Role-meanings as a critical factor in understanding doctor managers’ identity work and different role identities

This study examines “identity work” among hybrid doctor-managers (DMs) in the Spanish National Health System to make sense of their managerial roles. In particular, the meanings underlying DMs experience of their hybrid role are investigated using a Grounded Theory methodology, exposing distinctions in role-meanings. Our findings provide evidence that using different social sources of comparison (senior managers or clinicians) to construct the meaning of managerial roles leads to different role-meanings and role identities, which are the source of the two established types of DM in the literature, the reluctant and the enthusiast. The contribution is twofold: our findings lead us to theorize DMs’ identity work processes by adding an overlooked role-meaning dimension to identity work; and raise practical reflections for those who wish to develop enthusiast doctor managers.PostprintPeer reviewe

Developing a theoretical basis for the concept of organizational behaviour

Workplace misbehaviour is seen to be a neglected feature of organizational study (Ackroyd and Thompson; Vardi and Weitz, 2004). Where research has been undertaken into misbehaviour the emphasis tends fall into two broad categories. First of all, organizational behaviour theorists use the term misbehaviour as a means to highlight how the ‘negative’ behaviour of employees gets in the way of formal organizational goals. Secondly, radical sociologists tend to use the term misbehaviour as a means to critique Foucauldian labour process theory. Here an argument is made that suggests the disciplinary affects of new management practices associated with human resource management and total quality management have been overstated. Furthermore, radical sociologists also use the term misbehaviour as means to critique organizational behaviour accounts, which are believed to paint overly optimistic accounts of organizational life. However, on further examination it was discovered that neither a radical sociological approach, nor a traditional organizational behaviour approach, sufficiently addresses the current deficit in our understandings and explanations for workplace misbehaviour. Hence, one of the main themes of this thesis was to design a theoretical and methodological framework to address the deficit in our understandings and explanations. As such, a view was taken of how a radical sociological approach (orthodox labour process analysis) combined with an emerging social psychological perspective (a social identity approach (Haslam, 2001)) could help overcome previous theoretical problems associated with researching misbehaviour. Empirical support for this approach is provided by the detailed examination of the objective and subjective working conditions of four different sets of low status workers. The findings are based on longitudinal covert participant observations, as well as covert interviews and the covert gathering of company documents. The findings depart from previous insights into workplace misbehaviour in stressing the importance of acknowledging and investigating both the organizational and sub-group social identities of low status workers, in relation to such activities. As such, a great deal of the misbehaviour noted in the findings can be attributed to the poor treatment of low status workers by management, yet misbehaviour is equally if not more attributable to the empowering or inhibitive qualities of the many psychological groups that worker can associate with or disassociate themselves from. Recommendations are made about the direction of future research into workplace misbehaviour. There are many suggestions made and include examining misbehaviour in a wider range of settings, sectors and levels of organizations.EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo

Exploring traditions of identity theory for Human Resource Development (HRD)

The question of who is developed by HRD might appear self-evident. However, the answer becomes less certain when one seeks to understand how the individual changes through HRD activities and how these changes in turn shape what they do and how others respond to them. Such concerns are of central interest to the study of identity, a field that sees the question of who someone ‘is’, and indeed is not, as an important contributor to the personal and interpersonal dynamics of organisational life. Many of those engaged in identity scholarship would readily declare themselves to understand identity as a socially constructed phenomenon. Beyond this, however, contrasting research traditions adopt different positions on what constitutes an identity, where it emanates from, and how it might be known. Such variety means identity offers a potentially fruitful series of frameworks for exploring the nature, as well as the effect, of HRD on the individual and the workplace. Unlocking this potential, however, requires a firm understanding of the perspectives from which identity is described and the processes through which it is sustained and evolves

Welcome to the House of Fun: Work Space and Social Identity

Following the diffusion of HRM as the dominant legitimating managerial ideology, some employers have started to see the built working environment as a component in managing organisational culture and employee commitment. A good example is where the work space is designed to support a range of officially encouraged ‘fun’ activities at work. Drawing on recent research literature and from media reports of contemporary developments, this paper explores the consequences of such developments for employees’ social identity formation and maintenance, with a particular focus on the office and customer service centre. Our analysis suggests that management’s attempts to determine what is deemed fun may not only be resented by workers because it intrudes on their existing private identities but also because it seeks to re-shape their values and expression

Rhetoric But Whose Reality? The Influence of Employability Messages on Employee Mobility Tactics and Work Group Identification

Over the last decade, employability has been presented by its advocates as the solution to employment uncertainty, and by its critics as a management rhetoric possessing little relevance to the experiences of most workers. This article suggests that while employability has failed to develop into a key research area, a deeper probing of its message is warranted. In particular, it is suggested that employability may have resonance with employees as workers rather than as employees of their immediate employing organisation. This demands a slightly different approach to studying employability than some other related phenomena such as employee commitment which has resonance only in relation to the employing organization. In adopting a social identity approach, the significance of the employability message is shown not only to lie in employees’ willingness to disassociate from their existing work groups and pursue individual mobility, but also in its capacity to undermine workers’ collective responses to grievances and unwanted organizational changes. A future research agenda is presented which highlights the need to address recent attempts to develop employability expectations among graduate career entrants, and for a closer critical engagement with management writings that attempt to justify the unnecessary espousal of the self development message

Security Abeyance: Coping with the Erosion of Job Conditions and Treatment

The construct of security abeyance is proposed to explain how general insecurity might commonly arise during organizational restructuring. Security abeyance refers to feelings of general insecurity that emerge in work settings where there is an absence of information about the meaning and intention of organizational change. The value of the abeyance construct is explored using a study of change in the air traffic sector. For security abeyance to emerge, unreadable management actions needed to be also accompanied by confusions about the worker's organizational value. In the face of an enduring frustration of meaning, initial, neutral attempts at sensemaking gave way to more proactive efforts to provoke management into clarifying workers' futures. Resolution of the abeyance predicament was found to require workers to let go of attempts to evaluate their current, personal worth to the organization and to extensively re-evaluate their long-term relationship with management. However, the emergence of highly distrustful worker constructions of management did not affect other, established organizational attachments. The case for developing security abeyance research is made

Management Communication and the Psychological Contract

Corporate communications models conflict with the management research literature in assuming that managers hold unitary beliefs about organizational interests. In reality, while displaying some adherence to formal goals, managers have a tendency to pursue highly personalised agendas. What is more, endemic tensions in middle manager roles have recently increased in the wake of declining career opportunities and job security. Using a longitudinal case study of job change, shows how middle managers' notions of their self-interest can conflict with fulfilling the employee psychological contract. In the face of greater penalties for poor performance, middle managers were prepared to neglect and even violate their subordinates' psychological contracts in order to appear to be meeting their commitments to top management. Concludes that the prevailing unitarist assumptions held about managers weaken the corporate communications literature and should be abandoned. Suggests that corporate communications models would be enhanced by revisions which take account of the political nature of management motives and actions

Embellishing the past: Middle manager identity and informality in the implementation of new technology

This article illustrates how themes which were prominent in the industrial sociology of the 1960s and 1970s can refine our understanding of how management processes impact on the introduction of new technology and the employment relationship. Using a case study in the air traffic sector, this paper shows how middle managers' competitive struggles and overreliance on worker informality can lead to omissions in the planning of technical change and the neglect of worker concerns during its implementation

Greenfield recruitment and selection: Implications for the older worker

The recruitment of young, "green" workers has long been recognised as a defining characteristic of the greenfield site. Extends understanding of how person-centred recruitment, with its emphasis on employee acceptability, disadvantages the older greenfield applicant. Whether it be a new high commitment or customer service site, worker age is shown to combine with the conventional recruitment criteria of skill, class and gender to constitute an excluded labour segment. In its superior capacity to shape workforce composition, greenfield person-centred recruitment is shown to be important to understanding the ways in which managerial control is pursued and exercised more widely than within the labour process. Leopold and Hallier's framework of greenfield types is also modified to encompass new customer service sites where acceptability recruitment is critical to greenfield employers' labour relations strategies. Concludes that person-centred recruitment should be studied as a critical feature of greenfield workplace politics and practices

Management Enforced Job Change and Employee Perceptions of the Psychological Contract

Despite increasing research interest in the psychological contract, little is known about how employees' contractual beliefs alter during major organizational changes. Using a sample of air traffic control workers who have been used to stable work roles over long periods, examines employees' contractual responses to enforced job change. As job change approached, contractual acceptance or violation was engendered by sensemaking appraisals of management decisions, the meaning given to premove uncertainties, and perceptions of victimization. Following job change, sense-making continued and eventually yielded either a calculative assessment of the employment relationship or feelings of sustained violation. While sustained violation was accompanied by visible expressions of resistance against management, such acts represented a desire to reinstate the established employment relationship. Conversely, workers who accommodated the personal outcomes of management breaches became less committed to a contractual relationship, and resolved to exploit management weaknesses and omissions. These divergencies reflected how the contractual meanings given to single breach events were kept separate from panoptic assessments of management's entire body of behaviour during the reorganization