Contemporary Management and about gaining the commitment of the workforce
Today, throughout U.S. industry a significant change is under way in long-established approaches to the organization and management of work. (Walter, 1985) The first, organised by businesses with an identifiable product or product line, divides its employees into self-supervising ten to fifteen person work teams that are collectively responsible for a set of related tasks. Hyman and Mason (1995) state that the first, contemporary, form of management is due to a company policy of ‘employee involvement’, which refers to “practices and policies which emanate from management and which purport to provide employees with the opportunity to influence decision-making on matters which affect them”.
Employee participation, on the other hand, refers to “state initiatives which promote the collective rights of employees to be represented in organisational decision-making, including collective bargaining”, and the other countries in the EU, with their legally based industrial relations, are shown to exhibit this ‘pluralistic’ approach, with works councils, employee representation on boards and financial participation. Management Decision (1994) actually proposes the integration and coordination of employee involvement and total quality management, and thus the elimination of the differences between total quality and employee involvement, in terms of organisational practices. This argument is backed up by a survey, which shows that companies with a greater commitment to employee involvement also have a greater commitment to total quality, thus TQM and employee involvement are strongly compatible, and are both recognised facets of contemporary management theory.
The predecessor to contemporary management, the classical management approach to control developed by Frederick Taylor and Henri Fayol (Parker and Lewis, 1995) has been argued to be very similar to contemporary management theories, as has been seen by the parallels drawn between the contemporary concerns and foci of business and governments in today’s international environment, and those pertaining at the time of Taylor and Fayol. The persistence and revived profile of the classical management model of control is linked to contemporary Western management’s economic rationalism, and genesis of this model of control is further explored by Parker and Lewis via its founders’ personal backgrounds and industrial environments.
Parker and Ritson (2005) take this argument further, claiming that in classifying Fayol as a founding father of the Classical Management School, many academics have, to some extent, misrepresented this still important management theorist: “The Fayol portrayed in contemporary texts invariably emerges as a caricature of a much more insightful, complex, visionary and rounded management thinker.” As such, Parker and Ritson’s study re-examines Fayol’s personal and career history, as well as the arguments presented in his original work, General and Industrial Management, finding that he was a much more complex and multidimensional figure than his conventional stereotype today, and that his management theories embraced a wider spectrum of approaches and concepts than traditionally identified with the classical management school of thought. In marked contrast to his traditional portrayal, the study uncovers traces of ideas and concepts that anticipated aspects of the human relations movement, systems-based contingency theory, the movement towards greater employee involvement in decision-making and elements of knowledge management. Thus, this forces us to ask the question of whether contemporary management is actually a new system of commitment over control, or whether it is simply classical management control, re branded to take account of human relations and motivational concerns.
Mary Douglas’s (1992) cultural theory of grid and group provides a framework for the description of three distinct cultural types corresponding to three logics for the legitimising of ‘collective coercion’. Each type is distinguished by characteristic structures of classification, power, and moral order operating at the individual cognitive level. Since the 1980s, it has been increasingly recognised by management thinking that competitive advantage is more likely to be achieved through people, and thus emphasis has been made in HRM literature on the development of a strong company culture, encompassing shared beliefs and values, as a means of developing employee commitment. A key argument against the use of commitment as a management strategy is that, despite the best efforts of researchers, evidence of a strong positive link between commitment and performance remains patchy, let alone indications of a causal relationship. (Cooke, 2002)
Cooke (2002) in fact provides a comprehensive review of the subject in a similar way to Parker and Lewis (2005): by tracing the idea of organisational commitment to early management literature and emphasising its classical pedigree. The outcomes are most favourable when employers also direct employees’ attention to group or unit performance, in addition to their own jobs, results which support the increased use of involvement teams or self-managing groups by employers. The benefits of this focus, however, cannot be realized unless employers are willing to offer some degree of employment security or career investment in employees, and a variety of authors (e.g., Atchison, 1991; Lawler, 1986; Osterman, 1988; Strauss, 1987) have emphasized the importance of this policy of employer commitment. The results from this individual-level study provide evidence to support these views, and thus claim that, in short, “the employment flexibility of the quasi-spot-contract and the underinvestment approaches may involve a trade-off–reduced performance from employees. The mutual investment approach, in contrast, appears to provide deployment flexibility along with strong employee performance.” (Tsui et al., 1997) Yet Tsui et al. also note that popular writings seem to indicate that many firms under competitive pressure have recently moved from using an overinvestment employee-organisation relationship to using an underinvestment approach, at least in the short term. Precipitous empowerment mandates, over reliance on a narrow psychological concept of empowerment, one-size-fits-all empowerment, neglecting the needs of power sharers, a piece-meal approach, and distortions of accountability are all reasons for this failure, according to Forrester. This failure of management to effectively build commitment through empowerment can be seen to be a result of some of the failings of earlier conceptual work on empowerment (Conger & Kanungo, 1988; Thomas & Velthouse, 1990), which failed to demonstrate how empowerment can draw on, and extend, earlier work on job enrichment. Where job enrichment limits employee voice to the immediate work role, empowerment defines a set of cognitions that provide more extensive employee voice in decision making, whilst also extending the network of empowerment in the workplace by articulating the content and nature of the relationship between social structural context and empowerment. The social structural characteristics reflect characteristics of a high-involvement work design (Lawler, 1986) and the conditions which Aktouf (1992) argued are necessary for “vital work.” Academics have also claimed that there has been a dearth of such theory driven, “meso level” research examining the relationship between organizational social structure and individual cognition (Rousseau, 1985).
Tags: contemporary management, frederick taylor, henri fayol, hyman, industrial relations, management approach, management theories, management theory, pluralistic approach
