Organisational Control

Organisational Control

1. People may want to be subject to a control system:

   • To receive feedback on how well they are doing at work
   • To be guided by some structure and definition in how they go about performing tasks
   • To be recognised and/or rewarded on the basis of good performance

2. Organisational Performance

   • Management endeavour to "control" staff behaviours and actions
     • Control systems are used to do this by:
       • Planning and organising work functions
       • Influencing individuals to behave in the interests of the organisation
       • Monitoring the execution of tasks
       • Redressing performance issues (at individual and organisational level

3. Mullin's "Five Essential Stages of Organisational Control

   • Planning: Objectives/Targets
   • Establishing: Standards of Performance
   • Monitoring: Actual Perfomance
   • Comparing: Deviations
   • Rectifying: Corrective Action

4. Examples of Control Systems

   • Budgets (cash, sales, financial etc)
   • Quality controls (purchases & production)
   • Inventory Controls
   • Production Controls
   • Staffing controls

5. Strategies of Organisation Control

   • Personal Centralised Control
   • Bureaucratic Control
   • Output Control
   • Electronic Surveillance Control
   • Human Resources Management Control
   • Cultural Control

6. Problems from Control Systems

   • Rigid Bureaucratic Behaviour: e.g. reluctance to work outside one's area of responsibility; acceptance of minimum standards; more effort devoted to control rather than what they are supposed to measure
   • Strategic Behaviour: e.g. deferring essential expenditure in order to meet a budget requirement; "patchy" scheduling in the period of evaluation to meet a performance indicator/target.
   • Invalid reporting data: e.g. provision of misleading data in order to influence the setting of standards, or to appear to justify standards.
   • Resistance: e.g. both to feeling excessively controlled and so lacking in freedom to act, and also to the particular control effects of specific control systems e.g. controls may create new subsystems in organisations thus changing the power and structural configurations.

7. The Panoptican

   • If you know that you are always potentially visible, but don't know when you are being watched, the rational thing to do is control yourself and act in the ways you think your overseer wants you to
     • When this happens, the overseer is largely relieved of his/her responsibility, since the employee assumes "responsibility for the constraints of power."
       • The employee must know that the power has unpleasant sanctions that can be applied to punish and correct their behaviour. The application of sanctions is only likely to be required in the early stages of adoption, or in the socialisation of new members.

8. Clegg's Varieties of Resistance

   • Distanced Self Consciousness: The individual is isolated or disengaged from organisational practice, or alienated from other workers. Appears superficially to be doing what the organisation wants, but without commitment or investment. Resistance to psychological incorporation: allowing the organisation to have your body, but not your heart and mind.
   • Plural self-consciousness: recognition that individuals can use different "organisational selves" in different contexts. May manipulate self-appraisal schemes. Seperation of "work self" from "real self."
   • Professional self-consciousness: exploit occupational knowledge e.g. using specialist knowledge for power purposes, or taking customers/clients with them if they move organisations
   • Whilstle-blower self-consciousness: individual makes an ethical stand on an issue
   • Transgressive self-consciousness: psychological responses to frustration or oppression. Acts which are deliberate, premeditated, organised campaigns to disrupt organisational functionning. Saboteur behaviour.
   • Rule consciousness: Overrigid application of the rules, or deliberate bending of them.
   • Gendered self-consiousness: recognition that a worker is also a man/woman. Symoblic resistance e.g. manipulation of dress codes/personalisation of work stations.
   • Natural Rights Consciousness: most basic form of resistance. Passive refusal to do something which violates your's or another's basic rights.

9. Resistance

   • Subverting managerial control
   • Refusal to cooperate
   • Go slow
   • Walk Out
   • Withdrawal of goodwill
   • Work to Rule
   • Organisational misbehaviour
     • Behaviour which is not sufficantly directed or sustained
     • Involves different types of appropriation of time, work, product and identity from the organisation's control
   • Sickness/absense
   • Strike

10. Machiavellian = seeks power with with to manipulate and control others

    • Associated with: cynicism and manipulation; belief that others are weak, guillible and susceptible to manipulation by the strong and clever; dismissive of morality; willing to lie successfully; means justify the ends; personal and emotional detachment
    • Operates effectively when: can initiate and control a situation; face-to-face interaction; unscructured situation; scope for improvisation; resistance to social influence; logical, rational, unemotional approach to decision making, skilled in negotiation and bargaining.

11. Authoritarian: respects authority and shows a deference to those who possess it