Organizational Behavior

20: High Reliability in Practice – USN Rear Admiral Tom Mercer

December 17, 2016 Ralph Soule

With Special Guest U.S. Navy Rear Admiral Tom Mercer

Karl Weick

Based around a classic work by Weick and Roberts (1993) on Collective mind in organizations – where the authors observed and analyzed the way people on the deck of an aircraft carrier function in a collective manner – this episode brings you a discussion of how concepts of High Reliability (see also Episode 11) flesh out in real life!
As stated by Weick and Roberts, the collective mind is “a pattern of heedful interrelations of actions in a social system” (p. 357). These “heedful interrelations of actions” purportedly allow near error-free performance within a given environment. One of the key aspects there is considered to be knowledge integration between, and among, a group people performing complex, high-risk, interdependent yet diverse work in close proximity to one another. Knowledge integration based on these mechanisms suggests that repeatability is a core characteristic, but, the repetitive nature of these mechanisms does not necessarily imply that patterns of knowledge integration are exactly replicated over time. This was one of the key questions tacked by Weick and Roberts – how do people re-enact the work of this nature time and time again and what happens when (if) they fail.

Joining us for this episode is a very special guest – Commanding Officer of the aircraft carrier on which Weick and Roberts performed their study, Read Admiral (retired) Tom Mercer! Tom is an extraordinary individual and a highly experienced leader, bearing responsibility for a multidisciplinary organization of 6000 people working everything from munitions and aircraft to baking bread and producing television.

This is a must listen for a grounded, empirically saturated representation of the theoretical concepts of High Reliability Organization, and general management as such, that we cover on this podcast!

You may also download the audio files here:  Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 

Read with us:

Weick, K.E. and Roberts, K.H., (1993). Collective mind in organizations: Heedful interrelating on flight decks. Administrative Science Quarterly 38, 357-381.

14: Simply Managing, by Henry Mintzberg

August 2, 2016 Dmitrijs Kravcenko

Henry Mintzberg

Henry Mintzberg is an internationally renowned academic and a prolific business and management author. He is currently the Cleghorn Professor of Management Studies at the Desautels Faculty of Management of McGill University in Montreal, Canada. Much of Henry’s work is concerned with developing new approaches to management education and reflecting on the actual managerial practices and organization of work. He has published around 170 articles, 17 books (all available for reference on his website), and holds a great number of significant honours and awards. Henry will be well-known to virtually any management scholar, not least on account of his 1973 seminal work – The Nature of Managerial Work –  which began a decades-long research programme that dispelled a view of managers as scientifically rational controllers and coordinators.

The book we analyzed in this episode, Simply Managing (2013), is an updated study of managers conducted by Henry Mintzberg based on observing 29 managers at all levels of organizations across a range of industries and organizational structures: business, government, healthcare, and pluralistic organizations such as museums and NGO’s. It is condensed version of his earlier book – Managing, which was published in 2009. Both books address management as it is actually practiced, which Henry found to be quite different from how management scholars write about it. Simply Managing is designed to be of greatest use to practitioners, with an entertaining style and lots of boldface type to emphasize key points clearly.

In Chapter 1 of the book, Mintzberg used his observations to debunk the conventional notions of what management is and is not. For all the changes in the professional world of management practice, he concluded that the nature of management has not changed substantially in the 40 years between the publication of The Nature of Managerial Work and Simply Managing. Chapter 2 is a review of myths of managing, which Henry labels as folklore. Chapter 3 presents a model of managing with a thorough explanation. Chapter 4 criticizes views of management that only look at one of or a few of its its many varieties at a time as if the others could be ignored or were less important. Chapter 5, the most important chapter of the book according to Henry, identifies the paradoxes that are inherent in the practice of management. The final chapter, Chapter 6, grants amnesty to imperfect managers doing the best they can despite their flaws. It describes themes of effective management in context, because that is where the real work of management happens according to Mintzberg.

The book is thought provoking and comprehensive, which made for an interesting discussion with the author. Listen to the podcast and decide for yourself. 

You may also download the audio files here:  Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 

Also click here to read our own Ralph Soule’s review of Simply Managing.
Read with us:

Mintzberg, H. (2013). Simply Managing: What Managers do – and Can do Better. Financial Times

Also available for Kindle and as an audio book!

13: Banana Time – Donald Roy

July 5, 2016 Dmitrijs Kravcenko

Original Photo from the Article

Donald F. Roy (1909–1980) was a sociologist on the faculty of Duke University from 1950 to 1979. He is traditionally well known for his contribution to the labour process theory, workplace interactions, social conflict and the role of unions, but also for his very detailed descriptions of how workers experience time. Roy’s work surveys much of blue-collar America (beginning in 1934 he took employment in around 24 menial jobs in 20 industries), and is of great importance to Marxist analysis back in the day.

One of the most famous ethnographic works, Banana Time: Job Satisfaction and Informal Interaction describes Roy’s experience of working as a drill press operator (as in the picture on this page) for two months. Set against the backdrop of Taylor-inspired Scientific Management, the paper provides a thick description of the setting, the tools of work and, most importantly, behaviour and dynamics of the group of workers whom Roy was assigned to work with. The work group itself was fairly isolated in the factory, and supervision was infrequent. Roy initially experienced the work as “a grim process of fighting the clock”, and in this machine work, faced a “dismal combination of working conditions …[in the shape of] an extra-long workday, infinitesimal cerebral excitation, and the extreme limitation of physical movement”. In the early days of the job, he survived the experience by developing his own ‘games’ with the work (what Dmitrijs inadvertently referred to during the episode as ‘playing with himself’), setting arbitrary goals and creating as much diversity in the tasks as possible. However, as Roy became aware of a whole range of social activities that were going on between the other members of the group, he became drawn into the social dynamic of the workplace. This paper is about his experiences of those dynamics.

While the paper itself is not particularly theory rich, it does a great job of provoking a great deal of thinking about different theories in those who know them, or have listened to this podcast. The thick descriptions of work and social interactions touch upon a great number of themes and foundational concepts in management, psychology and sociology. For instance, Roy alludes to, directly or indirectly (usually the latter), Scientific Management, esprit de corps, Hawthorne Studies, motivation and self-actualization, time and motion studies, humour, play, and lived experience of time.

 To learn about all of these, and more, do join us for Episode 13 on Banana Time, by Donald Roy!

You may also download the audio files here:  Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 

Read with us:

Roy, D.F. (1959). Banana Time: Job Satisfaction and Informal Interaction, Human Organization, 18(4), 158-168.