Managing People and Organizations in Changing Contexts

Graeme Martin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317662648
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business generale
• Index: Business

Managing People and Organizations in Changing Contexts addresses the contemporary problems faced by managers in dealing with people, organizations and change in a theoretically-informed and practical way. This textbook approaches people management from the perspective of practising and aspiring managers, making it a valuable alternative to existing texts on organizational behaviour and human resource management.

This new edition considers new emerging organizational forms such as e-lancing and recent management concerns such as employee engagement, de-professionalization and the growing challenges of social media. Built around a chapter framework that connects different themes to managerial action and practices, this textbook covers a wide range of topics including:

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• managing at the individual, group and organizational levels

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• change management

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• managing creativity and innovation, and

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• corporate governance and corporate social responsibility.

There is an increased international flavour, reflected in the range of contemporary case studies and literature used throughout, which explore business and management problems in the private and public sectors.

This text will be relevant to practising and aspiring managers studying people management, organizational behaviour and change management.

Chapter 1

An introduction to managing people in changing contexts

LEARNING OBJECTIVES

By the end of this chapter you should be able to:

• describe and critically evaluate some of the key ideas underlying the management of people in changing contexts;

• apply the notions of universalism and relativism to the key ideas and practice of modern management, especially to our understanding of ‘best practice’;

• understand the importance of frames of reference and mindsets in management and how these influence managerial practice;

• understand how ideas about management change, and how the institutional environment and the influence of management thinkers can cause changes in our understanding of good practice in management;

• critically evaluate the role of management thinkers in producing useful knowledge for managers.

UNDERSTANDING MANAGEMENT

Introduction

According to Peter Drucker (1909–2005), who was one of the most prominent and most quoted business gurus of recent times, management is a timeless, human discipline. It has been used to build the Great Wall of China, to run empires and armies throughout history and to guide the development of the joint stock company, which has been the key institution in the development of modern capitalism. During the later part of the twentieth century and the early part of the twenty-first century, management became one of the fastest growing occupations, because managers are usually (but not always) seen to be essential to organizational success (Bloom et al., 2005). Moreover, whether we work in the private, public or voluntary sectors of the economy, managers and their work touch virtually every aspect of our economic, social and, increasingly, political lives. Those of you who aren’t yet a manager but aspire to become one most likely will have had direct experience of being managed by others. Sometimes this experience will have been positive, helping you achieve excellent results, and sometimes it will have been negative, perhaps causing you to underperform, experience undue levels of stress, lack of esteem or lack of job satisfaction. Those of you who are experienced managers will also understand that the people you manage don’t always respond in the ways in which you expect or want them to react to your ideas, actions and/or evaluations of them. So all of us need to be critically reflexive of our managerial potential, capabilities and the roles we play in organizations, industries and societies. By critical reflexivity, we mean a constant need to query the relationships among ourselves as managers and those people we manage: how we construct the world, our assumptions and our impact on individuals, organizations and society (Cunliffe, 2014). For many managers, however, who are naturally oriented to action rather than reflection, this is an extremely difficult task (King and Learmonth, 2015).

With these points in mind, our revised text is aimed at helping both aspiring and experienced managers explore and be critically reflexive of the nature of management and some of the key processes of management, specifically the key problems associated with managing people and organizations. To this end, our book has also been written from the perspective that the theory and practice of managing people and organizations are heavily influenced by the context in which ideas occur and how management is performed, and that these contexts often change considerably over time.

Key questions on management knowledge

When we embark on any management education program, it is important for us to understand the relationship between theory and practice, not least because we are usually taught theories we rightly expect to be able to put into action. However, the gap between theory and practice seems extensive, with managers typically seeking simple guides to practice and academics often reluctant to provide them. With more than 40 years of experience of teaching management students and executives between us in many different countries, this gap is sometimes questioned by course participants. We can articulate their questions as follows:

1 Is there a one-best-way or set of best practices in management? Or, to put this question in slightly more formal terms: (a) is there a single set of truths about management that represents its core body of knowledge and (b) if so, can this body of knowledge be applied in most, if not all, contexts?

2 Why is it that ideas about business and management seem to be a bit like the fashion industry, with new ideas and new jargon appearing almost every week?

3 Have managers, especially senior managers, become disconnected from organizations and societies they purport to serve and become literally self-serving?

Increasingly, we believe that these three questions should be raised when studying management, or when contemplating ideas from consultants, conferences or the increasing volume of business books found in airport bookstores and on the Internet. Such questions are particularly relevant because managers generally seek knowledge that helps them simplify the world they must confront, especially given the increasingly complex nature of the environment in which they work. To be told there is the possibility of a ‘magic bullet’ or ‘one-best-way’ is an attractive proposition, because it means they don’t have to think too much about what they are doing. And, as Henry Mintzberg (2011), one of the most insightful commentators on management, has pointed out, managers are very much focused on ‘doing’ rather than reflecting on academic theories concocted by people who have very little experience of practising management. However, the prospect of a magic bullet, contained in the nostrums of a single management book or PowerPoint presentation, is not something that usually accords with their experience of just how complex their world is. This disconnect is especially true when nearly all new books, courses or consultants tell them there is a better way of doing things, which is usually the way advocated by the author, teacher or adviser. Managers usually get little more from new ‘guru-speak’ than a recycling of even older ideas, often originating in the early 1900s, but dressed up in new clothing or new ‘spin’. A good example is the prescriptions of the ‘happiness’ industry and the focus on well-being at work, heavily promoted by governments and business (Davies, 2015), which stems from early (and, some say, poor) research in the 1930s on human relations (see Case 1.1 on the development of human relations at the end of this chapter). As a result, many managers and those on the receiving end of some of these practices become sceptical or even cynical about any new business program or form of management education. If such a process sounds familiar, then you are in tune with many of the critics of business education and the management consulting industry. For example, Khurana and Spender (2012) have forcefully argued that American business schools and their ‘products’ (typically students who follow careers in management consulting) have fashioned an intellectual inertia in management education, which has promoted a disconnected managerialism that failed to serve practice and, more consequentially, was one of the principal causes of the Global Financial Crisis of 2007–8. Paradoxically, however, regardless of the extent to which the management education and consulting industries are challenged to explain their relevance by business leaders and politicians, their influence has become ever more widespread. The demand for management education is showing few signs of abating, fuelled by the growth of corporate universities which hire business school staff and by executives willing to self-fund their development (The Economist, 15 May 2015).

So in this chapter, and in the rest of the book, we shall address the three questions raised at the beginning of this section. We do so because it is in everyone’s interests – teachers, students of management and examiners alike – to avoid the reputation for lack of relevance management knowledge enjoys with many practitioners (Rynes et al., 2007) and for promoting a disconnected and self-serving managerialism. With respect to lack of relevance, this has largely come about because dominant sections of the producer community of management knowledge – the producers of business guru books and the management consulting industry – have oversold the idea of the one-best-way, in wave after wave of management fads (Pascale, 1999). Francis Wheen (2004), rather amusingly, has labelled much of this material, especially the self-help books by ex-business leaders, as ‘old snake oil in new bottles’, pointing to the often messianic salesmanship of banal aphorisms dressed up in jargon and pseudo-scientific phrases, such as ‘re-engineering, benchmarking and downsizing’. Moreover, since we live in an increasingly changeable and arguably unknowable world, what we can usefully teach about management often has a short ‘shelf-life’.

If the guru industry has not helped the relevance cause, neither have some management academics who claim to pursue a practical agenda. Critical management scholars, a diverse group of academics who question the politics and values of managerialism (a set of ideas and practices that are tied to promoting the interests of managers), argue that many, ostensibly relevant, management academics and most consultants fail to engage in reflexive thinking over dominant business discourses (Cunliffe, 2014). Two examples of such discourses are shareholder value, the belief that businesses exist to create value for shareholders only, and transformational leadership, which places managers at the centre of change programs. Both are often expounded uncritically by those who benefit most from having such ideas accepted as truths – including, among others, highly paid leaders who benefit from share ownership, universities that benefit from running leadership courses and the business press that promotes and feeds off celebrity leaders (Clegg et al., 2011).

It is not only critical management scholars, however, that question the relevance agenda. Even ‘mainstream’ management academics and some practicing managers are beginning to acknowledge the limitations of their craft and the problems of becoming disconnected from the organizations they are employed to serve. This was evident in a major soul-searching exercise run at Half-Moon Bay in California in May 2008 in the aftermath of the Global Financial Crisis, which brought together well-known academics and senior executives to redefine a more ethically based notion of leadership. Take a few minutes to think about the outcomes of this exercise.

TIME OUT Ethical leadership and management’s grand challenges (based on Hamel, 2009)

Well-known management scholar and consultant, Gary Hamel, brought together a number of prominent business school academics in 2008, including Henry Mintzberg and Jeff Pfeffer, and business leaders to develop a list of challenges that leaders would have to address following the growing criticism of businesses during the period leading up to and after the GFC. These challenges included:

1 Ensuring that managers serve a higher purpose to achieve socially significant goals.

2 Embedding notions of community and citizenship in their values and practices.

3 Modernizing management’s philosophical foundations and thinking to move beyond efficiency and focus on innovation.

4 Eliminating the focus on formal hierarchy as a solution to organization.

5 Reducing fear and building trust in management systems to create innovative cultures.

6 Recreating control systems to embed the notion of control from within rather than external control as being the most appropriate to innovation.

7 Redefining the current idea of leaders as heroic decision-makers to become architects and builders of systems.

8 Embracing diversity and pluralism as well as consensus.

9 Seeing strategy as emergent rather than planned and top-down.

10 Restructuring or de-constructing organizations into smaller, more flexible units.

11 Challenging the pull of the past and institutions that prevent change.

12 Distributing goal setting and leadership so that voice in the organization reflects insight, not power.

Questions

Reflect on your own organization or one with which you are familiar: to what extent does it mirror these ideas? Do you see evidence of organizations in general following these principles? If not, why is this so?

The above time-out exercise may have helped provide an answer to the third of our three questions raised in the early part of the chapter concerning the disconnection of senior managers from their organizations and society. While there are a small number of high-profile organizations pursuing socially responsible and sustainable agendas, such ideas are not part of mainstream thinking (Mayer, 2013).

To address the first two questions we raised in this chapter, however, we have to go back in time to examine two concepts in management that go straight to the heart of the rigour-relevance debate. These concepts are universalism and change.

MANAGEMENT AS A SET OF UNIVERSAL TRUTHS

Universalism and relativism in management

There have been many books aimed at helping managers understand and improve their management skills, not just in the area of people management but in other managerial functions such as managing information, budgets and finances, and operations. Many of these books take a universalist perspective on management.

KEY CONCEPT The universalist perspective on management

The proposition is that it is possible to discover a set of universal truths concerning principles, values and morals that can be equally applied in all business and management contexts. These truths can be established either by reasoning from first principles or by empirical observation. The fundamental points of this perspective are its universal application and its relative permanence, though most universalists acknowledge that the gradual accumulation of new knowledge can improve our thinking. Such a perspective is associated with attempts to establish a science of management, and to establish universal codes of ethics for business behaviour that transcend national boundaries (Crane and Matten, 2010).

Such a view dates back to before the end of the nineteenth century and is best exemplified by the works of Frederick Taylor in the USA, the so-called father of scientific management, and by the French businessman-theorist Henry...