“Who am I to them?”: a conventionalist approach to managers’ role and authority
(2020) , 16 pages
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- Abstract
- Organizational and managerial discourses promote collaborative and participative management practices in an attempt to provide with the most appropriate answer to the challenges currently faced by organizations evolving in a complex environment. While the literature mainly focuses on the design and implementation of these new organization structures, the way they actually take shape and are adopted by its members is less overtly investigated. In this paper, we develop a conventionalist approach to analyze changes resulting from the implementation of a new organizational model promoting participative management in a Belgian public-service broadcasting company. To do so, we rely on ethnographic data made of fieldnotes of one year observation and informal conversations, the observation of 32 project meetings and 6 corporate events, semi-structured interviews with 23 managers as well as internal documentation and communications. We observe the emergence of an alternative convention in which management tends to become a job in its own right, while at the same time leading managers to search for legitimacy. Our data analysis especially outlines the outbreak or persistence of alternative forms of authority than the traditional one, linked to the status and expertise, in order to assert one’s legitimacy. Besides the remanence of authoritarian positions, we e.g. distinguish the ownership over people and budget as well as the possession and/or withholding of information. By doing so, our work provides with strong findings that support a better understanding of managers' responses to a deep organizational transformation of their environment.
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Terlinden, L. (2020). “Who am I to them?”: a conventionalist approach to managers’ role and authority (Louvain Research Institute in Management and Organizations Working Paper Series 2020/11). https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/234307