Perplexities
Article Type: Perplexities From: International Journal of Organizational Analysis, Volume 15, Issue 3.
Within the domain of organizational studies our collective knowledge is constantly expanding and being refined, while our inquiry practices are becoming ever more sophisticated. What previously surprised, puzzled and bothered - i.e. perplexed - organizational scholars, has fueled research, theory development,and enhanced managerial practice that we claim as contributions. These accomplishments, however, inevitably create new perplexities - some of which,when come to the surface, engage our attention and energize our work. This issue’s column, as in prior ones (Lundberg, 2007a, b), notes some things that perplex me, hoping that they stimulate your ruminations too.
Recently, a former colleague proudly sent me a copy of his new Organizational Behavior (2008) textbook. Because I know him to be an exceptional teacher and because we used to debate topical coverage and topic order in OB texts, I eagerly began to sample his book’s contents. Since there are several topics I believe I know something about, I looked at those first. The coverage of decision making, group structure and dynamics, and organizational change seemed reasonable, but not very well-integrated with other major topics. I then turned to the index for leads to a set of ideas that I have come to believe are central to our understanding of behavior in work organizations, as well as useful for managerial practice. Most were missing! (You might do this too - i.e. create a list of useful ideas and then check them out in any appropriate new text.) Here is a sample of the ideas I was looking for: status and status incongruence, social class, identity, work design (especially types of tasks,referent groups, group cohesion, aspiration level, contribution opportunity,self-fulfilling prophecies, organizational climate, empathy, learned incapacity,and personality) organization fit, industrial mental health, labor relations,upward influence, general systems theory, and crisis management. If, as I contend, ideas like these are practitioner-useful, and many are now avoided in OB texts (and other managerial texts), then I am perplexed in at least two ways:Just who are these texts written for? And whatever happened to older,manager-tested ideas?
Related to the above “what happened to” perplexity is the category of perplexities I simply think of as “why haven’t we pursued X?” where X is an idea that seems conceptually attractive and potentially useful. Let me illustrate this type of perplexity by outlining just one idea. In the decade 1978 to 1988, Peter Vaill named and wrote about “high performance systems (HPSs),” organizations readily acknowledged as “excellent” in which members often exhibit a coordinated “peak performance.” HPSs thus appear to represent a new organizational archetype - both trans-autocratic and trans-bureaucratic - of contextual resiliency, organic unity, unique identity and creativity where energy is focused on the tasks and rhythms of purposeful team work. We can readily understand the attractiveness of HPSs in the 1980s when organizations were being de-layered, downsized and right-sized, in response to competitive pressures from abroad, demands for increased social and ecological responsibility and stakeholder responsiveness, and increased returns on equity. Today, however, scholars and executives alike simply do not talk about HPSs(although ideas about self-managing teams and self-organizing systems still get some buzz) even as conventional organizational structures flounder and fail because they not only ignore basic human needs but also demean them and traditional functions can no longer handle the complex, systemic issues that permeate contemporary business. Hence the generic perplexity of “why have we not pursued idea X,” which seems so liberating?
A co-author and I have recently finished writing the instructors’manual for a forthcoming case book. Each case has a note which, conventionally,contains a synopsis of the case, learning objectives, and set of guide questions(and ideal responses) for class discussion. Each of our case notes, however, has a section we call “alerts” where we list things that students tend to overlook or underemphasize and things that we feel the instructor should work into the case discussion. In revising the notes for nearly 40 cases I noticed alert points being repeated. Here they are:
Problems requiring managerial action were partly or mostly caused by the very manager responsible for taking action.
An understanding of what is going on in a case as well as what action was feasible is substantially helped by surfacing managers’ beliefs about when and how organizations change, about how to relate to stakeholders, about what company goals are important besides financial ones, about current and needed managerial competencies, and about what employees want or deserve in exchange for their effort.
Several of the obvious alternative action possibilities are more about enhancing management power and status than achieving employee commitment to the action.
The action alternative of doing nothing was sensible because organizational members were likely to self-correct.
A major criterion for managerial actions to prevent problems is more important than simple problem solving.
Given my experience as a manager, consultant, and field researcher, these six points seem not only reasonable, but also pretty sound. However, they rarely, if ever, appear in the management literature. If such “alerts”are both reasonable advice and seldom heard, that is perplexing!
It is not news that the world within and around organizations is information rich. Today organizational scholars, managers, and all other stakeholders have greater access to more information, faster, more conveniently, and in more diverse forms than ever before in history. It is easy to be overwhelmed as information from millions of sources all over the globe pours in through every possible channel and medium and every imaginable form of storage holds an even greater volume of information waiting to be retrieved. As the volume of information grows, both claims for factual information as well as knowledge claims, major concerns arise, especially about the accuracy and validity, i.e. trustworthiness, of such information. Too often overlooked is that what we believe we know is conditioned by how we came to know it. Underappreciated is that there are so many, many ways of knowing, e.g. common sense and logic,debates and surveys, occupational recipes and authoritative pronouncements,metaphors and multiple perspectives, Delphi’s and dialectics, problem solving and system modeling, and “sciencing” among others. A study of these ways of knowing shows that all of them are based on some assumptions,that all are flawed, that none escape from human judgment, and that hegemony is claimed by most. Computer-assisted knowing, now rampant, has a powerful bias toward amplifying personal autonomy and individual problem-solving methodologies, promotes sleepwalking attitudes toward it and often distracts us from more important things, such as asking useful questions or creating evidence-based explanations. What is perplexing to me is that regardless of the importance of how we know what we know, the importance of fitting how we know to what we would like to know, and the importance of being conversant with the pros and cons of a wide repertoire of ways of knowing, that how we know is so unappreciated and gets so little attention.
