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A Concept for Today: The Management of Oneself in Role
... The main difference between Chaleff's approach and this chapter is that he uses dancers to illustrate his insights, whereas this chapter aims to encourage people to experience the roles for themselves and generate their own personal insights, without having to be dancers. Figure 1: The relational field within partner dancing (Matzdorf & Sen 2005:2) Follower and leader have to manage themselves in their respective roles (Lawrence 1979), but also manage their relationship to each other (trust, acceptance, allowing mistakes), as well as a set of interrelated spaces: 'private space'; 'communal space'; the space around them; and other dancers' space. ...
This chapter is based on a series of experiential workshops and exercises to help leaders and followers to be more mindful about their leading and following styles, and the impact that has on their followers or leaders. This approach has emanated from the authors’ experience as academics, practitioners, and dancers. It focuses on management learning in a holistic way, and as such differs from management training that tends to focus on skills in a rationalist, often utilitarian way, providing “toolkits” to achieve simple cause-and-effect chains. This workshop has the potential to be enlightening and empowering, both for leaders and followers. It helps people to understand better the “lead” and “follow” roles and their mutual dependence, as well as to understand the implications of different leadership styles. The workshops are based on the view that leader-follower-ship is seen as relational, mutually constructed, and mutually enabling, rather than hierarchical and based on power and authority.
... Follower and leader have to manage themselves in their respective roles (Lawrence 1979), but also manage their relationship to each other (trust, acceptance, allowing mistakes), their own "private space", their "communal space", as well as the space around them and the other dancers on the floor. This is a complex set of tasks -the sheer complexity makes it already a suitable comparison to people's work lives in organisations. ...
In this paper, we explore how leadership and followership are relational, mutually constructed
and mutually enabled. Using dancesport as metaphor and medium, we focus on the
embodied, corporeal aspects and dynamics of leading and following, relating them to
lead/follow roles and tasks of people in organizations. In a mainly autoethnographic
exploration of the lived experiences of people in leader-follower-relationships, we use the
concept of embodied cognition as a basis and argue that dance can provide a vehicle for
immediate, implicit “insights” and even “aha effects” through sensory, bodily experiences.
... Auch bei den Rollen stößt man auf unbewußte Aspekte: Sei es die von Sandler (1976) beschriebene Neigung zu "intrapsychischen Rollenbeziehungen", die von Parin (1978) analysierte unbewußte "Identifizierung mit der Rolle", die von Lawrence (1979) beschriebenen unbewußten Abhängigkeiten, die es Menschen in Organisationen erschweren, die Autorität ihrer Rolle zu entwickeln und ihre Rolle selbst zu managen, oder schließlich die von Hirschhorn (1985) und Triest (1999) analysierten "psychodynamischen Aspekte der Rollenübernahme". Beumer und Sievers beschreiben einen Ansatz, mittels organisatorischer Rollenanalyse "mit dem Ungewußten und dem Ungedachten in der Organisation zu arbeiten" (2001, S. 109), um darüber "unbewußte Dynamiken im Verhältnis der Person zur Organisation im Kontext der beruflichen Rolle" (ebenda, S. 113) offenzulegen. ...
Organisationen sind nicht nur Arenen instrumentellen Handelns und mikropolitischer Auseinandersetzungen, sondern auch Orte gelingender Kooperation und gegenseitiger Anerkennung. Dies setzt jedoch voraus, daß die Organisationsmitglieder in der Lage sind, emotional auszuhalten, aus der Mehrzahl der in der Organisation bestehenden Beziehungen ausgeschlossen zu sein. Idealerweise können sie es sogar schätzen, wenn die anderen entlang der zu erledigenden Aufgaben eigenständige formelle und informelle Beziehungen zueinander pflegen. Dafür steht das Konzept der triangulären Kultur.
... From Ropo and Sauer's paper (2008), one gets the impression that a 'waltz leader' would prefer a compliant 'sheep' or 'yes-person' -but in contemporary competitive dancing this would not be an adequate basis for top performances! Follower and leader have to manage themselves in their respective roles (Lawrence 1979), but also manage their relationship to each other (trust, acceptance, allowing mistakes), their own 'private space', their 'communal space', as well as the space around them and the 'moving obstacles' in it -the other dancers on the floor, competing and collaborating for space to 'power through'. ...
Management can learn much from modern competitive ballroom dancing. Dance embodies many aspects of organisational life in a microcosm – teamwork , power relationships, job roles, competition, politics, etc. In the authors' experience with dance and leadership workshops, it offers dancers and non-dancers alike a medium to explore, experiment and challenge within a facilitated ‘safe’ and playful environment. We argue that, based on the concept of embodied cognition, dance can provide a vehicle for immediate, implicit ‘insights’ and ‘aha effects’ through sensory, bodily experiences.
... A dynamic concept of role, appropriate to conditions of organizational change, demands a mature negative capability because managing in such conditions relies heavily on the capacity to live with uncertainty and yet still to act (see Simpson and French, 1998). Such an ability has been called``managing oneself in role'', which``starts from the individual in his role in his enterprise questioning his responsibility and authority as a member of that enterprise'' (Lawrence, 1979, p. 244)[1]. The notion of``role'' originated in the theatre and was only translated to the broader organizational context in the seventeenth century. ...
Explores how psychoanalytic thinking can contribute to the management of the conflicting emotions stimulated by change. Suggests that successful change management depends on a combination of “positive” and “negative” capabilities. The positive capabilities involve the management of the substantive content of any change initiative, the change process itself, and the roles and procedures required by both of these. However, even when these three “technical” aspects are well managed, change always arouses anxiety and uncertainty. As a result, there is a tendency to “disperse” energy; that is, to be deflected from the task into a range of avoidance tactics. Through a particular understanding of such “dispersal” and its opposite, the “capacity to contain”, psychoanalysis can suggest how this counterproductive tendency may be more effectively managed. The British psychoanalyst Wilfred Bion called this capacity to contain “negative capability”.
... Even prior or without need to ask permission (e.g., sell ideas) to top management (e.g., Dutton & Ashford, 1993), the theoretically interesting issue is this area of organizational activity from the practitioner's vantage point, not from the manager's perch. Rather than promote compliance with subservient compunction for having raised issues from the non-managerial perspective, a theory of bottom-up instigated organization change emphasizes the dialogical action (Freire, 2005) and hermeneutic significance of conversational responsibility (Ford, 1999), organizational praxis (Jun, 2006), and fully engaging in work (e.g., Lawrence, 1979). ...
A social constructionist practitioner approach for framing organizational change from a non-executive, non-managerial employee perspective is proposed that describes organizational change as conversational shifts. Social constructionist approaches to organizational life offer employees possible conceptual spaces within which to envision and proactively participate in organizational change in ways that structuralist-functionalist approaches do not. Sensemaking about resistance to change and possibilities for change using issue sellingand other frameworks from the change literature provide ideas for shifting conversations and knowledgemanagement in organizations. This paper provides a starting point for theoreticians and practitioners to articulate and explore potentials of bottom-up instigated organizational change.
Numerous people including scholars, professional practitioners, and policymakers turn to the Bhagavad Gita, a timeless reservoir of abundant plurality and diversity of prescriptions. Shlokas (verses) from the Bhagavad Gita cited in support of prescriptive insights, judgement calls and tough decisions in the course of encountering seven eternal dualties of human living are discussed in this Chapter. The Bhagavad Gita’s pull is strongest when existential ambiguity is rooted in phenomenal complexity, surrounded by normative uncertainty and hermeneutic vulnerability. This is precisely the canvas of wicked problems in strategy where boundary confusions arising from incompleteness of knowing and undecideability of actions lie at the heart of the problem. The latent dynamic in the Bhagavad Gita concerns tensions between overt forces of salvation theology and covert forces of revelation politics when beliefs, values, norms, and attitudes are reinforcable by either of these. The same dynamic is present in management of organizations when setting limits, partitions, demarcations for porosity of boundaries that enable and regulate flows. The meta-learning from the Bhagavad Gita is that normative, existential, phenomenal and hermeneutic endeavours are simultaneously required and cannot be rank-ordered. This simultaneity requires attention to processes that enable or disable, and reflect or distort actionable revelations. As the celestial song of non-attachment, the Bhagavad Gita invites us to go beyond religion to touch spirituality and continue that journey beyond spirituality to traverse thresholds into unbounded realities. Functions of boundaries for management of organizations are thereby clarifiable so that structures provide reliability, systems produce certainty, and processes ensure aesthetics and harmony.
Clinicians, managers and researchers - as well as politicians and religious leaders - are worrying about a lack of compassion and humanity in the care of vulnerable people in society. In this book The author explores the dynamics of care. He argues that we know how to do it, but somehow we seem to keep getting it wrong. Poor care in hospitals and care homes is well documented, and yet it continues. Care for people in their own homes is seen as an ideal, but the reality can be cruel and isolating. The author describes research over forty years in thinking why institutional and community care are both subject to processes of denial and fear of dependency. His examples include children in hospital, people with disabilities living in the community, and the care of older people and those with dementia.
Organisation als arbeitsteilige Kooperation zu spezifischen Zwecken ist eine gesellschaftspolitische Innovation, die mit der Entwicklung der Industriegesellschaft weit über Wirtschaft und Politik hinaus zu einem durchgängigen Handlungsprinzip geworden ist.57 Eine der grundlegenden Aufgaben, die sich für die Führung jeder einzelnen Organisation stellt, besteht darin, die Handlungsweisen der Organisationsmitglieder möglichst nah an den Organisationszielen zu orientieren und zu halten. Mit der Heraufkunft der Industriegesellschaft und der organisatorischen Gestaltung von Industrieunternehmen nach dem Vorbild von Militär und bürokratischer Herrschaft schien diese Aufgabe zunächst — wie bei Max (1956) beschrieben — durch den Einsatz von eindeutigen Befehlsketten und in hierarchischen Organisationsstrukturen gelöst. Die strikte Unterordnung der einzelnen Organisationsmitglieder hatte indessen auch eine Reihe nichtintendierter Folgen zur Kehrseite, deren Bearbeitung auf Seiten des Organisationsmanagements eigene Aufmerksamkeit verlangte: geringes Engagement der Beschäftigten (bzw. ihre Demotivierung), Qualitätsprobleme von Produkten und Dienstleistungen, die organisatorische Unfähigkeit, auf unvorhergesehene Situationen angemessen zu reagieren.
The particular version of group relations training that has been developed in the Tavistock Institute and is associated with the Leicester Conferences on Authority and Organization (or some version of that title) has informed the parallel practice, in action research and consultancy, of the scientific staff who have been responsible for sponsoring them. Apart from the development of a heuristic framework for understanding groups and institutions, there has been the identifying of such issues as the politics of relatedness (Lawrence, 1979a; Miller, 1979a).
This paper describes an action research project undertaken over the period of one year with the senior management group of a Civil Service organization. Like much of the UK Public Sector in recent years, this organization has experienced a period of radical change, including restructuring, delayering, and projected staff cuts of approximately 20%. The challenge has been to manage the transition from a traditional bureaucracy to a new organizational form (Cravens, Piercy and Shipp, 1996).
