Managing People in Organizations Introduction

• This chapter introduces concepts related to managing and organizations.
• The chapter aims to enable one to identify the changes that are impacting managing and organizations in the contemporary world.
• The chapter introduces trends in digital organizations and contemporary managing.
• The intention is to help one understand managing as sensemaking and managing or organizations by grasping managerial rationalities
• This will familiarize one with global shifts for future managing and organizations.

Managing People in Organizations: Introduction

• Managing People in Organizations focuses on managing people within organizations. This includes how individuals work in teams and groups
• Chapter 2 focuses on the the socio-psychology of individuals and the impact of this on managing and organizations. Organizations are structured with leaders and followers, as explained in Chapter 3
• Chapter 4 discusses how individuals and teams are led and motivated.
• Part 2 switches the focus to organizational practices at an organizational level.
• Chapter 5 notes that leadership and its theories are staples in management texts, with leadership seen as creating and maintaining organizational culture.
• Equity, diversity, and inclusion (EDI) are important considerations, along with levels of organizational culture and national variations. Organizational conflict and power relations are central to organizational life, explored in Chapters 6 and 7.
• Conflict is a part of power relations, explicitly occurring between various groups and managed through conflict minimization. Communication practices are central to management, with Chapter 8 focusing partly on digital communication.
• Part 3 focuses on managing organizational processes and structures, particularly learning and change.
• Chapter 9 explores organizational learning and Chapter 10 looks at innovation, recognizing that long term effectiveness is a concern for managers.
• Contemporary organizations are being called to account in terms of sustainability and ethical practices.
• Sustainable and ethical practice are covered in Chapter 11; in contemporary terms, it is difficult to be considered ethical whilst contributing to climate change
• Organizational design has been a central theme of Management and Organization Studies reviewed in Chapter 12.
• Earlier organizational structures, as argued in Chapter 12, were based on principles decided by authoritative figures, leading to standard designs that were replaced by more explicit research
• Initially, the focus was on controlling individuals through various means, but now increasingly design thinking as a creative process is favored. Globalization and deglobalization, are supply chains is covered in Chapter 13 It is noted that, illustrated by a shift in 2020-21, globalization is not a One-way process.
• The COVID-19 pandemic and government responses have contributed to uncertainty and individual freedoms, especially of the Trump administration, changing sentiment towards globalization.

Making Sense of Managing

• Managing is a practice separate from organizations, which are goal-oriented collectives To be organized involves systemically arranging components in a system
• Management is the process of:
  • Communicating
  • Coordinating
  • Accomplishing Actions
  • Pursuing Organizational Objectives
• Objectives are pursued by collaborating with stakeholders and managing relationships with employees, suppliers, and customers.
• Management goes beyond productivity/efficiency and includes socio-political and ethical responsibilities.
• Lean and efficient private sector organizations have, for around 40 years, been the dominant model for organizations
• Top management strives for a common understanding within the organization, termed "sensemaking".
• Sensemaking is the process through which individuals and groups explain novel, unexpected, or confusing events.
• Sensemaking involves constantly making sense, revising past rationalizations with new information, and constructing meaning through interaction.
• The definition of sensemaking is broken down into several aspects:
  • Ongoing: Always making sense, including in dreams.
  • Retrospective: Reviewing sense in terms of additional data.
  • Plausible: Provisional sense that is good enough for that moment, updated continuously.
  • Images: Using representations and considering other view points to relate new findings to the existing knowledge base.
  • Rationalize: Clarifying confusing ideas or processes and making them justifiable.
  • People: Though computers etc may act on the people who do the sense making.
  • Doing: Thinking and action define each other; people discover their goals through action.
• Sensemaking is influenced by the identity of the person sensemaking, with storytelling and narrative accounts of experience playing a vital role.
• Managers aim to influence employee sensemaking by using:
  • Cues
  • Language
  • Experience
• Cues are useful in fitting things together and making common meaning, framed by managers to enable coherence.
• Framing means defining what is relevant and distinguishing it from what is not.
• Framing organizes situations through metaphors, stories, traditions, slogans, and material creations. It is used by leaders to reframe organizational change occurs not only through sensemaking but also through sensebreaking and sensegiving.
• The emotional component is strong with a leader's sensemaking

Sense Making Components

• Framing: Deciding relevance from many stimuli available to the sensemaking process
• Sensebreaking: Disrupting an existing sense to make alternative sense.
• Sensegiving: Attempts to influence the sensemaking of other so that other share the preferred meaning.

Tradition in relation to Sense Making

• Tradition is a foundation for sensemaking, seen in archival and oral history research

• Executives (re)interpreted the past to author the future, ensuring ideological consistency.

• Another foundation for sensemaking is to assert the legitimacy of rational analysis.

• Relationally, sensemaking, sensegiving, and sensebreaking mediate the flow of sense data.

• Sensemaking is framing ongoing events; sensegiving is strategically framing other's perceptions.

  Whereas sensebreaking strategically disrupts flows of sensemaking & giving.

• Leaders are required to frame a shared sense for others to follow.

• It maps to leadership competencies most evidently.

• Crisis highlights our acute need for sense making An example of the need for sense making originates in Wick's analysis of the Mann Gulch Incident.

• The incident saw firefighters lost their lives because not following one direction: to drop their tools, enabled them to run and duck for cover, saving their lives.

Occupations like pilots need accurate sensemaking due to requiring monitoring and split-second decisions.

Managerial Rationality

• Managerialism is when managers claim to be able to make decisions that deny legitimacy to other knowledge forms.

• Managerialism seeks to apply managerial practices to all areas of society, with management believed as being able to solve any problem the means to solving

• Managers endorse the belief of managerialism to control organizations, integrate them normatively, and limit sensemaking.

• Managerialism emerged in for-profit organizations as economic rationalism.

• Profit accrues to the owners after all the costs of using financial, symbolic, and social capital are met.

• Social capital is whom you know and how you are known (rather than what you know).

• Metaphors is a figure of speech used to compared one thing to another that aren't alike as argued by Morgan (1986) one example can be to aim for "Premier league" titles.

• Organizations are made up of highly professionalized routines.

• In highly professionalized Organizations the patient's body is the intersection point of various professions

• Organizations are full of handovers that create lot of opportunities for different perspectives, even plausible stories or alternative truths

• Plausible stories are rumour, gossip, websites etc where each make sense to each other. Rationality is constituted nor mandated by official organizational roles:

• Meaning stories are major medium of communication

• To manage is to implement schemes, themes, and dreams which requires making sense.

• Rational management never have perfect knowledge

• Bound rationality is where people are rational within known constraints.

• Managerialist rationality symbolises that are in control

• Belief is rationality can be a self-fulfilling prophecy

• Resistance to change is the undermining of interventions.

Resistance can be the assertion of alternative rationality. To avoid bias EDI is included.

Contemporary Managing and Organizations in a Changing World

• Organizations differ in purpose and mission. The distinction is blurring due to rational knowledge which makes practices have a high degree of commonality

Organizations are tools that extend human agency, depending largely on the controllers.

Leading to questions around which goals can be benign versus particularistic especially if controlled by those who are powerful.

• In the post-was era, employees were managed through career aspirations that were linked to them becoming tools for cooperation and progress and avoiding risks

With that came large-scale technologies and advancements in computing.

This has resulted in the destruction of much or corporate America.

An effect of this is digitalization has altered the need for intellectual intensity and altered different kinds of management.

Working with databases and software can now be customised to tailored and specific requirements.

Understanding tacit knowledge

• Knowledge intensive work such as Alvesson depends on tacit knowledge.

• Tacil knowledge is intuitive understanding, like a novice understanding how riding a bike works.

• Not easy communicated or instructed but well learnt with practice.

Knowledge workers can use it and the need increases, in a way which requires leadership based on informal interaction.

The Digital Organization

• The digital economy is rich domain for those who exploit it An understanding on consumer and client base can provide more opportunities to target them.
• Identity factors when considering digital bubbles, leading people to vote and buy from people they relate to and identify with.

Messages must affirm identity to ensure best chances of conversion.

Money, time, and resources can reinforce this in a way which improves the odds of the action achieving it's conclusion.

• Electronic media enhance tribalism and boundary maintenance.
• Shared imagined experiences create bubbles of situational emotions
• Apple is a great example of where brand loyalty, through social media and new product releases, has created value for their enterprise

Through using spot contacts, costs can reduce with more efficiency.

While the digital economy now employs few people, Uber has over 1M drivers but recognizes very few as employees.

Self-exploitation and freelance platforms allow subjects who may be excluded to participate while diminishing their opportunity.

The transaction is everything for platform economies, and the main contractor has no care for anything else in terms of well being.

• The above is known as the gig economy.

• A parallel currency, based on vanity and popularity, assesses organization value through it's contributions and platform selection.

There assets, such as likes, are perishable as per the owners of platforms like Tik Tok and You Tube which harvest hard currency.

Internships can have the same characteristics of this.

Reliance on meta-data enables organization critics to ironize or critique various strategies.

New media can allow idea creation, contribution and criticism for multiple views.

Control is dispersed across a network of people where hackers through sabotage, can critique projections.

In 2021 ransomware code was created by Darkside group who inserted the code into Colonial Pipeline System

Digital affordances mean distinct agencies can work together is trust, empathy, and commitment is involved.

• McLuhan hypothesised that digital devices become extensions of nervous systems.
• We use them to network and make them members of communities over time

In Practice: The Gig Economy

• In many countries the nature of work determines entitlements, meaning receipt of payments vs the ability to claim employment rights like holiday pay.

Arguments has started of stresses for the benefits while others stress for the exploitation.

Some stress welcoming, rather than resisting , the Gig economy as a sector and a means from analytical and sociological standpoints.

Digital Design in Organizations

Digital afforances have created means for organizations such as Zappos to endorse self management

• Digital Organizations such as Zappos and HolacracyOne, who create designs based one self-managing circles where vertical hierachies are replaced with overlapping circles in which they share their information with transparency.
• Kallinksos argues that technologies allow tasks that were previously within space to be dissolved and reordered.
• Organizations increasingly separate designs to segment activities for competitive advantage, which specialize elsewhere or alternate machines with intelligence.
• Machine intelligence are algorithms that easily replicated and capture routines; an algorithm are better at tasks better than human energy at accomplishing routine tasks.

With that, the people who are misplaced should be given high skilled education training, and in the absence, become surpolous requirements.

• Algorithms afford no room for the acknowledgement of consequences, instead presenting the purest frame of technical decision making.
• Digital nomads, and young workers armed with Wi-fi, can move around where they please.
• In the past, nomads house sat or lived in a variety of places such as Airbnb.
• The mobility creates problems for tax authorities as they can "fly under radar" but also create issues like increase inner-city prices.

Pandemics can change everything, especially lockdown which limits the opportunities

The Effect of COVID-19

• The COVID-19 pandemic has world-changing consequences, especially in countries that see heavy cases of a lack of borders.

• The Airbnb economy has dried up.

• Once settled they many return or become something else.

• As a result of organizations have had to shift and change to adapt to these conditions

• The world has adapted

• Even as the pandemic draws and is being drew down the world changes as a result of the new norm There are new changes that should be brought to the current discussion as a result Bill Gates suggests productivity-enhancing should be taxed For future governments must ensure enterprises are not based on super exploitation of cheap labors. Organizations will decamp, be it good or bad, must provide active market with taxes.

• Diversity is increasingly growing and is an assest for organizations.

• Polyphony can introduce new information but also can introduce conflict

• Time and Space are two fundamental coordinates.

• High cultural sensitivity needs to be achieved

Communication is difficult and different depending on generation: Older, Mobile, and Direct are examples cited.

• In contrast Millennials are more cynical and will less take control and command.
• Green values by GenZ helps disparate generations come together, and those corporate social responsibilities need to be addressed.
• Organizations are moving away from hard power to soft power - in form of commanding to culture.
• Those practices will be your future whether thought of or not.

The Economic Context of Contemporary Management

• Public is traditionally conceived of Bureaucracy.
• New Public Management (NPM) : Starting that in the 1980s the reforms where informed by neoclassical theory of increased action from private practice.
• Across Anglo-American polites: Underlying Management and Markets is better.
• Influenced by things such think tanks and popular texts.
• Microeconomic theory has allowed down sizing, policy making, citizens.
• Public is considered the alternative, with those who use the tools now have to explicitly share the value as one consequence with explicit DTI policies.
• At the same time the public has been abandoned.

There is a trickle down effect to economics and benefits, that the the IMF say do not work .

There is new economic and value systems. The result is that the economic system can become devastated as found in the finance in developing journal