self as if it were something that is fixed, stable and something independent of the world. However, in the 1930s, George Mead argued that the self is social in nature – it is socially constructed. As children, we achieve our first sense of self by taking over the attitudes of others towards us, or, in other words, by making sense of others’ responses to us. The sense of self that we acquire from others also contains a sense of what we must be in order to be liked or recognized. This becomes internalized as a relationship between two aspects of the self – what we are and what we must be to be loved. This creates a motivating force that is never-ending.

In a work context, this might mean that we see our boss as someone we want to please or be like and are therefore motivated to work hard because of these impulses.

Another example might be seeing promotion as an opportunity to ‘make something of myself’ and therefore being highly motivated to ‘climb the ladder’.

Activity

Think about inspirational figures in your life.

In what ways do you wish to be like them, or recognized by them? Has this provided you with motivational energy?

French philosopher Michel Foucault made an important contribution to thinking about the self and the operation of power, using a prison design by 19th-century philosopher Jeremy Bentham to illustrate his ideas. The prison was designed in such a way that prisoners were not aware of whether, at any point in time, guards were observing them. Foucault argues that over time, the prisoners will internalize the power relationship and will effectively watch over their own conduct. A modern-day application is speed cameras. Our knowledge that we are potentially being watched (there may or may not be a camera in the box) changes our behaviour. An application of these ideas in the work context is performance appraisals, which make the results of work visible to others and define what it means to be a successful employee. Although these appraisals might be performed by others, employee’s knowledge that they will be appraised encourages them to regulate their own behaviour by setting targets and goals and by criticizing their own performance. In essence, they become self-managing.

Several studies have drawn on ideas around the production of the self. Townley sees the study of motivation in organizational behaviour as being stimulated by the desire to make people controllable, with the knowledge used to develop techniques of human resource management selection, performance appraisal etc. Casey studied culture change in a transnational company and examined how management’s desired values of For use with Introducing Organizational Behaviour and Management 4e David Knights and Hugh Willmott © 2022 Cengage EMEA

a ‘happy family’ acted as an ideal against which employees judged themselves. Rather than questioning the reality of this ‘happy family’ idealism, employees criticized themselves for failing to live up to it. Fleming’s ‘radical responsibilization of employment’ offers perhaps the most up-to-date and bleak view of current trends in employment and motivation. The era of uberization is ‘self-determination’ taken to an extreme in which in the name of personal autonomy, choice and flexibility, many of the economic risks of work and employment are being shifted from the employer to the individual employee.

The Marxist critique of capitalism and ideas about the construction of the self can be seen to work together. In particular, ideas about the self can help explain low levels of resistance by employees against the capitalist system. If motivation involves selfmanagement, making something of ourselves, competing with others and seeing failure as personal failure, any hostility is turned towards the self rather than the system. While we are encouraged to remain preoccupied with ourselves, opportunities for resistance and change are lost.

Keywords Scientific management Intrinsic factors Expectation Marxist analyses Economic interests Deskilling Foucault

Hawthorne experiments Extrinsic rewards Theory X and Theory Y Motivators and Hygiene factors Alienation Insecurity Resistance

Content theories Process theories Power Capitalism Labour process Self

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Instructor's Manual and Workbook Chapter 3 - Individual differences, personality and self Introduction

It is common sense to think of ourselves as having a personality and the study of organization behaviour has traditionally attributed to personality considerable explanatory power. From a manager’s perspective, a critical skill is the ability to understand and manage different personalities in the pursuit of organizational goals. This chapter tells the story both of mainstream ways of thinking about personality and of a more critical understanding of subjectivity and identity. The critical approach is useful for thinking about deeper questions about the construction of ‘personality’ in the OB literature and in popular understandings of managers.

Unlike other chapters in the text, no sharp distinction is made between mainstream and critical approaches. It is more a case of emphasis and interpretation, with some work having a critical orientation yet being used in OB texts in a way that promotes and reinforces mainstream thinking.

Aims

By the end of this chapter you should understand the development of personality type theories and the central ideas that inform a biological view of personality. These constitute nomothetic theories of personality. You should also be familiar with idiographic approaches, including psychodynamics and phenomenology. Finally, you should be aware of the connections made between the experience of existential anxiety and contemporary organization.

Introduction to Personality

There is much debate over what is meant by personality. For instance, according to Webster’s Encyclopaedic Dictionary, personality is both the ‘visible aspect of one’s character’ and ‘the essential character of a person’. The former is consistent with the Latin persona (from which ‘personality’ in English is derived), which means ‘mask’. The latter definition implies that personality is biologically determined, or something that is ‘fixed’ from birth. Two approaches to the study of personality are nomothetic and idiographic.

Nomothetic Approaches

A nomothetic approach is concerned with constructing tools to measure personality and is associated with the work of Eysenck, but dates back as far as Hippocrates in the 4th century For use with Introducing Organizational Behaviour and Management 4e David Knights and Hugh Willmott © 2022 Cengage EMEA

BC. Hippocrates was the first to attempt to classify personality through his observation of four temperaments: melancholic, choleric, sanguine and phlegmatic. For Hippocrates, people are born with a mixture of these temperaments.

Activity

How relevant is Hippocrates thinking for your understanding of what is meant by personality? Make a list of work colleagues and close friends and attempt to categorize them in terms of the four temperaments. Does the framework help you to understand their personality better?

Jung is an influential contributor to personality theory and has been drawn on extensively (albeit selectively) by mainstream theorists. For Jung, the individual is a participant in the collective unconscious. The collective and personal unconscious form one part of a system called the inner world, out of which the persona or personality develops to create a surface between the inner and outer worlds. According to Jung, we are simultaneously residents in two worlds, and although we may only gain access to our conscious at certain times (e.g. through dreams) it exerts its influence on the conscious world.

Jung uses the terms introvert and extrovert which are widely used today in discussions about personality. For Jung, it is the introverts, who are withdrawn and thoughtful, who are more receptive to the influence of the collective unconscious. On the other hand, extroverts, which we associate with being sociable and outgoing, are more concerned with the outer world. Although introvert-extrovert is often understood as an either/or, for Jung each person has both introverted and extroverted characteristics, although people have a proclivity towards one or the other.

Myers-Briggs adapted the work of Jung to develop the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator Test - a practical tool for managers interested in measuring personality. According to the test there are four underlying tendencies or preferences which are evident in the way we think and act and which define the type of personality we have. These are extroversion or introversion;

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sensing or intuition; thinking or feeling and judgement or perception. Several benefits of the test have been promoted: • identifying career options • choosing whether to pursue academic or vocational training • recruitment and selection decisions • more complex decisions involving the make-up of teams.

Internet question

Find our more about the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator test at http://www.myersbriggs.org/ Make a list of the benefits and limitations of using such an instrument. Have you undertaken this test, or a similar one? If so, do you think the result accurately reflect your personality?

Another aspect of the study of personality looks at traits rather than personality types and is based on the work of Hans and Michael Eysenck. The Eysencks adopted a scientific approach and conducted laboratory tests to measure behaviour, which they then attributed to the existence of particular personality traits. They identified two clusters of traits: extroversion and neuroticism, the latter being associated with emotional volatility, inconsistency and unpredictable mood swings. Later in their careers they identified a third concept, psychoticism, which describes those who cannot control their impulses. The Eysencks’ work is associated with biological or genetic explanations of personality, which represents an essentialist explanation which is appealing for practising managers who seek ‘solutions’ to complex organizational problems.

The adoption of the methods of the natural sciences to study personality has attracted criticism for ignoring sociological influences. It is argued that a mixture of genetic and social factors explains personality. For example, children brought up in a home that is caring and nurturing are likely to develop different personalities to children brought up in households where neglect and abuse are the norm. Critics of the biological approach taken by the Eysencks for instance, believe that personality is the product of organization and socialization. Rather than challenging assumptions about traits such as ‘anxiety’, the Eysencks’ approach was to take them as given and then to attempt to measure them, which ignored the changing social and historical construction of these categories. The influence of For use with Introducing Organizational Behaviour and Management 4e David Knights and Hugh Willmott © 2022 Cengage EMEA

scientific thinking on personality is illustrated by the popularity of psychometric testing in human resource management. A critical approach to the study of personality is sceptical of such instruments.

Activity

The application of methods from the natural science to studying social phenomena is controversial. Make a list of the pros and cons of studying social interaction using a natural sciences approach.

Idiographic Approaches

Idiographic approaches to personality emphasize its contingent character. Whereas nomothetic approaches seek to uncover and discover the mechanisms that determine personality and to categorize the various personality types, idiographic approaches emphasize personality development and change. This perspective assumed that personality can grow or withdraw depending on the circumstances. Two schools of thought within the idiographic approach are: • Psychodynamics – based on the work of Freud, the individual is theorized as a processual phenomenon that is challenged to resolve a series of unconscious internal conflicts.

• Phenomenology – based on the work of Husserl, emphasis is given to the experiences of knowing, feeling and acting with the aim of capturing the unique nature of experiential being.

The end of the individual?

In the western world we live in societies which celebrate the individual. We value individual styles and opinions and we believe that individuals should be rewarded for their contributions. This has become common sense to the extent that it is difficult to believe that the individual may be a recent social phenomenon – a category in which we have all been disciplined. Experiences such as being in a large sports crowd or a riot can give us the sense that it is possible for the rational, autonomous individual to be overtaken by a collective personality.

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One way of rethinking questions of personality and individual differences is to focus on identity, which brings in questions around the meaning and purpose of our lives. A concern with identity is distinctive to the critical study of organization behaviour. It is argued that there is a basic anxiety that comes from ‘being in the world’ and we are always trying to resolve this anxiety through the quest for a strong identity. The search for identity leads us to seek power and control others and to have our identities confirmed through consuming particular goods and services. Because of this, organizations can be seen as being full of pathological forms of identification, schizophrenic tendencies and authoritarian and narcissistic personalities.

In summary, the central issue in mainstream and critical approaches to the study of personality is the appropriateness of sciences and the methods of the natural sciences.

Whereas the mainstream relies heavily on a scientific approach, critical scholars are less enthused, although because of this they attract criticism for being utopian and impractical.

Within this central issue, there are subsidiary issues: • Whether personality is the outcome of nature or nurture related to this.

• Whether personality is a static entity or develops over time.

• Whether it is reasonable to infer personality from studying behaviour.

• The degree of explanatory weight that should be given to personality.

• Whether it is better to study identity rather than personality, which allows a greater range of dimensions (political, spiritual, emotional etc.) to be explored.

Key words Personality Idiographic Extravert Psychoticism Phenomenology Anxiety

Biologically determined Collective unconscious Myers-Briggs Type Indicator Test Psychometric testing The individual theory Schizophrenic tendencies

Nomothetic Introvert Neuroticism Psychodynamics Meaning and purpose

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Instructor's Manual and Workbook Chapter 4 - Groups and Teams at Work Introduction Mainstream views are based on the assumption that teamwork has positive effects on organizational performance through increased flexibility, motivation and learning.

Critical views highlight problems with mainstream thinking. These approaches suggest that teamwork is neither intrinsically good nor new.

Aims By the end of this chapter you should understand key mainstream approaches to groups and teams and why they are important for work organization.

You should also have an understanding of key critical approaches, the political issues they highlight and the opportunities they offer for understanding the difficulties and challenges of organizational life.

Mainstream approaches The use of groups and teams in organizations has become widespread. It is important to consider the difference between ‘groups’ and ‘teams’. A group can be defined as a collection of people who share certain interests and passions, or might simply enjoy each other’s company, for example a group of friends at university. Teams have specific purposes or goals, have a clear task and must collaborate with each other to complete the task. An example might be a team of students working on a piece of course assessment. The key difference is therefore that in teams there is collaboration between members to undertake a task.

To understand group and team processes, we need to take account of both conscious and unconscious processes. Conscious processes include communication, decision making, power and influence, conflict and ethos. However, psychoanalytic approaches have shown there are also unconscious processes that operate i.e. they are not always intentional and guided by a clear rationality. Bion (1961) identified three unconscious processes – dependency, expectancy (or pairing) and flight/fight. Dependency occurs when the group is completely dependent on a leader for providing security. Expectancy or pairing occurs when there are sub-groups which focus the attention of members and which are invested with hopes that they will solve the problems of the group.

Flight/fight occurs when the group transforms insecurity into a threat from a person or an object that needs to be fought or escaped.

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Social psychology has been the main source for management theory on groups and teams. Two important contributions have been the concepts of social loafing and groupthink. Social loafing is the tendency of some individuals to reduce effort and contribution in a team situation. It is most likely to occur when the number of members is high, interest in the task is low and when there are no systems in place for checking individuals’ contributions.

Activity It is highly likely that if you’ve been in a team, whether it be at work or at leisure, you will have experienced social loafing. Based on a previous experience, consider the following questions and write your responses in the box below.

How did the nature of the task and the composition of the team influence the extent of social loafing?

Did the team endeavour to overcome social loafing and if so, what did they do and how effective was it?

Groupthink is when pressure for consensus prevents the group from making a proper appraisal of alternative courses of action. Symptoms of groupthink are listed on page 122 of the text and include an illusion of invulnerability and unanimity, a belief in the morality of a group and the use of direct pressure on those who are reluctant to conform to the consensus that develops.

Internet question Critics of the War in Iraq launched by the US administration under George Bush consider the decision to go to war as a classic example of groupthink. Using the For use with Introducing Organizational Behaviour and Management 4e David Knights and Hugh Willmott © 2022 Cengage EMEA

internet search engine www.google.com do some research on this issue. In the box below, list the symptoms of groupthink presented in the textbook and try and find an example of each from President Bush’s decision to go to war.

In mainstream approaches, teams are believed to enhance three organizational dimensions: flexibility, motivation and learning. Teams enhance flexibility by being able to react quickly to problems by making decision at team level rather than further up the chain of command. One application of using teams to enhance flexibility is lean production, which aims to avoid waste, slack and redundancies through a different approach to work organization. Lean production has been applied widely in the car manufacturing industry, with teams being responsible for a different portion of the assembly line. Teams are responsible for resolving problems and coming up with better ways of working.

Teamwork is believed to enhance motivation, with the argument being that when workers are empowered to work in teams which they can manage themselves they are more likely to be highly committed. The assumptions which underlie this view can be traced back to the human relations movement and the socio-technical tradition, which stressed that an organization is a social system in which groups are an important source of influence on behaviour. It is assumed that a democratic approach which favours participation and autonomy enhances the performance of the organization. An important study was the Hawthorne experiments conducted at the Western electric Company in Chicago during the 1920s, which concluded that social factors and not working conditions were responsible for changes in productivity. Another important study was conducted by Trist and Bamforth in the 1950s on a shift in working methods for coal miners. The study highlighted the changes in social arrangements that resulted from a change to the technical aspects of work.

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environment in organizations. Learning is increasingly seen as a social phenomenon rather than as an individual cognitive endeavour and research demonstrates that individuals working alone rarely produce the level and quality of creativity and problem solving required for innovation. This topic is discussed in greater detail in the following chapter.

Key issues in the study of groups and teams concern their effects on productivity, how teams develop, how they should be designed and managed. Concerning effectiveness, some research has substantiated the claim that teams increase productivity, but other results have been less positive. The question of how teams develop was addressed by Tuckman (1965), who developed a sequence of stages: forming, storming, norming and performing. The idea is that each stage needs to be completed before a group can move to the next stage and this hierarchical ordering and division into stages has been the subject of criticism. Gersick (1988) argued that teams do not follow specific and necessary stages, but instead proceed through a process of ‘punctuated equilibrium’ which is characterized by periods of stability (equilibrium) that are disrupted (punctuated) by a revolutionary period where new ways of working emerge.

The issue of designing teams has been addressed by many authors, including Belbin, who identified a set of roles that are held to be crucial for team effectiveness. These roles provide a balance between dealing with both the relationship and task aspects of groups and teams. Another important issue is that of resistance within teams, which is defined as conduct that serves to maintain the status quo in the face of pressure to alter it. The issue of resistance has largely been ignored by mainstream approaches but has been paid greater attention by the critical approaches.

Mainstream approaches to teams at work have made several contributions, but there are also limitations. A contribution is the offering of effectively designed and managed teams as the solution for almost any organizational problem. This in part explains the appeal of teams to managers, but team life is not always as positive as mainstream perspectives suggest and their prescriptions are not guarantees of success. Related to this is the aim of mainstream literature to develop models that can predict team behaviour and results. Critics argue that because of the variability of team experiences, this aim is impossible to fulfil. Another contribution claimed by some mainstream authors is the empowerment of working in teams, although other mainstream thinkers fear that this results in a loss of managerial control, a greater risk of poor decision making and the pursuit of goals that might not be in the best interest of the organization.

Critical approaches Critical approaches to teamwork contest the idealised picture of teamwork that appears in the mainstream, which is seen to create a win-win situation work situation, with empowered and more satisfied employees enabling the organization to be more flexible and innovative. Whereas mainstream approaches think of teams as a neutral technology of work design, critical approaches conceive of teams as a practice that is involved in creating, maintaining and reproducing unequal power relations.

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Critical approaches to teamwork point out that in today’s work environment teamworking is generally a top-down, management driven process. Whereas many of the classical studies involved cases where employees had organized themselves into autonomous groups, teamwork is nowadays generally introduced as part of a managerial strategy. Often, this results in employees working not just smarter, but harder and it is therefore argued that teamwork can produce work intensification. For example, lean production has been labelled ‘mean production’ because of the way it increases pressure on workers by eliminating breathing space. These considerations are a departure from the mainstream by pointing to the ugly face of teamwork as a stressful practice, rather than a win-win situation. It also raises the question of who benefits when teamworking results in smarter and harder work. Critics argue that workers do not necessarily benefit, in which case teamworking can be seen as a form of exploitation which serves management’s interests. From this perspective, even if teamworking moves away from the fragmenting, individualizing logic of Taylorism, it reproduces the same logic of exploitation. Furthermore, it can be argued that teamworking is a more subtle and pervasive form of exploitation. Through teamworking, employees often actively consent to their further subordination, since it provides them with feelings of involvement and ownerships of work. Teamworking can be viewed as a subtle form of control because it is clothed in this rhetoric of participation and involvement.

Activity Reflect on your own experiences of being in teams to consider the different perspectives on teamworking put forward by the mainstream and critical approaches.

Do the mainstream approaches provide a realistic picture?

Are the critical approaches useful for illustrating the complex, contradictory and murkier picture of teamworking?

A limitation of this ideological critique of teamwork is that it implies that workers are ignorant and cannot understand their own interests. This essentialist view of the human subject assumes there is a set of ‘real’ interests which is fixed and determined.

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applied by a cunning management to a naïve workforce. Instead, it focuses on the issue of why workers consent to teamworking. These issues of consent have been addressed by considering workers’ subjectivity or sense of self. Here, teamworking is conceived of as a social practice that creates and maintains certain power relations through constituting particular subjectivities, or in other words, by transforming individuals into teamworking subjects who assume a self-identity as team-mates. Barker developed the concept of ‘concertive control’ based on a study of self-managing teams at a US electronic company. The control is concertive because workers act in concert to develop the means of their own control through the creation of rules and mutual surveillance which establish the proper conduct of team members. This self-discipline produced more intense forms of control than traditional bureaucratic methods.

A limitation of this critical approach to understand teamwork is that it paints a bleak picture of teamwork because this disciplinary mechanism seems to produce entirely consenting subjects which excludes any possibilities of resistance. However, studies suggest that teamworking as a managerial strategy does not always work in the ways intended by management. In Pyramid, teamwork power/knowledge actually compromised the expected aims for which empowered teams were introduced.

Management introduced a system of peer review for teams as a way of obtaining knowledge from the shop floor, as well as providing an opportunity for the teams to reflect on their processes. This disciplinary mechanism was supposed to classify, divide and rank workers so that bonuses could be allocated to the best performers. However, it became useless when workers started to give each other the same score. This equalizing of scores was made possible by the mobilization of a team ethos.

The message to emerge from this case is that it is too simplistic to assume that teamworking is a managerial tool that only ever produces workers’ exploitation, as some critical approaches seem to suggest. Clearly, it also demonstrates that it is simplistic to assume that teamworking creates win-win situations for workers and managers, as mainstream perspectives imply. The meaning of teamworking is open to contestation and its effects will differ, according to the nature of the situation and the people involved.

Key Words Groups Dependency Social loafing Motivation Empowerment Norming Roles Exploitation Self-discipline

Teams Expectancy Groupthink Learning Forming Performing Power relations Subjectivity Resistance

Unconscious processes Fight/Flight Flexibility Lean production Storming Punctuated equilibrium Work intensification Concertive control

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Instructor's Manual and Workbook Chapter 5 - Managing people: Contexts of HRM, diversity and social inequality Introduction Managing people through human resource management (HRM) is dominated by a mainstream approach. Diversity management has also developed within the mainstream, being concerned with exploiting diversity to achieve the strategic goals of the organization. The contribution of critical approaches to HRM and diversity is to reflect upon some of the often ignored conditions and consequences of managing people at work, such as power asymmetries and social and economic inequalities.

Aims By the end of this chapter you should understand the differences between HRM and personnel management and be aware of ‘soft’ and ‘hard’ approaches to HRM. You should understand what managing diversity means, and why it has become a popular management idea in recent years. You should also be aware of the contributions of critical approaches to both HRM and diversity management.

Mainstream approaches Mainstream approaches to managing people are concerned with developing research which directly contributes to managerial goals and objectives. This managerialist perspective originates in the private sector but is increasingly being adopted in the public sector. HRM is concerned with every aspect of employment – recruitment, selection and induction; training and development; job evaluation and appraisal; performance and pay; employee relations and collective negotiations; and equal opportunity. In the mainstream, diversity is narrowly concerned with equal opportunity and with limiting the disruptions or conflicts that may arise because of various divisions within the workplace.

HRM The term HRM only began to be used in the mid-1980s. Before this time, the task of managing people was done by personnel departments and its study was called personnel management. The role of personnel management was to organize matters relating to employees in a uniform, equitable and standardized manner. Personnel management was held in low esteem, which partly explains the emergence of HRM, which sought to be part of the strategy as well as the operations of the business.

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There are different ways to view human resources. They may be seen as assets whose variable costs of production need to be constrained, or as creative and innovative assets which need to be nurtured and developed in order to advance the productive power of the organization. These two views are reflected in ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ versions of HRM. The ‘soft’ versions emphasize the care of employees and seek to develop their commitment, flexibility and quality.

Two ‘soft’ models which have received wide attention in the literature are: • Beer et al, (1984, 1984): subscribes to a humanistic philosophy that draws on organizational psychology and the human relations perspective. It is concerned with developing employees as people, being attentive to their quality of working life and social well-being.

• Hendry and Pettigrew (1990): developed in the UK and seeks to combine strategic contingency and human development approaches. Their model links the content of strategy and HRM to a range of internal and external contexts.

‘Hard’ versions of HRM focus on employees as an asset that can be exploited instrumentally to secure productivity and profit. Two of the most influential ‘hard’ approaches are: • Fombrum, Tichy and Devanna (1984): considers business strategy to be the determinant of how the resource represented by human beings is deployed in a flexible and cost-effective manner.

• Schuler and Jackson (1987): focused on operational and competitive strategy and is concerned with the capacity of human resources to cut costs and to innovate.

Activity Reflect on your own experiences as an employee.

What might be some of the consequences of managers viewing you as a cost to be controlled?

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Managing diversity Diversity is the recognition that there are numerous differences between people in terms of their social characteristics (e.g. gender, race, age), their backgrounds (e.g. education and skills) and their values (e.g. cultural, moral and political beliefs).

Managing diversity is about respecting these differences and adapting policies and practices to accommodate them and to enable diverse employees to participate fully in workplace activities.

Diversity became part of managerial vocabulary around the end of the 1990s, in response to what was considered to be a negative and counter-productive tone of equal opportunity and anti-discrimination efforts. These were seen as bureaucratic and negative in imposing external constraints on what managers could do. The solution has been to transform diversity issues from a moral question of equity to an instrumental concern with efficacy, by focusing on the ‘business case’. This move was welcomed by many advocates of equal opportunity because they could promote their agenda in a more positive way. It also helped management consultants specializing in diversity management, as they could now sell the productive and competitive advantages of greater employee diversity. As it became a popular management practice, diversity management began to displace more radical demands for eradicating discrimination in the pursuit of gender, race, sexual and other equalities.

Two significant trends in the management of people in today’s organizations are the changing nature of the workplace and the shifting composition of the workforce. In the West, the demographic shift in the population results in an increasing potential number of older workers, creating a non-traditional source of labour which organizations are increasingly seeking to target in their recruitment. A second factor in the shifting composition of the workforce is women’s relationship to paid work. In the West, women are living longer, increasingly not marrying or marrying later, and increasingly not having children or having them later. This makes women a more significant part of the workforce, enabling them to retain a degree of financial security and independence.

Activity Consider jobs like nursing and secretarial work.

To what degree are these jobs usually associated with women? Why is this so?

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Critical approaches Critical approaches are less concerned with the prescriptive or normative question of how to manage. Instead, they provide us with a commentary on actions, policies and beliefs that can provide greater insights into the management of people. Questions associated with critical approaches include: How is it possible to reconcile competing views of people as economic units of production whilst at the same time regarding them as human beings?

How acceptable is it to incorporate older workers into the workplace and on what, and in whose, terms is that incorporation conducted?

HRM Critics of HRM suggest it amounts to little more than empty rhetoric which is used to elevate the status of activities formerly performed by lower level personnel managers.

Alternatively, it is seen as a reflection of broader neo-liberal movements in Western economies toward free market and managerialist solutions to human resource problems. Given that HRM has developed almost exclusively within the mainstream, it is almost contradictory to link HRM with critical approaches. Critical studies tend to approach HRM indirectly as their primary focus tends to be on gender or feminist analysis, diversity more generally or organization theory. Critical perspectives challenge the relentless, single-minded pursuit of profitability within the mainstream and suggest that issues of inequality, discrimination, power and privilege at work need to be given equal attention.

An influential study is Townley’s (1993, 1994) radical interpretation of HRM drawing on Michel Foucault’s insights about power and knowledge. For Townley, HRM is best understood as an exercise of power over those subjected to it. It represents a number of mechanisms (such as job analysis and performance appraisal) that have the effect of disciplining employees, rather than being seen as a package of politically neutral techniques for improving the management of people in organizations, as mainstream approaches suggest. Townley argues that HRM techniques of disciplinary power individualize employees, reducing the potential for any resistance or opposition to management. This makes HRM highly attractive for managers.

Managing diversity Mainstream approaches on managing diversity are generally conservative and managerialist, seeing diversity as a problem to be managed, thereby reducing or eliminating the risk of disharmony and instability at work. Promoting equal opportunity and diversity at work is seen as compatible with profit maximisation because diverse employees are better able to understand diverse customers. This ‘business case’ of managing diversity is more appealing to managers than the negative, compliance focus of anti-discrimination legislation.

Research question Find out what pieces of anti-discrimination legislation exist in your country and make a list of them.

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For each piece of legislation, think about who the legislation was designed to protect.

How effective do you think it has been?

From a critical perspective, however, the perception of diversity as a ‘problem’ is itself problematic. Critical writers ask whether many efforts to manage diversity are more about sustaining divisions than limiting their damaging consequences. This suggests that managers themselves reproduce and sustain relations of power and inequality.

This is what Acker (2006) calls inequality regimes – sets of interrelated practices, processes, actions and meanings that result in and maintain class, gender and racial inequalities within organizations. From this perspective, inequalities within organizations are maintained as diversity is celebrated, with managers seen as active agents in this process rather than neutral arbiters or brokers.

Since the 1990s theories of intersectionality have become a popular critical approach.

Intersectionality is concerned with multiplicities of identity that are held simultaneously. These differences intersect such that a person may experience disadvantages in multiple ways. These disadvantages are constitutive of one another.

For example, a gay Muslim woman might experience disadvantage in a way that is greater than the sum of the parts.

Key Words Managerialism Personnel management Discrimination 'soft' HRM Values Intersectionality

Diversity management Backgrounds Inequality regimes Equal opportunity Inequality

'hard' HRM Rhetoric Strategic contingency Social characteristics Disciplinary power

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Instructor's Manual and Workbook Chapter 6 - Organization, structure and design Introduction Mainstream thinking on structure and design falls into two camps – classical and modern. Classical theories believe it is possible to identify principles of organizing that are universally applicable, regardless of the context which the organization faces.

Modern theories stress the importance of adapting the design of organizations to the contingent demands and opportunities of the context.

Both mainstream approaches conceive of structure and design as an impartial and rational process. Both assume that consensus underpins organizations and both are preoccupied with improving the level of managerial control. Neither mainstream approach pays much attention to issues such as power and inequality. In contrast, critical approaches conceive of structure and design as a cultural and political process.

They assume that conflict is endemic to organizations and attempt to throw light on, and question, managerial control.

Aims By the end of this chapter should understand the classical and modern approaches to structure and design, as well as alternative approaches that form a critical approach.

Both the mainstream and critical approaches have limitations and you should be aware of those.

Mainstream approaches Components of an organization’s structure include • the way people are grouped into departments • the way activities and responsibilities are allocated • the lines of reporting from subordinate to superordinate • the lines of communication between employees • the monitoring of performance and design of reward systems.

Classical theorists of structure and design thought of organizations as well-oiled machines. They sought to develop universal principles which would provide a comprehensive guide for management practice.

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An early contributor was Henri Fayol, whose 14 principles of structure and design were boiled down by Huczynski and Buchanan into five key points: • • • • •

Functional division of work Hierarchical relationships Bureaucratic forms of control Narrow supervisory span Closely prescribed roles.

Activity Take an organization with which you are familiar and analyze its structure and design according to the five principles above.

What are the advantages and disadvantages of applying each of these principles?

A limitation of classical thinking is the emphasis on vertical reporting. A single chain of command, which is seen as essential by classical thinkers, means that in principle there is no reporting relationships across the organization. This limitation is addressed by a matrix structure, which involves two reporting lines – one to a functional authority (e.g. marketing and sales) and one to a project authority.

The modern approach breaks with the classical ideal of finding the one best organizational design. Instead of applying principles consistently, it seeks to adapt the design to the contingencies of the context. The aim is to develop a good fit between the design and the demands of the organization’s external environment.

Two examples of the modern approach are systems thinking and contingency theory.

Whereas classical thinking assumes a closed system where no account is taken of factors external to the organization (such as changing consumer tastes, economic stability) system thinking is open in that it analyses activities in terms of inputs, processes and outputs and takes accounts of how each part is interdependent with For use with Introducing Organizational Behaviour and Management 4e David Knights and Hugh Willmott © 2022 Cengage EMEA

other parts of the system. Open system thinkers believe that ‘healthy’ organizations are those that adapt to changes in the environment.

Contingency theory is based on open systems thinking and seeks to account for changing environmental demands and opportunities, such as changes in legislation and in the costs of resources. There is a strong focus on the interdependencies of system components. For example, the design of goals and objectives is seen to be conditional on the opportunities and demands presented by the environment, as well as their interaction with the technology, structure and human resources of the organization.

Both classical and modern approaches to structure and design emphasize the formal aspects of organizations and largely exclude the informal aspects (such as gossip and informal networks and alliances). This is a weakness since organizations depend on both formal and informal practices to perform effectively. Excessive formalization often creates rigidities, in which action is dependent on a procedure or rule that permits it.

Various techniques can be adopted by managers in an attempt to improve the structure and design of organizations. Two influential techniques are business process re- engineering (BPR) and total quality management (TQM).

BPR represents a ‘hard’ approach in that it pursues Taylorism’s concern with measurement and control. The emphasis is on a radical re-design of structure through: • Reorienting businesses around processes rather than function • placing heavy emphasis on entrepreneurialism • advocating the widespread use of technology.

In BPR, little attention is paid to how the resulting changes are likely to be received by employees. Critics argue that this explains why BPR has failed to deliver its promised improvements in the majority of cases.

In contrast, TQM represents a ‘soft’ approach because it questions the assumption that the application of hard methods will mechanistically improve the organization. It is much more focused on people and favours a process of incremental change based on a concern with quality, which has its origins in Japanese management practice.

Compared with BPR, TQM is less likely to encounter strong resistance by those affected by the change. Three key features of TQM are: • Continuous improvement of internal processes • Creation of an organizational culture with a strong customer orientation • Teamworking.

Mainstream approaches to structure and design have made a number of contributions, including • A recognition of the critical importance of design, because it is assumed that structure largely determines behaviour in organizations For use with Introducing Organizational Behaviour and Management 4e David Knights and Hugh Willmott © 2022 Cengage EMEA

•

Open system approaches have focused attention on how the organization adapts to its environment.

The mainstream approaches have a high level of credibility and legitimacy because they provide rational approaches and do not challenge the established hierarchies of power and inequality. In the mainstream, questions such as whether an approach to structure and design is beneficial or sustainable tends to be dismissed as an ‘ethical’ or ‘moral’ issue that is beyond the concern of managers.

Mainstream approaches have limitations in that they: •

reinforce a technical rationality that is unrealistic and therefore unachievable

•

assume that behaviour is determined by the structure of an organization, which ignores the capacities of individuals to transform and/or resist structures

•

assume a consensus which is unrealistic given that different interests and power relationships exist in organizations.

Critical approaches The key point of difference between the mainstream and critical approaches is their assumptions regarding consensus and conflict in organizations and society. As mentioned previously, mainstream approaches assume that consensus between, for example, employees and owners of an organization, is the norm. Conflict is seen as an aberration that can generally be resolved by improving communication so that everyone is aware of their shared goals or by removing ‘troublemakers’. Advocates of the mainstream point to the lack of overt conflict, such as strikes, to support their assumptions.

In contrast, critical approaches argue that consensus is often forced, with the absence of overt conflict more likely to represent the relatively powerless position of employees in relation to owners, rather than a sign of underlying harmony. Critical thinkers see the design of an organization’s structure as being integral to sustaining this forced consensus. When a structure is represented as being the most rational and costeffective solution, any challenge that questions its legitimacy is likely to be rejected.

Critical approaches seek to show that organizational structure is a condition of, but also has consequences for, the reproduction of power and inequality. They connect an analysis of structure to the place of organizations within a capitalist system. This is an issue that is largely unacknowledged by the mainstream, which takes the presence and the value of capitalist principles of economic organization for granted. This form of critical analysis draws originally from Marx and more recently from Braverman’s Labor and Monopoly Capital (1974). Braverman argued that the structure and design of work under Taylorism has separated thought from action, in the name of science.

Managers do the ‘thinking’, while the role of workers is reduced to the ‘doing’ which alienates them from their labour and gives them little control of their work.

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Braverman’s ideas were largely accepted by critical organization theorists he is criticized for his lack of regard for the subjectivity of labour. By this, it is meant that Braverman tended to see management as all-powerful and did not give sufficient recognition to management’s reliance on the cooperation and collaboration of labour.

A more balanced approach is to regard organization structure as the result of dialectic of control, involving an interdependence between groups within the organization. A useful example of the dialectic of control is the structure of a university lecture (in other words, the relationship between lecturer and students). It might appear that lecturers have all the control since they determine the content of the course, forms of assessment and so on. However, the lecturer depends on students to attend class and cooperate during lectures. Therefore, the existence and reproduction of the structure is as much dependent on the behaviour of students who may appear powerless as it is upon lecturers. This example demonstrates an important assumption of much critical work in relation to power. Power is seen as relationship and depends on those subjected to it consenting with its demands. The mainstream tends to see power a being held and used by one group over another.

An influential contribution to critical approaches is Michel Foucault. In particular, his ideas about the panopticon and disciplinary mechanisms are useful for thinking about the operation of control in organizations. The key idea is that direct control is replaced by other forms of surveillance and discipline that operate at a distance. In an organizational context, this might be the replacement of direct supervision by performance measures and targets. The significance of these measures depends on the extent to which employees internalize their direction. The intention of the panopticon is to produce self-disciplining individuals. Foucault’s analysis is drawn on to suggest that it is through the institutionalization of disciplinary power that the structures of contemporary work organization are determined and maintained.

Activity Read more about the panopticon in the chapter under ‘Controversies and debates’.

What relevance does the concept of disciplinary mechanisms have for today’s organizations?

Relate Foucault’s ideas to an organization with which you are familiar.

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In summary, the critical approaches have made important contributions to thinking on structure and design. These include creating a greater awareness of the relationship between these aspects and the wider politico-economic context. Rather than seeing design as a technical process of finding the most rational, efficient solution, critical approaches recognize that it is a historical and political process that involves struggles between groups that pursue different interests.

As with any approach, the critical approaches have their limitations. They are accused of paying too much attention to the human dimension and therefore neglecting broader structures of power such as global capitalism. They are also accused of being too overly theoretical and highly idealistic. This is largely because the audience for critical approaches tends to be students and academics, rather than practicing managers.

Key words Classical theorists Matrix structure Contingency theory Total quality management Continuous improvement

Universal principles Modern approach Formalization Hard approach Subjectivity

Chain of command Systems thinking Business process reengineering Soft approach Dialectic of control

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Instructor's Manual and Workbook Chapter 7 Management and leadership Introduction The aim of this chapter is to outline some key differences between management and leadership, and to introduce you to both mainstream and critical approaches to leadership.

Management is frequently associated with task focused responsibilities coordinated through hierarchical organizational structures. Leadership focuses on energizing staff with a sense of direction and commitment through promotion of a collective sense of purpose engaging the ‘hearts and minds’ of organization members.

It is often thought to be in the best interests of senior executives to foster leadership practices amongst managers in efforts to increase productivity, effectiveness, and innovation from staff.

While this approach may seem obvious to senior executives, it tends to assume that organizational members share their commitment – which is often not the case.

Leadership has become highly fashionable in recent times. This reflects increasing emphasis on inspiring people and encouraging their participation, over more dictatorial or bureaucratic approaches often associated with management.

Aims By the end of the chapter you should understand the key mainstream perspectives on leadership, including personality trait and transformational, situational, and contingency theories, as well as their limitations You should also have an understanding of key critical approaches, as well as their limitations.

Mainstream approaches Personality trait and transformational theory Trait theory is focused on the identification of personal qualities which can be thought of as necessary to be a leader. Research has failed to come up with a conclusive list of personality traits which can be used to distinguish between leaders and non-leaders.

Burns’ (1978) and Bass’ (1985) theory of ‘transformational leadership’ has a trait theory flavour which focuses on particular qualities leaders need to lead staff, particularly through turbulent and uncertain periods. Such leaders inspire, motivate, and empower staff to be problem solvers and achieve outcomes as a collective group rather than on a self-interested level (more commonly For use with Introducing Organizational Behaviour and Management 4e David Knights and Hugh Willmott © 2022 Cengage EMEA

associated with a ‘transactional’ approach). For these reasons, transformational leadership continues to have a high profile in current leadership thinking.

Like trait theories, transformational leadership theories have underlying assumptions which tend to ignore the effects of circumstances, organizational systems and culture, and the responsiveness of followers towards aspiring transformational leaders.

Activity Think of an example of leadership drawn from your own experience – perhaps a job you have worked in, playing a sport, or simply going out with mates.

What singled out certain people as ‘leaders’ or distinguished their behaviour as having the characteristics of leadership?

Contingency and situational theory Modern leadership thinking tries to take circumstantial factors and their interaction into consideration – this is known as ‘contingency’ or ‘open systems’ thinking – where leader success is ‘contingent’ on the circumstances that support its effectiveness.

Closely linked with contingency theories are situational theories. Situations can give rise to different styles of leadership which are often thought of as consultative or participative (widely described as ‘democratic’), and others that are imposing and dictatorial (widely called ‘authoritarian’). Dictatorial or authoritarian styles predominantly rely on individual conviction, assertiveness, and favouritism towards selected followers. The major downside of this approach is the risk of lack of cooperation from followers who do not respond well to such styles.

More consultative leadership styles involve greater discussion, consultation, and contribution with, and from followers, thereby harnessing the collective wisdom of the group. This contrasts with nonFor use with Introducing Organizational Behaviour and Management 4e David Knights and Hugh Willmott © 2022 Cengage EMEA

democratic styles where individual leaders tend to monopolize truth and good judgement. The core downside to consultative or democratic approaches can be the paralyzing effects of endless discussions which may cause costly delays, procrastination and ineffective compromises.

Prominent contingency theorists of leadership are: • Fiedler - focus on styles of leadership that are more or less participative • Hersey and Blanchard – key focus is on leader-follower dynamics • Vroom and Jago – incorporate consideration of the future consequences of adopting a particular style focused around autocratic-democratic polarity.

Activity Using your example of leadership drawn from your own experience in the previous activity to consider how would you describe it using Fiedler’s, Hersey and Blanchard’s, and Vroom and Jago’s contingency models of leadership.

Although the mainstream leadership theories advocate democratic approaches, democracy in organizational practice is often notably absent, particularly in more hierarchical organizations dominated by management. Despite modern thinking about management and leadership which favour an open systems or contingency approach focused on organizational adaptation to its environment, mainstream thinking is fraught with problems caused by a number of questionable assumptions, including that: • knowledge is complete and available • goals do not vary across the organization • managers and leaders do not operate out of self-interest • the external environment does not necessarily impact on economic goals.

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Philosophical Assumptions of Theory X, Y and Z Managers According to Theory X, workers do not like to work and will avoid it whenever possible. They have little ambition, try to avoid responsibility, and like to be directed. In this case use of coercion, control, and threats of punishment is necessary.

Theory Y notes that expenditure of physical and mental effort at work is natural to people.

According to this theory people will exercise self-direction and self-control if it is committed to their goals. Commitment to the objectives relies on the rewards associated with their achievement. This occurs when there is capacity to exercise a relatively high degree of imagination, ingenuity and creativity widely distributed throughout the population.

Theory Z takes a critical approach by considering that people are motivated by a strong sense of commitment to be part of a greater whole. It states that employees seek out responsibility and look for opportunities to advance in an organization. Those employees who learn different aspects of the business will be in a better position to contribute to the broader goals of the organization. As a critical approach Theory Z notes that organizations will engender strong bonds of loyalty in employees, making the organization more productive and successful.

Critical approaches Critical writers are skeptical of mainstream assumptions about consensus in organizations. The possibility that there might be endemic conflicts associated with inequalities of wealth, status and power tends not to be contemplated in mainstream thinking. The mainstream tends to treat conflict as an individual problem (e.g., a personality disorder), whereas critical approaches emphasize social explanations.

Critical approaches acknowledge that organizations may appear to be consensual but argue this occurs because managers suppress conflict or because subordinates recognize benefits in demonstrating compliant or consensual behaviour.

Critical analysts relate these notions to relational dependence – particularly in terms of the manager-subordinate relationship. However, suppressive environments do not eradicate issues, and often result in subtle subversion. Examples of this are Bullshit Bingo and use of daily humour and gossip.

Mainstream perspectives are based on essentialist thinking, whereas critical approaches emphasize explanations based on social constructions. In essentialist thinking, it is assumed that the world comprises a series of ‘essences’, and that the purpose of reflection is to discover the fundamental of universal aspects of whatever is being examined. Applied to leadership, this is to claim that leadership is determined or caused by some essential factor. Critics of the mainstream identify essentialist aspects in each of the mainstream leadership approaches described earlier.

Trait Trait leadership theory is founded on personality or characteristics. These aspects are thought of as For use with Introducing Organizational Behaviour and Management 4e David Knights and Hugh Willmott © 2022 Cengage EMEA

the ‘essence’ of leadership, while contextual factors are ignored.

Situational The context is seen as essential, because it is assumed that the context can be boiled down to a set of features.

Contingency From a contingency perspective, both trait and situational factors are seen as essential to successful leadership. Determining successful leadership becomes a matter of matching the type of leader with the appropriate context.

From a critical perspective, the notion of essences is rejected in favour of assumptions about the socially constructed nature of reality. For example, the notion of an organization’s ‘environment’ is not a self-evident entity. Its existence is constructed by members of an organization so it is necessary to consider the interests, identities and politics that form part of the organizational environment also.

A recent critical take on leadership is a constitutional approach which assumes that traits, context and environment are all constituted socially. As with all critical approaches, it less concerned with providing technical prescriptions of leadership than highlighting how leadership is accomplished in daily encounters in organizations.

The critical approaches encourage challenges to mainstream thinking to consider broader notions of what management and leadership could mean. This is particularly important given the current trend to elevate leadership over management and emphasize its importance for successful leaders and their organizations.

Critical approaches are not exempt from limitations. Given their focus on managing and leading people, broader considerations such as the global nature of capitalism and the domination of financial power may be neglected. In addition, although critical approaches encourage broader thinking on management and leadership, this is often in a theoretical and idealistic way which tends to be of limited practical application for organizations which generally favour more applied and pragmatic contributions.

Activity Apply the critical views to your answers in the previous activities in this chapter and describe how you may think differently about the contingency models of leadership.

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Key words Management Transformational leadership Democratic Essentialist thinking

Leadership Contingency Authoritarian Social constructions

Trait theory Situational theories Conflict Constitutional approach

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Instructor's Manual and Workbook Chapter 8 Politics and decision-making in organizations Introduction Politics is a term we are all familiar with. A political analysis of organizations views them as systems of government which are inclined either towards authoritarian or democratic forms of rule.

Mainstream writers acknowledge organizational politics but tend to view it as something negative that needs to be eradicated in order to improve the performance of the organization. Critical perspectives suggest that politics is an inevitable part of making decisions and should not therefore be seen as something that can or should be eradicated. Critical perspectives highlight the deep-seated nature of conflict within organizations and connects politics to wider sets of power relations in society.

Aims By the end of this chapter should understand the unitarist/classical and pluralist models of political organizational decision making, which dominate mainstream thinking.

You should also have an understanding of the limitations of these models and of the contribution of a critical perspective.

Mainstream approaches Politics and decision making are interconnected. Because of the differences in views that exist in organizations, decision making inevitably involves politics. A mainstream definition of political behaviour, provided by Robbins (1998), contains three ideas: • it extends beyond the formal authority that accompanies a person’s position in the chain of command • it involves the informal use of power to cultivate allies and control information • it is directly linked to decision making.

Early writers of organizational theory adopted a unitary perspective, which assumes that the views of top management are shared by all employees. In this model, conflict For use with Introducing Organizational Behaviour and Management 4e David Knights and Hugh Willmott © 2022 Cengage EMEA

is seen as dysfunctional rather than a reflection of different interests. Classical writers focused on the formal organization of work, such as authority structures and reporting relationships. More recent mainstream writers have taken greater account of organizational politics, with organizations increasingly recognized as ‘political systems’.

Research question Conflict can cause lost time, resources, and efficiency in any work team, but when managed well, conflict can result in new ideas, more informed decision-making, and better performance. Managing conflict effectively requires skill, knowledge and experience. These days every organization must train its employees to effectively manage conflict and resolve issues that block performance.

Ask around a workplace that you have access to. Are there any training courses, books or leaflets to help in conflict management?

Burns and Stalker (1966) provide an early account of mainstream political analysis, identifying the ‘political structure’ of an organization as a key factor in effective management. The political structure is “the balance of competing pressure from each group recognizing a common interest for a larger share of all or some benefits or resources” (Burns & Stalker, 1966, p.145). The authors identified two types of organizations: mechanistic and organic. Mechanistic systems are highly bureaucratic, whereas organic systems are more flexible and therefore better equipped to adjust to changing environmental conditions.

While early writers on organizations adopted a unitarist perspective, recent work in the mainstream is dominated by a pluralist frame of reference. In contrast to unitarism, pluralism recognizes a diversity of interests within an organization. For example, the interest of managers might be to increase profits, whereas the interest of workers might be to increase their wages. These interests can collide and create conflict, however in contrast to unitarism, this conflict is not viewed as dysfunctional in pluralism. Pluralism sees organizational relations as defined by bargaining, competition and the use of politics to achieve a ‘negotiated order that creates unity out of diversity’ (Morgan, 1986, p.185). Power is the medium through which these divergent interests are resolved. Refer to Table 8.1 in the chapter which compares the unitarist (or classical) tradition with the pluralist tradition.

Activity Take this opportunity to reflect on your own assumptions about conflict by analyzing an organization with which you are familiar.

Are there any interests that are shared in common by all members?

Do some groups have interests which conflict with the interests of others?

If there are conflicting interests, how are these negotiated?

Do you think it is possible for conflict to be eradicated? If not, why not?

Make a note of your reflections in the box below.

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In classical theory, decision making is viewed as a rational process in which managers act consensually to resolve problems. It is assumed that if conflict does arise, the formal organizational structure can resolve dispute and preserve the unity of the organization. A criticism of this approach is that it ignores elements of irrationality.

Table 8.2 in the chapter lists the steps in rational decision making and a range of potential contributors to irrationality, including misinformation, errors in logic, personal ambition and jealousies.

Another key idea to emerge from mainstream approaches is the role of uncertainty as a source of power. Pettigrew (1973) conducted an important study of an expanding computer system within a retail organization. Faced with a high level of uncertainty, the organization became heavily dependent on a group of new system analysts responsible for installing the computer system. This young, dynamic group of analysts were different from the existing group of analysts, who were more bureaucratic, and an intense rivalry developed between the two groups.

The pluralist perspective on politics and decision making has been criticized by those who adopt a mainstream structuralist approach to organization theory. This mainstream structuralist perspective shares the pluralist assumption that organizations are complex social units where different individuals interact. However, whereas pluralists focus on the resolution of these interests amongst individual decision makers, mainstream structuralists focus on the organizational conditions which are seen to determine the decisions that can be made.

March and Simon (1958) were important contributors to this approach. Their model of limited rationality draws attention to the limitation of pluralist analysis of decision making. While pluralism focuses on the use of rationality to reach the optimal decision, March and Simon suggest that the need to manage large amounts of information requires decision makers to ‘satisfice’ (reach a satisfactory decision).

The primary contribution of the mainstream structuralist approach is to suggest that organizational structures have a greater influence on the decision-making process than individual behaviour. Organizational goals are translated into operating procedures and forms of classification. This provides stability to the organization and limits the For use with Introducing Organizational Behaviour and Management 4e David Knights and Hugh Willmott © 2022 Cengage EMEA

potential of interest groups to influence decision making and effect organizational change.

Critical approach to politics and decision making Whereas mainstream accounts of politics and decision-making focus on the relations that are internal to organizations, critical perspectives attempt to connect these topics to the wider political and economic context in which organizations operate. This is because critical views argue that internal dynamics reflect broader patterns of power and inequality in society, which simultaneously constrain and enable the political activities of organizational members.

An example of a critical perspective is Marxist analysis, which links work organizations to the dynamics of the capitalist system. From this perspective, organizations are social arenas where wider social and political inequalities of power are played out, such as between the interests of capital and those of labour. Other critical perspectives highlight what they see as the incompatible interests of men and women, different ethnic groups etc.

Critical approaches have a different view of conflict from the mainstream’s unitarist and pluralist perspective. Unitarism sees conflict as dysfunctional since it assumes all organizational members share common interests. Pluralism sees conflict as relatively functional since it is the inevitable outcome of divergent interests held by organizational members. Pluralism believes these divergent interests can be negotiated so that a level of harmony is restored to the organization.

Critical perspectives, such as critical structuralism, which has its origins in Marxism, share the pluralist assumption of divergent interests but regard the conflict that results from these differences as deep-seated and systemic and therefore less freely negotiated and settled. From this perspective, the conflict has its origins in wider social relations, such as those that exist under capitalism, which leads the owners of the means of production to exploit workers through paying them much less than the value of their labour.

The critical structuralist is not to be confused with the mainstream structuralist approach; however they share in common a focus on structures rather than on individual behaviours. Because of this, both structuralist accounts have a propensity to neglect individual behaviour, seeing interactions between people in terms of politics and decision making as nothing more than the outcome of structural processes.

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Activity What relevance does a Marxist perspective on politics and decision making have for understanding the political dynamics of your workplace, or with an organization which you are familiar with?

Critical approaches challenge a functional view of power that characterizes mainstream thinking on politics and decision making. By functional, it is meant that the focus is on how politics might be functional for management’s goals, or in other words, how politics can be managed to remove its disruptive effects and therefore improve the performance of the organization. Critical perspectives highlight a number of problems with the functional view of power and politics.

• •

•

• •

Takes for granted the existing structure of power relations and therefore helps to reproduce prevailing inequalities.

Sees politics as inevitably negative and therefore something to be eradicated.

Critical perspectives define politics as the actions that mobilize resources and enrol people to support a policy, plan, or project. Politics is necessary to secure compliance or consent, so cannot be described as aberrant and cannot be eradicated.

Tends to see organizations as an aggregation of individuals rather than as collective communities. This individualistic view is itself highly political because it suggests that individuals who engage in politics are disruptive and should be isolated.

Perceives power as something to be possessed, usually by individuals. Critical thinking perceives power as a relationship, where its use is always dependent on the compliance or consent of those over whom it is exercised.

Fails to consider politics as a mode of resistance to legitimate concerns such as incompetent management.

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Key words Unitarist Pluralist Formal Authority Informal use of power

Conflict Political systems Mainstream structuralist Uncertainty

Limited rationality Satisfice Critical structuralism Functional view of power

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Instructor's Manual and Workbook Chapter 9 Culture Introduction The study of organizational culture focuses on the shared organizational values, beliefs and norms (what is important and how things should be done) in a particular organizational setting. Culture is seen to represent some kind of shared commitment to particular ways of relating to the organization, to superiors, to colleagues and to the role.

The interest in organizational culture emerged in the late 1970s when western management practitioners and theorists were facing a series of challenges, including a search for personal meaning through work; the rise of neo-liberalism; the limitations of a mechanical, ‘Theory X’ approach to managing people; innovative production methods; and the ‘Japanese miracle’.

Mainstream perspectives see culture as something an organization ‘has’, and therefore as something that managers can shape and modify. Mainstream perspectives currently dominate the literature. In contrast, critical perspectives see culture as something an organization ‘is’. In this view, everything in the organization speaks in some way of underlying values, beliefs and norms in that environment. Here, culture emerges organically as workers learn together to cope with what their jobs require of them.

Aspects of organizational culture might include mission and goals; the psychological contract; authority and power relations; the characteristics members should have; how members communicate and interact; rewards and punishments; and ways of dealing with the outside world.

Schein argues that there are three levels of culture, only one level of which we can observe in the form of cultural artefacts (the tangible manifestations of culture). Cultural artefacts are just the tip of an iceberg, with values and basic assumptions hidden from view.

Research question Choose two similar competing organizations such as airlines - say, British Airways and Ryanair.

Compare the advertising for these two organizations either from television advertising or online from their webpages.

What do these cultural artefacts show us of the shared organizational values, beliefs and norms of these organizations?

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Aims By the end of this chapter you should be able to identify the origins of organizational behaviour’s interest in culture, be familiar with the mainstream perspective on culture and understand how the critical perspective departs from its mainstream counterpart.

Mainstream approaches The ‘has’ perspective The mainstream perspective, which dominates the literature, views organizational culture as, in Smircich’s (1983) words, something that an organization ‘has’. Culture is understood overall as a management ‘lever’. ‘Has’ theorists are functionalist and technical in their outlook. Here, culture is: • A manageable, like any other asset. Therefore, culture is something that can be manipulated.

• Integrating and stabilizing. Because culture is shared between organizational members, it brings people together, creating consistency and reducing conflict.

• Created at the top. In this view, culture can be created and disseminated downwards. Also referred to as cultural engineering, here the ‘right’ kind of, or ‘appropriate’, organizational culture can be created and makes it possible to rule out particular courses of action.

There are however, two areas of disagreement in the ‘has’ literature: • ‘One best culture’/‘one size fits all’ versus contingencies/‘horses for courses’.

• How to manage organizational culture the best: changing, maintaining or building it.

The ‘one best culture’ position suggests a kind of magic formula for organizational success. Notable proponents of this approach, Peters and Waterman (1982) identify eight cultural values that America’s best performing companies ‘have’. They argue that these (for example ‘a bias for action’) can and should be introduced into all organizations to ensure ‘excellence’. On the other side, ‘horses for courses’ proponents, Deal and Kennedy (1988), argue that the type of culture mostly likely to lead to success depends on features of the business’s environment in terms of risks and speed of feedback. From this they have developed four typologies. Despite the differences, both positions share the assumption of a connection between culture and organizational success.

The other major disagreement in the ‘has’ literature concerns the most appropriate ways to manage culture, most often focused around changing an existing culture. There is no agreement as to the best way to change an organization’s culture. Cultural transmission mechanisms are grouped into two main categories. Firstly, there are those that fall within the realm of human resources and involve getting employee resourcing right (the right people, developing employees and encouraging communication). Secondly, ‘symbolic leadership’ devices used by senior organization members to demonstrate what is expected. Management by example is the epitome of such techniques (‘walking the talk’).

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Activity Choose an organization that you are familiar with.

What are some of the ways in which your organization manages its culture?

They key theme from the mainstream approaches is the explicit link they make between organizational culture and performance. There are two main limitations of the mainstream approach. Firstly ‘strong’ cultures might not be ‘good’ cultures. When they encourage complacency and inflexibility, a strong culture might actually harm organizational performance. Secondly, what is the evidence that culture change programmes ensure long-term success with culture change? Most of the empirical material used to establish the culture-excellence link is brief anecdotal stories focused on leaders and heroes.

Critical approaches The ‘is’ perspective The critical perspective views organizational culture as, again in Smircich’s (1983) words, something that an organization ‘is’. This is closer to the original anthropological conception of culture (as emerging ‘from the collective social interactions of groups and communities’ (Meek, 1988, p. 459)) than the mainstream ‘has’ view. The ‘is’ perspective is critical in the sense of refusing to accept things at their face value and appreciating the role of power in establishing organizational cultures.

Critical perspectives are more interested in understanding culture than making prescriptions. They see culture as a metaphor rather than something that has to be managed. The ‘is’ perspective, sees organizational culture as a jointly produced system of intersubjectivity, concerning itself with how shared assumptions emerge and are passed on in day-to-day organizational activity.

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Because it sees culture as a social product, which comes from everywhere, the emphasis is on the fragility and dynamics of organizational life. Therefore, in the ‘is’ or critical perspective, there is a greater focus on the subcultural and multicultural nature of organizations. These cultural differences are not only a product of varying experiences within the organization (for instance, relations between workers and management), but also emerge and flow from ‘external’ experiences outside the organization (for instance, professional identities).

Those working in the critical perspective are sceptical about the ability to manage culture. Golden (cited in Brown 1998, p. 93) argues that there are at least four possible reactions to corporate culture ‘sold’ by management ranging from unequivocal adherence to open non-adherence.

The aspirations of the mainstream ‘has’ approach are also subject to challenge by the critical perspective. For example, Willmott (1993) claims that cultural management has similar objectives to the totalitarian government depicted by George Orwell in his novel 1984.

Activity Reflect on the critical approach to organization culture. Do you think Willmott’s connection between Orwell’s novel and management’s attempts to develop an organization culture has merit?

Does management have the right to shape employee values however they wish, or do you think there are ethical limits to the management of culture?

Two important empirical studies were published in 1988 and 1990. Collinson (1988) studied a lorrymaking factory in England, examining humour and suggesting that the way the men joked with each other ‘reflected and reinforced the central values and practices of these male manual workers and contained elements of resistance and control, creativity and destructiveness’. Ackroyd and Crowdy (1990) discussed the culture in an English abattoir as a product of the particular demands of the slaughterman occupation.

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Key words Artefacts Values Basic assumptions 'has' perspective Symbolic leadership Metaphor

Variable Integrating Cultural engineering 'one best culture' Strong cultures Intersubjectivity

Stabilizing 'horses for courses' Cultural transmission mechanisms Human resources 'is' perspective

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Instructor's Manual and Workbook Chapter 10 Technology Introduction This chapter is about making sense of technology in organizations. Mainstream approaches are dominated by technological determinism (TD), which is the belief that technical properties of technological devices cause corresponding developments in organizations or society. This assumption leads mainstream thinking to focus on how organizations can best adapt to the demands placed on them by new technologies.

Critical approaches argue that TD is simplistic and fails to capture the complexity of technological development. This chapter considers three responses to TD – social shaping of technology, social construction of technology and actor-network theory. These approaches share a belief that more attention needs to be paid to organizational, social and cultural factors which shape technology.

In order to make sense of technology, we must first be clear about how we are defining it. A ‘hardware’ focused definition of technology focuses on physical properties, such as mechanical or chemical devices. Broader definitions of technology recognize that devices cannot be thought of as being completely separate from the human activities which are necessary to activate them. In this approach, technology includes what people do as well as what they use. Any meaningful definition of technology must therefore include what people know. Therefore, in seeking to understand technology, we must pay attention to: • Devices • Human activities • Knowledge and skills.

Aims By the end of this chapter should understand the different approaches that have been used to analyze the relationship between technology and organizational behaviour (technological determinism, social shaping of technology, the social construction of technology and actor-network theory), as well as the major studies that illustrate the strengths and limitations of these approaches.

Mainstream approaches The key feature of mainstream approaches is their technological determinism. Determinist arguments appear in many topics in organization behaviour and refer to the view that there is an inevitable direction in which events move, which is determined by some cause. For technological determinists, the cause is technology. In TD, it is believed that technological developments are inevitable, so the best people can do is try to adapt to them. This assumption is widely held both by those optimistic about technological advances, who see them as empowering individuals and by For use with Introducing Organizational Behaviour and Management 4e David Knights and Hugh Willmott © 2022 Cengage EMEA

those with a pessimistic view, who fear intensified control and increasingly shallow relationships.

Key ideas in TD are that: • Technology is as extraneous to the rest of society; an autonomous force that causes social and organizational changes.

• It concentrates on the impacts of technology on human organization and action.

• It is focused on the problem of how organizations can best adapt to new technologies.

Activity A hotly debated issue of organizational change is telecommuting. What would a TD argue in relation to the development of information technologies that make telecommuting possible? What would they predict about the effects of these technologies on organizations? Can you identify some problems with this approach?

TD arguments are made by Woodward (1965), who argues that organizational structures are determined by the kind of technology used by the organization. That is, there is an appropriate organizational structure for each technical situation. TD arguments are also put forward by advocates of business process re-engineering (BPR). It is argued that new information technologies should be the trigger for revolutionary organizational changes. TD themes dominate the mainstream literature on organizational change and have largely achieved the status of common sense. This is evident when people talk about the inevitability of change, driven by the emergence of new technology.

An issue within TD accounts is the space that is allowed for human choice. Most TD advocates acknowledge that the acceptance or rejection of a new technology does remain a human choice, although often it is argued that organizations and societies that choose not to adopt a new technology will not survive against competitors who do choose it. There is therefore, a tendency within TD to employ a Darwinian ‘survival of the fittest’ argument.

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that dictates whether a given technology succeeds or fails. This assumption is attractive, for several reasons. It fits well with a mechanistic view of organization and management, which has dominated theorizing in the mainstream. Second, it suggests that most of the world’s problems (poverty, war etc.) can be solved through the development of science and technology in the form of a ‘technological fix’. The implication of TD thinking is that the burden of adapting to new technologies is borne by workers and stakeholders. Those who resist ‘technological progress’ are accused of being ‘Luddites’, which was the name given to British textile workers in the 19th century who actively resisted the mechanization of their trade by breaking machines.

Activity Opponents of organizational change which involves the introduction of new technology are often accused of being Luddites. Make a list of what you regard as legitimate reasons why people might oppose technological innovation at work.

TD perspectives can be categorized as ‘strong’ or ‘weak’. Strong TD sees technology as an autonomous and irresistible force, while weak versions portray it as not the only influence. Even strong TDs agree that people issues are centrally important, but this is generally restricted to a consideration of how people may disrupt the proper functioning of technology or to thinking about how society is impacted by technology. TD is criticized for this narrow view. Other criticisms include: • Technologies have no power to adopt themselves onto unwilling organizations and societies. In the end, this is the product of a human decision.

• The assumption that technology causes a set of impacts based on its technical characteristics is a difficult theory to substantiate. The impacts of the same technology can vary widely across different societies.

• TD fails to account for the ways in which technical, economic, social, political, cultural and organizational phenomena are both causes and effects in the relationship between technological and organizational change.

Critical approaches TD’s main weakness is reification, which is the tendency to treat a human creation (e.g. technology) as if it had its own independent existence rather than being the product of human thought and action. Critical thinkers reject the mainstream view that technology represents an autonomous force and argue this is used as a political tool for justifying unpopular decisions in organizations.

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Change is attributed to ‘technological progress’ and not to the deliberate decisions taken by powerful members of the organization. Those who oppose such ‘advancements’ can be easily dismissed as Luddites.

Critical approaches believe that the task of social science is to investigate why particular technologies take the form they do. There are three main theoretical approaches: Social shaping of technology (SST) Advocates of SST argue that the mainstream’s focus on impacts fails to recognize the ways in which social, organizational and cultural processes shape the technologies themselves. They argue that as well having impacts on organizations and society, technologies are themselves outcomes of social and cultural processes. For example, take a technology such as a building. The wide variety of building styles seen in different cultures demonstrates the influence of socio-cultural factors such as attitudes to family, privacy and the social position of women. In other words, buildings are ‘shaped’ by our society and our culture. In SST, the key question is how and why particular technologies are adopted or not. Cowan (1985) notes that many high-quality technologies have been abandoned for non-technical reasons, or rejected in favour of inferior ones. For example, she argues that the electric fridge was adopted over the gas fridge not because it was technically superior, but because it was backed by large and resourceful backers.

Research question The adoption of VHS as the video standard in the 1980s is regarded as an excellent illustration of the social shaping of technology. Sony's Betamax video standard was introduced in 1975, followed a year later by JVC's VHS. After a battle for dominance lasting a decade, VHS emerged the winner, but many argue that was not because of its technical superiority. Do some research on the internet to find reasons for the demise of Betamax which support SST theory.

There are various criticisms of SST. From the perspective of TD, SST underplays the fact that technologies have a real material existence and that these properties do constrain the range of possible applications in predictable ways. Beyond TD, SST is also criticized for largely ignoring the technical characteristics of technologies, because of its focus on social and cultural factors.

Like TD, there are also ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ versions of SST. The hard version is called the social construction of technology, which we examine next.

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Social construction of technology (SCOT) SCOT is radical because it argues that the technical characteristics of a technology cannot be separated from the interpretative frameworks that people use to make sense of that technology. It seeks to explain how and why specific technologies emerge and are adopted at particular times. It is also important to consider how they might have been otherwise. To do this, we need to study the meanings that technologies have for those people involved in their development, promotion and use.

An example is the adoption of chairs. Historically speaking, many non-western societies did not traditionally use chairs, preferring instead to sit cross-legged on the floor, which promotes a healthier posture. From the perspective of SCOT, chairs are socially constructed, rather than a common sense design reflecting the physical requirements of humans. It can be argued that the widespread adoption of chairs is the result of cultural dominance of the West – in order to be taken seriously by westerners you have to act, and in this case sit, like westerners. The implication of SCOT is that an organization’s technologies (such as information systems) are vehicles for the expression of particular world views and ideologies.

SCOT argues that a given technology can mean different things to different groups, which it labels the ‘interpretative flexibility’ of technology. When a technology is new, its interpretative flexibility is high. This can be reduced through various means, including force, agreement and compromise on a particular standard or specification.

The decrease in interpretative flexibility leads to one variant of the technology becoming dominant.

The strength of SCOT is that it highlights how culture, social arrangements and institutions are constitutive of technology. It has also attracted the following criticisms: • From a mainstream perspective, SCOT is accused of replacing technological with social determinism.

• Technologies are not infinitely interpretative. Design and use is constrained by the physical properties of objects.

• From a critical perspective, SCOT is accused of ignoring the social consequences of technological choices.

Actor network theory (ANT) ANT argues that TD, SST and SCOT are flawed because they view technology and society as separate (albeit related) domains, instead of seeing them as different phases in the same action.

ANT advocates refuse to draw hard distinctions between the ‘social’ and the ‘technical’, arguing instead that they presuppose and constrain one another. From an ANT perspective, the technological is constitutive of society – it makes society possible. We cannot have a society without technology and vice versa. The implication is that we should avoid giving purely social explanations for social phenomena and purely technical explanations for technical phenomena.

Rather, both should be understood as processes of network building.

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An actor-network is the bringing together of various actors (humans, resources, objects etc) whose actions are aligned for a particular purpose. The different elements of a technology’s actor-network are held together by chains of ‘translations’, which bring together otherwise unrelated entities. The key question for ANT is ‘how can we best explain the processes whereby stable networks of aligned actors are created, maintained and dissolved?’

ANT has attracted several criticisms: • It produces complex accounts which are full of jargon, but which merely describe, rather than explain.

• By refusing to make an analytical distinction between human action and the behaviour of objects, people are reduced to the status of objects.

• ANT tends to view networks from the perspective of management and is therefore insensitive to concerns such as inequality and oppression.

Research question Go to the ANT Resource http://www.lancs.ac.uk/fass/centres/css/ant/antres.htm and find our further information about the approach, including a list of further readings.

Key words Technology Technological determinism Technological fix Social shaping of technology Interpretive flexibility Actor network theory

Devices Impacts Luddites Social construction of technology Constitutive Network building

Human activities Adapt Reification Interpretive frameworks Social determinism Translations

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Instructor's Manual and Workbook Chapter 11 Globalization and organizations Introduction Globalization is generally understood to be a ‘process involving increasing cross-national flows (of capital, goods, services, knowledge, culture and people) and, consequently, greater degrees of connectivity, interdependence and integration among nations’ (Boussebaa, 2020, p. 683). Since the 1980s, it has been one of the most significant issues in business and in society more broadly. It is globalization that has brought us more and cheaper goods and that has increased the pace of innovation as companies increasingly compete on a worldwide basis.

Globalization is a contested process. It generates wealth and opportunities and brings the world together, but it also has negative socio-economic and cultural impacts on some localities and leads to contestation. The contestation over globalization has become more intense in recent years with the increasing economic power of the so-called BRICS countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa) and their demands for a more balanced, multi-polar world economy.

In this chapter, we will discuss globalization with specific reference to multinational business organizations – multinational enterprises (MNEs) or transnational corporations (TNCs). We will discuss the mainstream perspective, which generally views globalization as a positive force and approaches the MNE in terms of efficiency, innovation and competitiveness. After that we will review MNEs via the critical approach. We will show their effects on society and political systems that reflect and maintain wider societal structures and inequalities.

Aims By the end of the chapter you should understand the concept of globalization, especially as it relates to multinationals. You should also understand the mainstream theory on how organizations internationalize and why they choose to invest overseas and become multinationals, as well as see the limitations of this theory and the importance of approaching globalization and multinationals critically.

Mainstream approaches The mainstream perspective promotes the view that globalization – unrestricted international trade and investment – has an overall positive outcome for the world: increases efficiency, productivity, and prosperity for all countries, and has a civilizing effect.

Modes of internationalization The core challenges for organizations looking to internationalize are control, predictability and profitability. Offshore investment carries both risks and opportunities. Organizations have typically taken four approaches to international business – selling, licensing and franchising, subcontracting, For use with Introducing Organizational Behaviour and Management 4e David Knights and Hugh Willmott © 2022 Cengage EMEA

setting up offshore production.

• Exporting – a low risk strategy involving exporting from the home country, requiring low investment offshore. The traditional way small and medium businesses become international. Core disadvantages are high transport costs, duties levied at international borders which make products more expensive, and limits to offshore markets due to lack of consumer customization and reliance on agency arrangements.

• Licensing and franchising – based on agency arrangements where the organization receives a fee from the agent who uses the organization’s offering in the offshore country.

This strategy involves no capital risk or time establishing offshore markets. Core disadvantages include loss of control over: the brand, knowledge and processes which transfer, and the production process. Knowledge losses relating to market information to adapt and develop products may also occur. Attempts to mitigate these disadvantages through monitoring can be costly financially and time wise – negating the economic effects of the original arrangement.

• Subcontracting – uses independent manufacturing organizations as contractors for the production of goods and services, thereby increasing flexibility and reducing costs.

Disadvantages include increasing relationship difficulties with product complexity and opportunism. Management may resort to contract termination and subsidiary establishment to resolve such issues.

• Overseas production – investment in, or establishment of, offshore facilities has exploded in the last 10 years driven by internationalization, cross-border mergers and acquisitions and the dominance of capitalism in a political context. MNEs establish overseas operations through the transfer of capital (and also technology and people). One of the most important measures of such transfers is the transnationality index.

Theories of FDI The success of inward foreign direct investment (FDI) in some countries can be attributed to factors such as stable political and economic environments, low cost or high skilled labour force, close proximity to major markets and low language barriers.

MNEs facilitate FDI flows and establishment of offshore production facilities through capital (and technology and people) transference. This strategy has three core advantages: product life cycles are extended, internalization and the eclectic theory.

Extending the product life cycle involves lengthening the investment life of a product by shifting production to overseas markets once the current product is outmoded in the home country.

Globalization may shorten this process although organizations generally continue to develop products in their home countries and sell standard products in offshore markets.

In internalization, the major investment in asset development, systems, innovation, and research and development is protected from the opportunism of agents of organizations to establish their own facilities. In eclectic theory, overseas facilities are established where ownership, locational, and internalization advantages outweigh costs and uncertainties.

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Strategy and structure of MNEs Following determination of an appropriate strategy, relationships between company head office, offshore subsidiary and markets must be controlled and coordinated effectively. Two main approaches need to be considered: a global decision-making process to identify production and export location, or a national market focus to cater for particular market demands and regulatory environment. These approaches pose a tension between integration and responsiveness respectively.

Bartlett and Ghoshal (1989) research looks at four organizational models concerned with how firms are organized: • Global firms focus on global product standardization through production efficiencies, high economies of scale, competitive pricing strategies. Management is tasked with supply chain coordination and control to achieve targets.

• Multinationals concentrate on responsiveness to national differences building strong presences through independent operations responding to local market demands.

Performance is typically monitored by head office and is predominantly financially focused.

• International firms focus on knowledge and competency transferability across borders.

Knowledge is often developed via head office but customized to particular markets and integrated with local knowledge.

• Transnational firms are identifiable by the mix of subsidiaries performing specializations but with interdependence and interaction with the organization as a whole. Contextual learning facilitates improved information throughout the subsidiaries. Such organizations are typically able to respond to local markets, achieve global efficiency and innovate on an international basis.

Bartlett and Ghoshal’s model is grounded in rationality with respect to the behaviour of managers and organizations and the dominance of economic incentives, while tending to ignore social and political concerns.

Harzing’s (2000) research has focused on control techniques used by head offices in relation to their subsidiaries. Under personal centralized control head office carries out key decision making and monitoring closely. Such control has limitation as subsidiary and decision numbers increase. In bureaucratic formalized control head office imposes standard rules and procedures across the organization without regard for country differences (causes issues) creating an inflexible local operating model.

Output control involves head office setting targets to be achieved to enable performance comparisons. Establishing appropriate output measures can be ambiguous and challenging. Finally, in control by culture and networks, the organization facilitates cross-border assignments and project teams to build networks across the organization to enable monitoring and control of tensions between head office and local subsidiaries.

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Activity Identify three organizations operating in your home country which are international businesses. On the basis of Bartlett and Ghoshal’s (1989) research, which organizational models do you recognize and why? Which control techniques do you think they use and why?

The role of culture MNEs face challenges posed by the ‘cultural differential thesis’ which is grounded in the embeddedness of individual values and beliefs in social contexts, the most significant of which is the ‘nation state’. Hofstede’s research, which began in the 1960s, shows distinct differences across nations with respect to work attitudes. In particular, he refers to five “attitudinal complexes”: • Power distance- refers to the distance identified in organizations between the ‘top’ (those perceived to be in power) and ‘bottom’.

• Uncertainty avoidance – the extent to which uncertain or unknown situations, cause people to feel threatened.

• Individualism/collectivism – the extent of independence, dependence, and interdependence between people within the culture.

• Masculinity/femininity – looks at ‘work centrality’, work-life balance, masculine and feminine influences on the work culture.

• Long-term orientation – refers to future oriented approach as opposed to more shortterm or present orientation.

Given the differences across cultures it is inevitable that conflict will arise in MNEs. Common responses to this proposition include establishing independent local subsidiaries, training managers to be culturally sensitive, creation of a common culture through significant training and development investment in managers.

Despite support for Hofstede’s research, it is not without criticism, including the assumption that nations can be described as comprising one culture, challenges in quantifying culture in terms of dimensions and matrices, and the assumption that cultural differences are stable.

Internet question Use the web address https://geerthofstede.com/country-comparison-graphs/ to access the Hofstede profile for a country (other than the UK or your home country) you are interested in.

Compare your chosen country with your home country’s profile. What differences do you note? Do you agree or disagree and why? Also, do you think it makes sense to group all the nations that For use with Introducing Organizational Behaviour and Management 4e David Knights and Hugh Willmott © 2022 Cengage EMEA

make up the UK into a single category? What cultural differences between these nations might be lost in this analysis?

Contributions and limitations of the mainstream approach Mainstream research on globalization centres on how and why firms internationalize, how organizational coordination works once they do, and how differences in cultures impact on management of MNEs. Limitations focus on the questionable assumptions of the contingency model of organization, such as the assumption that managers act rationally based on their information and knowledge.

Critical approaches The critical perspective shows that there is a negative side to globalization, this includes issues such as labour exploitation, financial fraud, environmental destruction and efforts to shape national and international institutions to the advantage of dominant MNEs. Some MNEs have become massive organizations that are, in economic terms, bigger and more powerful than most countries. The critical perspective seeks to uncover, challenge, and address this side of them.

The underside of MNE activity SOCIO-ECONOMIC EFFECTS • Patterns of labour exploitation: MNEs can be highly exploitative, tapping into ‘cheap’ labour around the world to increase profits. MNEs are able to use their power to manage global production networks and global commodity chains.

• Patterns of taxation payment: MNEs are highly complex in terms of their internal accounting systems and the ways in which they calculate profitability and liability for tax.

They tend to use tax havens and tax avoidance.

• Patterns of FDI: The exploitative nature of MNEs and their tax aversion schemes raises fundamental questions about the benefits of their overseas investment (FDI), especially in relation to the less economically developed societies in the Global South.

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POLITICAL EFFECTS • Lobbying governments at home and internationally: MNEs – as economic power – have consequential political effects. They have resources to engage lobby groups to influence governments and the legislature to create the environments they want, thereby using visible power (both nationally and internationally). Invisible power may also be used in national (for example, behind the scenes activity to gain support) and international (for example, through private international law) contexts. This enables MNEs to keep certain activities such as contract disputes out of the public eye which may otherwise be to their detriment.

• Overthrowing governments abroad: United States MNEs have been particularly active on this front, often seeking support from the US government and, in particular, the CIA to overthrow governments that have threatened their economic interests.

• Influencing international law: a whole new area of ‘transnational’ law has begun to develop that is separate from normal, national legal systems. A court has been set up by the International Chamber of Commerce (ICC) to deal with contract disputes between large companies or between countries and companies.

While we can see that there are key economic and political power concerns which tend to be ignored under mainstream approaches, it should be noted that anti-globalization activity has a relatively high profile (often thanks to media attention) and control efforts have been made by some international institutions such as the United Nations Global Compact.

Research question Ryanair chief executive Michael O’Leary is an enormously successful yet controversial figure.

Consider how Mr. O’Leary might use power (both visible and invisible) to influence political outcomes in the UK and Europe. Can you find examples where this has happened?

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MNEs as political systems This approach to developing a critical analysis involves seeing MNEs as multiple groups in continual conflict and negotiation rather than as a single, rational economic actor. The focus shifts to multiple sites operating on a local level as opposed to the coordinated, controlled structure of the mainstream account of the MNE. ‘Transnational social space’ concept (Morgan, 2001a, 2001b for an extended discussion) recognizes that globalization produces a ‘transnational’ level of action but also gives equal attention to the importance of the ‘local’ (in its cultural and social manifestations). This also means that the focus is on multiple local sites rather than a coherent hierarchical structure in which decisions are taken and implemented on the basis of an abstract, market-driven model of the MNE. In this critical approach, local sites and subsidiaries are seen to have their own social dynamics. The power of local subsidiaries is highly dependent on the degree of autonomy and independence the local site has, and the nature of social relationships – both inside and outside the MNE site.

Autonomy and independence come through local site valuable technical expertise, production systems, and products and services.

The degree to which HQ can enforce its power over the local sites will vary according to the degree to which a local site has some independence and also the degree to which there is a form of social solidarity/coherence among local managers and employees that enables that local power to be exercised.

In collectivist systems, the local subsidiaries of MNEs are usually controlled at middle and lower management level (and sometimes higher) by managers who have long been associated with the local system.

In individualist systems, on the other hand, collective institutions are weak, and individuals have to develop their own responses to labour market conditions with little help from trade unions or the government.

Regarding the wider geopolitical context, the critical perspective also highlights the ‘longstanding, macro-level processes of colonial and imperial domination’ (Boussebaa et al., 2012, p. 470), an unequal encounter between dominant (mostly Western/Northern) contexts and dominated (typically Eastern/Southern) contexts.

In conclusion, critical perspectives broaden the mainstream views of international and MNEs, traditionally focused on rational and economic analysis, towards a more social focus in the context of management and MNEs.

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Activity Identify two MNEs you think are operating according to a more social approach. Which factors have you identified in drawing your conclusion?

Key words Multinational enterprises (MNEs) Licensing Responsiveness Uncertainty avoidance Overseas production Product life cycle Integration Visible power

Internationalization Franchising Cultural differential thesis Individualism/Collectivism Internalization Long term orientation Invisible power Social dynamics

Selling Subcontracting Power distance Masculinity/Femininity Foreign direct investment (FDI) Eclectic theory Anti-globalization Independence

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Instructor's Manual and Workbook Chapter 12 Ethics at Work Introduction

The aim of this chapter is to examine the relationship between ethical values and organization behaviour. Much undesirable behaviour by organizations is regulated by the law, but the law is a blunt tool which can be limited in its reach and not effectively enforced. There is, therefore, a gap between how we might want organizations to behave and how they have to behave according to the law. There is a demand from society that organizations not only obey the law, but act ethically.

Aims

By the end of this chapter should be aware of the assumptions of mainstream approaches to business ethics and how these assumptions limit the questions that are asked of business. You should also have an understanding of social responsibility, both from mainstream and critical perspectives. Finally, you should understand how critical approaches enable a deeper examination of the ethical values of modern organizations.

Mainstream approaches

The current concern with ethics at work is a product of the deregulation of markets in economies such as the United Kingdom and the United States. Deregulation reduced the legal obligations on business in favour of a belief that organizations should voluntarily self-regulate – an ideology that was welcomed by the business community. However, a series of business scandals has shaken the public’s faith in the effectiveness of self-regulation and to regain the public’s trust, the business community has attempted to reassure that public that it can act responsibly. This concern with ‘ethics’ is often known as corporate social responsibility (CSR). Examples of CSR activity include • Developing ethical statements or codes of practice • Making well-publicized donations of money • Linking the business brand with ‘good’ images such as environmental regeneration.

Business ethics is the academic study of CSR. Most mainstream approaches to business ethics consist of three elements: • A pro-business agenda where the critique is of business practices rather than the ethics of business more generally • A free-market agenda which endorses voluntary self-regulation • A belief in the compatibility of profits and ethics.

There are three problems that the field of business ethics must address to justify its existence to sceptical managers: relevance; conscience and translation.

The problem of relevance concerns whether ethics is something managers should be concerned with. Friedman (1970) argues that the only social responsibility of business is to increase its profits, thereby satisfying the interests of its owners. Friedman argues that social responsibility is a For use with Introducing Organizational Behaviour and Management 4e David Knights and Hugh Willmott © 2022 Cengage EMEA

personal issue rather than an organizational one. For example, if managers want to donate money to charity they should use their own money rather than that of the corporation. Friedman believes that ethics is private and should stay out of business.

To overcome the problem of relevance social and economic arguments are made. The social argument draws on stakeholder theory, which states that shareholders are only one of many groups (employees, customers, suppliers etc.) with which business interacts and should therefore be responsible for. There is an element of self-interest here, since it is assumed that looking after these groups is good for business. The economic argument is clearly self-interested, seeing ethics as a business opportunity to be exploited. The assumption is that good ethics will increase profits.

The problem of conscience concerns who should be the ethical conscience of the organization and how should this be enforced? Those who promote business ethics believe that management is the ethical conscience. This reproduces the dominant managerialist thinking of western thought by assuming that management should have the right to define the organization’s ethics and to ensure employees comply with those ethics.

Finally, the problem of translation asks whether the languages of ‘ethics’ and ‘business’ are commensurable. The academic study of ethics is philosophical and abstract, so how can this be translated into something intelligible and manageable to business? The problem of translation is overcome by simplifying ethics down to a process of developing and disseminating ethical codes and/or policies. This means that ethics, in principle, can be easily managed.

Research question

Visit the website of global energy firm BP www.bp.com, a company which has made a concerted effort to create an ‘ethical brand’.

In the box below make a note of the ways in which they have incorporated a consideration of business ethics into their website.

How effective do you think this has been in changing people’s perceptions about the organization?

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A key controversy in the field of business ethics concerns the philosophical ethical framework which should be applied to evaluate behaviour in organizations. There are five main frameworks: • Utilitarianism – the ethical value of an act is based on its consequences. An ethical act is that which leads to the greatest good for the greatest number.

• Stakeholder theory – a variation of utilitarianism which argues that in considering the ethical consequences of actions we must consider the interests of different groups.

• Deontology – based upon rules but argues that ethics is an end in itself. Ethical duties can be worked out through logic and reason on the basis of a universal imperative.

• Justice – focus on rights and fairness.

• Virtue – focus on the character of the person who acts.

Activity

Think about some examples from your work or personal life where you believed you have acted ethically. Which of the approaches to ethics listed above best explains the reason why you acted this way. For instance, was it because you thought about the consequences of your actions (utilitarianism); because you were obeying an ethical rule that you would never consider breaching (deontology); because you were owed something that you took back (justice); because you are simply an ethical person (virtue); etc.

Could your evaluation of your behaviour as ethical be different if you applied one of the other ethical frameworks?

Business ethics does not limit the freedom that managers have under a system of self- regulation.

Instead, it endorses and reinforces this freedom and the power of management. A limitation of this approach is that when problems with the system of self-regulation emerged, the answer of business ethics was to give more freedom to management. Another limitation is the managerial focus of business ethics, which does not ask whether it is ethical for the minority of organizational members (i.e. top management) to impose their definition of ethics on others.

Critical approaches

Critical approaches to ethics have raised three questions; the ethics of organization; the ethics of obedience and the corporate takeover of ethics.

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The ethics of organization

The work of Bauman (1989, 1993) highlights how giving managers the power to define and control the ethics of other members of the organization can actually increase unethical organizational practices. Bauman argues that an effect of organizational pressure towards conformity and uniformity is that individual ethical responsibility is removed from the organization, with individuals not making and acting upon moral judgements about their behaviour and the behaviour of others in the organization. This might explain how in today’s organizations, well-intentioned people who act morally in their private lives may act unethically at work.

The ethics of obedience

The argument put forward here is that one person’s (e.g. an employee’s) subordination to another (e.g. a manager) is unethical. The most powerful critique in this area comes from Marxist critiques of work relations under capitalism. For Marx, workers are necessarily alienated and exploited by capitalist relations and their resistance is interpreted as an attempt to end this alienation and exploitation. Forms of resistance, such as worker demands for improved health and safety, are therefore considered ethical.

The corporate takeover of ethics

Critical approaches assert that business ethics is ethics made safe for business, essentially being reduced to a corporate branding exercise which is just one more attempt to maximize profits. This has removed from ethics much of its critical potential and thereby ignored the ‘big picture’ of the ethics of business in general. An example is organizations that make large scale redundancies, which is considered by mainstream approaches to business ethics not to be an ethical issue, despite its potentially severe implications for people.

An important study within the critical approach to ethics is Neimark’s (1995) study of a multinational shoe manufacturer which makes large profits by exploiting labour in developing economies. Neimark focuses on the company’s spending of a small percentage of its profit on ‘socially responsible’ actions as an example of the way that business ethics actually deflects critical scrutiny. This highlights the danger of accepting at face value corporations’ claims to be ethical without questioning their less well publicized profit-seeking behaviour.

Another important study was conducted by Milgram in the 1970s to illustrate the importance of questioning authority. The outcome of the experiment was that participants were willing to administer an electric shock to others, even though they thought they were seriously hurting those people, simply because an authority figure was telling them to do so. The relevance for ethics is that in obedience there is always the potential for a loss or abdication of ethical responsibility.

Therefore, in contrast to mainstream approaches which give management the right to decide the organization’s ethics, critical approaches suggest that disobedience from employees can be ethical.

A good example is the role played by ‘whistle-blowers’ in challenging unethical organizational practices. Whistle-blowers tend to be conscientious employees yet are often seen by management as troublemakers.

Critical approaches are useful for asking questions that are not asked by mainstream approaches, which are limited to justifying ethics in terms of what is profitable, comfortable and sympathetic to For use with Introducing Organizational Behaviour and Management 4e David Knights and Hugh Willmott © 2022 Cengage EMEA

business interests. Critical approaches assert the right of organizational members to radically question organizational behaviour.

They are underpinned by the following questions • Whether, and how, organizations contribute to happiness or suffering?

• How this should be judged?

• Who is harmed and who is helped by organizational behaviour?

• Whose lives and values have we neglected in the way we study and manage organizations?

Internet question

The role of whistleblowers in an organization is a controversial one. Read some background to whistleblowers at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whistleblower Think about your own views of whistleblowers. Do you believe they perform a vital function to ensure organizations act ethically or are you more likely to regard them as troublemakers who do not deserve protection from the law?

Make a note of your responses in the box below.

Key words Values Corporate social responsibility Deontology Free-market agenda Conscience Virtue Exploitation

Deregulation Utilitarianism Justice Compatibility of profits and ethics Translation Obedience Branding

Self-regulation Stakeholder theory Pro-business agenda Relevance Ethical codes Alienation Whistle-blowers

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Instructor's Manual and Workbook Chapter 13 Management of sustainability, or how should we manage planet Earth?

Introduction

In order to examine the complex interrelationship between management thinking, practice and the natural environment, this chapter is organized into three sections: (1) review the state of the planet, (2) why this has happened, (3) what extent it is possible to manage the planet.

Why is managing planet Earth such a challenging problem? People should balance the fact that we have become richer, live longer and have better lives, without this continuing to come at a cost to the Earth system. The Planetary Boundaries framework is a systematic way to assess the state of the planet and the possibility of tipping points in the complex system. If these tipping points are reached there will be points of no return. For example, the loss of biodiversity is largely irreversible and possibly permanent (Rockström et al., 2009; Raworth, 2017). Both Earth system scientists and management authors have strongly argued that the planet must be managed in accordance with these boundaries in order to avoid catastrophic outcomes.

Management education needs to become more ecologically literate and to appreciate and utilize insights and knowledge from other disciplines, most notably Earth system science and science and technology studies.

The conventional strategic management Business as usual approach notes that environmental/sustainability challenges present a set of new economic opportunities (organizations can create competitive advantage and enter new markets). However, Management for Sustainability and Deep Ecology are perspectives that outline the role of management thinking and practices that could play a part in creating a sustainable future.

Aims

By the end of this chapter, you should understand the interrelationship between management practice and thinking and the sustainability of planet Earth, as well as having an overview on the origins of contemporary environmental issues. You should understand why it is so challenging to effectively manage environmental problems, as well as be able to evaluate the assumptions and values underpinning perspectives on how to manage planet Earth. Finally, you should know the key concepts introduced here such as Earth system science and the Anthropocene, complex adaptive system model, Business as usual, Management for Sustainability and Deep Ecology.

The state of the planet

The current state of the planet is largely attributable to our industrial development, driven by innovation and technology, which have had significant impacts on the environment. Earth system scientists have developed an Anthropocene dashboard for assessing the state of the planet in terms of both socio-economic and Earth system characteristics. We need to recognize For use with Introducing Organizational Behaviour and Management 4e David Knights and Hugh Willmott © 2022 Cengage EMEA

that the Earth is a complex adaptive system and cannot be managed conventionally, and we should think differently about its management, as suggested by post-normal science. There are also ethical issues involved in how we should share risk and resources in an equitable manner.

The ozone boundary is seen as an exemplar of how to tame an environmental problem. This case is a story of how an environmental problem emerged, was recognized, theorized and dealt with practically. The perceived success was achieved by the effective management of a ‘tame problem’ which utilized a linear approach to policymaking, based upon uncertainty reduction, within a classic ‘truth to power’ model.

Managing the climate crisis is quite different. There is a steady and inexorable growth in carbon emissions which humanity has been unable to stem. The inexorable rise in CO2 pooling in the Earth’s atmosphere has already resulted in changes to the climate. This process is commonly understood as the ‘greenhouse effect’. Decreasing the carbon footprint requires focus and steps not only on individual and national levels, but also on organizational level: what management does; what organizations do in relationship to the natural environment; how organizations are regulated; what the relationship should be between organizational and managerial practices and other interest groups in society etc.

Conventional management practices can resolve ‘tame’ environmental problems. However, ‘wicked’ problems present a new challenge for management and therefore there is a need to develop new thinking and practices to reverse the Earth system’s negative trends. There is no one management discipline that has all the requisite knowledge when responding to the management of the planet, and this is why it is important to take a trans-disciplinary approach (Stember, 1991) utilizing the three relevant academic disciplines (environmental science, management studies, and science and technology studies).

Why has this happened?

The Anthropocene emphasizes the influence of human activity on the planet. For the last 250year period, human beings have transformed the planet by five noteworthy points: sharp rise in life expectancy; levels of CO2; the increase in population; the continuation of economic growth (GDP); higher living standards. So, the dilemma is clear: How to combine the fact that we live longer and have better lives without this continuing to negatively affect the planet.

Modern management techniques in the main waves of the Anthropocene have been framed upon specific assumptions. There is a strong tendency to assume that future states of the planet are predictable and controllable, that linear cause and effect can be identified, and this constitutes a panacea mindset (Young et al., 2018). However, the Earth system is a complex adaptive system and sustaining it requires complexity thinking.

Economist, Kate Raworth (2017) presents a critique to conventional management thinking and adds social dimensions to the Planetary Boundaries’ framework (Figure 13.10). The problem of the planet is not only climate change, but all the other elements indicated in the boundary frameworks. According to this approach, management decisions should not only be based on how to stay inside the safe operating system (e.g., Rockström et al.’s 2009 planetary For use with Introducing Organizational Behaviour and Management 4e David Knights and Hugh Willmott © 2022 Cengage EMEA

boundaries), but should include measures that enable individuals to live to the minimum requirements outlined by the UN 17 Sustainable Development Goals.

What should we do about this?

Possible actions need to consider the contemporary decision-making context.

There are three basic policy options that can be combined in various ways. These strategies differ in terms of political preferences (e.g., state regulation or market freedoms): • command and control: regulations are made and enforced by law.

• market system: develops new incentives using taxation so people change their behaviour.

• voluntarist approach: altruism or compliance is achieved via educating citizens and normative pressures.

Questions of identity are crucial to the way we see the problem and crucial to the solutions. The four myths of nature represent different ethical positions in terms of the relationship of human beings with nature. Furthermore, different components of sustainability – environmental, social and economic – are concerned with different focuses of survival: planet, human or organizations.

Challenging the conventional economics, Kate Raworth found that while we must remain within the planetary boundaries, we need to give equal attention to the social needs of humanity. By For use with Introducing Organizational Behaviour and Management 4e David Knights and Hugh Willmott © 2022 Cengage EMEA

doing this we would enable individuals to live to the minimum requirements outlined by the United Nations’ 17 Sustainable Development Goals whilst protecting the planet.

Research question

An ‘ecological footprint’ estimates how much productive land and water you need to support what you use and what you discard.

First, calculate your ecological footprint. Then compare your ecological footprint with the national average.

Ecological footprint calculators: • •

Global Footprint Network www.footprintnetwork.org/resources/footprint-calculator/ Ecology Fund www.ecologyfund.com/registry/ecology/res_bestfoot.html

There are three broad approaches to managing planet Earth. Each position achieves a different balance in terms of sophistication of analysis and programme for action. Whilst Deep Ecology offers the most serious analysis of our current situation, it is the weakest in terms of specifying action. ‘Business as usual’ is strong on action but seems to underestimate the current level of danger. Management for Sustainability occupies a middle position between these two.

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Business as usual (BAU): the current state of the planet provides a new set of competitive opportunities, and success criteria is focused on gaining competitive advantage. Innovation is needed to persuade consumers to purchase new products and services. Management for Sustainability and Deep Ecology scholars would argue that this approach is not likely to be successful in managing most environmental problems.

Management for Sustainability (MfS): ecosystem survival and business survival are both mutually possible, and this is therefore a win–win situation. But to achieve this, new thinking and new values are needed. Nature is viewed as a stakeholder that must be involved in all the decisions that are taken. Ecological footprint, ecological modernization and circular economy approaches are commonly utilized within MfS. Deep Ecology (DE): a pessimistic position which indicates that our world is at the risk of collapse.

Ulrich Beck’s (The Risk Society, 1992) central argument is that industrial society is unsustainable, and we have to move to risk management. Radical reform is therefore required and must build upon complexity theory and a different view of human nature, the Ecological Self (Naess, 1973; Angus, 2016; Raworth, 2017; Patel and Moore, 2018). Deep Ecology views the planet as fragile and there is a need to be very cautious about any new trajectory of sustainability.

Activity

Discuss the adequacy of the three approaches (Business as usual, Management for Sustainability and Deep Ecology) and share your view to what extent they make it possible to effectively manage planet Earth. What do you think about the consequences of each approach on inequality, insecurity, identity, power dynamics and freedom?

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Internet question

Watch the Ted Talk ‘10 years to transform the future – or destabilize the planet’ by Johan Rockström. This short video builds upon the Planetary Boundary argument.

What kind of trajectories does Rockström set out for humanity if action is not taken now? www.ted.com/talks/johan_rockstrom_10_years_to_transform_the_future_of_hum anity_or_destabilize_the_planet

Key words Earth system science

Anthropocene

Sustainability

Business as usual

Management for Sustainability

Deep Ecology

Carbon footprint

Ecological footprint

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