Tài liệu Corporate Reputations, Branding and People Management 13 docx

Organizational action: governance,leadership and engagement Governance and leadership To recap on our introduction to these issues in the opening chapter, we argued that organizational i

■ Achieving affinity It is not enough for customers and employees (and other stakeholders) to see the corpor-ate character in the same way; what satisfies them must

be the same to achieve the emotional links, e.g they must both value agreeableness or enterprise, and place

a negative value on ruthlessness

■ Achieving connection.Connections are the logical rea-sons why employees would want to see satisfied cus-tomers through, for example, seeing a connection between their attitudes and behaviours, satisfied cus-tomers (and other stakeholders) and the financial per-formance of the company

We would certainly recommend that organizations wishing

to explore gaps between organizational identity and how out-siders view an organization’s image (its reputations) might want

to develop a more contextually sensitive adaptation of this approach We have begun to do this in a range of contexts, including a financial services company, a political party and a voluntary organization (see Box 3.3)

Box 3.3 Corporate character in a voluntary organization

We undertook a piece of research in 2003 for Age Concern North Tyneside, a charitable organization in the North of England The organ-ization provided a range of services for older people, including sheltered housing, day care and drop-in centres so that elderly people could get advice and training on insurance, life-skills, computing etc The organiza-tion was part of a larger, well-known naorganiza-tional network that had developed

a mission and values framework, but operated relatively autonomously Like all charitable organizations, it had to compete for funding with other charities; it also had to secure competitive contracts with the local government authority in the area for the provision of services for the eld-erly, based on negotiated service-level agreements Thus, in many respects,

it was subject to market-style conditions on pricing and costing, and

on promoting itself as a worthwhile recipient of donations It also had

to operate in a highly competitive labour market for good quality care

workers, nursing staff and administrators to ensure that the service stand-ards agreed with the local authority were met However, it had to do

so without the capacity to offer competitive wages and salaries, even at median local market conditions, since it was poorly funded in compari-son to nursing homes run directly by the local authority

The senior management team, comprising a CEO, who was also

on the Board of the national parent organization, Age Concern England, the finance and operations managers, and the HR manager, were a well-qualified, enterprising and committed team, who, interestingly, were all women Given their problems, they wished to understand more about the identity-image problem to (a) devise a strategy and set of practices that would help them ensure that staff were aligned with the values of the parent group, and (b) help them compete in the local labour market for good quality staff so that they could achieve better levels of service and enhance their image with potential funding agencies

The first stage of the investigative work involved surveying all 120 full-time employees in groups during working hours, which returned a very high response rate We developed a questionnaire based partly on the corporate character dimensions and items suitably amended for the con-text Despite not being able to survey the ‘customers’, many of whom were too old to complete questionnaires, this approach was deemed highly appropriate because the values framework mapped directly onto certain

of the corporate character dimensions The other section of the ques-tionnaire examined the state of psychological contracts, leadership styles and communications, and individual identification, which we shall look

at in more detail in Chapter 4

The results showed that staff as a whole viewed the organization’s character as competent and agreeable, followed by enterprising, which mapped onto the parent values of being expert, caring and dynamic, and which could be treated as proxies for what clients sought It also showed, as might be expected, that the organization was neither ruth-less nor macho Nor was it seen as particularly informal However, the extent of perceived competence and agreeableness among staff was not particularly high, nor was it universal, since staff at the three dif-ferent ‘sites’ rated the character of the organization difdif-ferently Closer examination of the state of psychological contracts – what employees valued about work, what was perceived as ‘promised’ by the organiza-tion and what was actually delivered in practice – helped shed light on some of the likely causes, as did this next topic – leadership

Organizational action: governance,

leadership and engagement

Governance and leadership

To recap on our introduction to these issues in the opening chapter, we argued that organizational identity deals with the

‘Who are we?’ question and how such conceptions influence the corporation’s autobiography – its image – cannot be sustained without supportive organizational actions Two of the most important dimensions of organizational action are gover-nance and leadership Consider the case of Hurricane Katrina

in Box 3.4

Box 3.4 Lessons from failure

At the end of August 2005, Hurricane Katrina devastated the city of New Orleans and much of the Gulf Coast of the USA killing more than 1000 people and exposing to the rest of the world the inability of America to act when faced with a crisis that many claimed was foreseeable Pictures

of a bemused President Bush caught like a rabbit between the lights, and a disengaged local police force were brought into the living rooms

of billions of people through TV reports and other news media The dis-aster provoked a bitter debate about the (lack of) leadership and gov-ernance displayed by government officials before, during and after the hurricane, with an array of leaders at various levels of national and state governance coming in for severe criticism, including President Bush, Kathleen Babineaux Blanco, the Governor of New Orleans, Mayor Ray Nagin of New Orleans, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff and former Federal Emergency Management Agency director Michael Brown, who took part of the formal blame for lack of action

In a discussion at Wharton Business School, the following comments were made by prominent US academics in response to a question on whether this was a failure of leadership, or a natural consequence of the governance structure of the USA, which is split between federal, state and local officials and the formal protocols that have to be observed between them, e.g the state has to formally request Federal assistance

Morris Cohen:[Bush] was very reluctant to [send in troops] He would have been roundly criticized But in hindsight I think he should have The resources were sitting there within miles … He, or some-one, made the wrong decision And yet it’s an uncertain process If the President had been too aggressive, that would have engendered all kinds of criticism The next time that leader had to make a deci-sion, he would be more careful

Robert Mittelstaedt:Despite all the laws about what a president can or can’t do – or what approval you need from state governors – when the chips are down, leaders step up and take action and worry about the consequences later Bush should have declared martial law on Tuesday [30 August, one day after Katrina swept through the city], sent troops in there and started to marshal resources Bush’s later statement [in which he took responsibility for any shortcomings on the part of the Federal government] was a halfhearted answer The picture that comes to mind is Bush reading the little goat book [to schoolchildren when White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card informed the president of the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001] On Monday [August 29], Bush was in Phoenix talking to people

in an old folks home about his Medicare prescription plan In both instances, he ends up with a dumb look on his face I have never seen him as a leader He’s just a politician managed by his handlers And I’m a Republican Imagine if Bush had stepped up on Tuesday [30 August] and sent massive troops in there to evacuate people and offer medical aid Suppose afterward you had a congressional

investi-gation into whether he should be impeached for violating the posse comitatus law [an 1878 statute prohibiting Federal troops from being

used for law enforcement on US soil] Would he rather have his peo-ple in front of the commission saying, ‘Didn’t you understand how bad this crisis was?’ rather than sitting by while people drowned? I’d much rather be in that position than where he is now Leaders don’t worry about consequences Leaders are born, not made He has amazing power but inherently doesn’t have much leadership ability There is no leadership test to be elected

Lawrence Hrebiniak: Our government is decentralized, but only to a point We have both centralized and decentralized resources If that system is to work, both sides must be well prepared for action There

should be some integration between the local and the central level Bush should have had the right people in Homeland Security or FEMA contact these [local and state] people and say, ‘We’ve got a hurricane coming Who should respond first? What resources do you need?’ You talk to them and you find out where they are short of capabilities and you make up the slack

In direct response to the question, ‘Was any leadership exhibited in New Orleans?’, the following comments were made

Robert Mittelstaedt:Where did leadership show up? The Coast Guard They had deployed helicopters to the area, so they were able to move resources in right behind the storm That’s why choppers were all over the place rescuing people People at the middle level in the Coast Guard knew it was their responsibility and they just did it They understood their mission and they were there and they saved thousands of lives

K@W:Did the political culture of New Orleans contribute to the fail-ure of local leadership?

Robert Mittelstaedt:One of my relatives, a judge, once ran for mayor

of New Orleans and lost The only explanation I had for his loss was that

he was politically connected but not corrupt It’s a place with a long his-tory of political corruption and a lack of concern for the broader pub-lic good Even with somebody like Nagin, who has made some attempts

to try to improve that environment and go after the corruption, it’s still far down on the list of cities that have things under control The poverty level is horrible Crime is terrible The public school system is terrible

I don’t believe the response [to the aftermath of the storm] was related

to racism; you have seen white flight out of New Orleans for decades All of that contributes to an environment where there are no leaders who can effectively deal with the bulk of the problems, many of which

go back to Huey Long [the corrupt former governor of Louisiana] It’s been an anti-business state in many ways The economy is totally dependent on shipping and tourism If you don’t have leaders who want to solve these things, you get what you saw on TV

Source : Reprinted with permission from ‘A Month After Katrina’,

Knowledge @Wharton, available online at http://knowledge

wharton.upenn.edu

In the opening chapter, we discussed work that showed how governance and its problems are embedded in the multiple identities of organizations (Golden-Biddle and Rao, 1997) The directors in this study not only experience role conflict resulting from competing expectations from their legal and fiduciary obli-gations but ‘conflicts of commitment’ as they struggled to reconcile incompatible expectations ensuing from their desire

to uphold different identities Golden-Biddle and Rao have developed a very useful framework to analyse problems such as Hurricane Katrina, or, indeed, any situation that relates the actions or inactions of boards of directors and senior managers

to organizational identity and individual’s identification with their organizations (see Figure 3.6)

Organizational identity

Board and senior leaders’

actions

Expectations of board and senior leaders’ role

Individuals’

identities

Action

Figure 3.6

How identity shapes the role of directors and other senior leaders (adapted from Golden-Biddle and Rao, 1997)

Their framework sets out the four mutually interdependent elements – organizational and individual identities, and senior managers’ expectation of how they should act and how they do act which are linked by two processes of identification and action So, first of all, individuals will identify most strongly with the organization when they believe that preserving the organi-zation’s identity will satisfy their own needs, a process we shall

examine more closely in the next chapter Second, and most importantly for this section, the actions of leaders are based on expectations of how they should act and expectations concern-ing the result of their actions Thus, when senior leaders act

in ways consistent with their expectations and those of others, these actions maintain strong degrees of integration between individuals’ and organizational identities However, when they don’t act in accordance with expectations, or experience role conflict or conflicts of commitment to multiple identities, the process of identification is weakened, especially among employ-ees Applying this analysis to the Hurricane Katrina case, President Bush’s initial failure to act, along with those others indicted, certainly failed to meet the expectations for the American presidency to show decisive leadership and may have led to a decline in identification among voters and many employees of the New Orleans Police Force with the Bush pres-idency (which reached an all-time low during the early stages of the disaster), the state and city government Moreover, it may have confirmed the impression among some that Bush was a weak leader controlled by his aides and given to appointing ‘cronies’ like Michael Brown to important appointments for which he had no real background Another, perhaps kinder, interpretation

is that Bush and his aides were caught in a conflict of com-mitment, between upholding the Federal government’s organi-zational identity that embraced the spirit of September 11 and upholding the identity of individual states for independence, which are protected by statute from having uninvited federal troops on their soil for law enforcement

This type of analysis is consistent with the earlier comments

on leadership styles in Chapter 1, in which we highlighted the

failures of senior leaders to ‘walk the talk’ by acting out the mis-sion and values statements For example, both views expressed

in the Hurricane Katrina case are consistent with the need to hold an individual to account rather than the more diffuse and fractured structure of governance Moreover, as we noted, there are few more powerful explanations for lack of identification by employees, often manifested in scepticism and cynicism, than the failure of senior leaders to act in ways consistent with

organ-izational identity (Pate et al., 2000) More positively, we also noted

that when leaders act to preserve an organizational identity that

employees perceive to be in their best interests, high levels of individual identification ensue For example, following President Bush’s decisive actions after September 11, his personal ratings went up markedly And during the next disaster to hit the US coast, Hurricane Rita, the Bush administration acted well before the event, one might speculate as much to restore identity of the Bush presidency for decisive leadership and Bush’s personal ratings, as for protecting the citizens of Galveston from the storm

This process was also brought home to us most recently during a recent piece of research at Agilent Technologies, dis-cussed earlier, when senior managers did everything they could

to preserve the organization’s identity as an employer of choice, even when they were ordered by headquarters to take their fair share of employee layoffs Consistently throughout the period

of layoffs and beyond, individual identification, as measured by attitude surveys, remained high However, when senior man-agers, faced by ever-mounting pressure to change the contracts

of those remaining, breached the old ‘deal’ on employment, identification levels plummeted Jeff Pfeffer (1998), in his book

The Human Equation, cites this process as one of the worst sins

of US organizations, especially those that follow a ‘hire and fire’ policy

Conclusions

In this chapter, we have drilled down a little further into the core of our model and argument, which focuses on the relation-ships between image, organizational identity and organizational actions, including governance and leadership We have also touched on how these interrelationships are justified by the desire

of organizations to secure greater identification with employees, having them think and behave as individuals in ways that sup-port these organizational-level conceptions and actions

We examined a number of practical frameworks, including Balmer and Stuart’s AC3ID identity alignment However, the two most useful from our perspective are Gary Davies’ Corporate Character approach and the insights provided by Golden-Biddle

and Rao’s analysis of how identity shapes the role of directors and senior leaders The former is best applied to assess gaps between employees’ understanding of an organization’s identity and how outsiders view its image, and can be adapted to specific organ-izational contexts without radical alteration The second shows how the actions of collective leadership, probably the most impor-tant influence on external and internal perceptions of the organ-ization, are linked We applied this analysis to a major case of leadership failure in the context of a crises of national identity and follow up the implications of this for individuals in the next chapter

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