Cranfield School of Management
Interview: Professor David Buchanan
Organisational Behaviour
SM
David Buchanan, you’ve written a book on organisational
behaviour with a colleague (Andrej Huczynski). I’d like to explore
a bit about that and particularly pick up some issues that come
out of the book.
I guess the first one I would like to ask is why should a manager
faced with a 1001 challenges start to delve into this topic,
organisational behaviour.
DB
Well, I think there are two main reasons; one is that a text like
this provides an overview of the field, an overview of the issues,
the topics, current thinking as well as some of the historical
thinking. Just because it is historical doesn’t mean that it doesn’t
apply today.
We do try to provide and overview of current thinking, both
theoretical and practical, across the field. So someone who is
looking for an update on, whatever it might be; team work,
leadership, management change, would find a fairly well
written; engaging, entertaining, summary/overview, easy to read,
quite accessible, in the book. I think it is also useful to suggest
that a textbook like this doesn’t provide solutions; you wouldn’t
turn to any of the text books in that genre looking for an answer
to a particular management problem. What you may find are
ways of looking at, ways of thinking about, ways of
conceptualising frameworks that might lead you to a more
effective solution. So I think that the book possibly provides that
sort of function as well.
Having said that, I would have to say that the book isn’t written
explicitly for a practising management audience, it’s written for
managers studying for a Masters degree, such as an MBA, and
it’s written for undergraduates studying for Business Studies and
Management Studies degrees.
CHANGE
SM
So if we pick one of the areas which is a hot topic for many
managers and that is change. Your book picks out the spread of
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change, the frequency of change, and certainly that would be the
experience of many managers. Reading the chapter on change,
you have a particular take on change and how you manage it.
Would you like to explain what that is?
DB
We do. I think if one turns away from a textbook like this to the
practical management literature on change, what you find is what
one commentator called “in-step” guides. You find Kotter’s 8
Step recipe for Managing Change, you find Tony Eccles’ 9 Step
Recipe for Managing Change, you find David Guest’s 18 Step
Recipe for Managing Change which makes the process appear to
be logical, neat, tidy, step-wise, and also manageable. The
change process of course isn’t like that and most managers find it
difficult to apply those neat, tidy recipes, mainly because they
don’t work. They need to be translated into a specific
organisational context. So you need to take the recipe, add
creativity, add informed managerial judgement, then those kind of
recipes start to work. The problem is they are very often not
presented in that way; they’re presented as a check list and you
follow that through. And that is why they don’t work.
The book also picks up a couple of other issues. One is what’s
known as the process perspective on change, which very simply
argues that the change process is messy, iterative, untidy, and
usually highly politicised. Most of the recipe guides to change
don’t pay any attention to the organisation politics of the change
process. In this book- as I would normally argue -that if, as a
change agent, as a manager trying to drive change, you’re not
prepared to engage the politics of your organisation you will fail,
sooner or later, and probably sooner. The value of the process
perspective on change is that it confronts the messy nature of the
process and also the politicised nature of the process. It tends
not to be as helpful to managers, however, in terms of offering
concrete, practical, checklist style advice but it is a way of looking
at the process. In other words if you approach change hoping it
will be neat, tidy and step-wise, you’ll be disappointed: if
you approach change knowing that it’s going to be messy and
untidy you won’t be taken by surprise, and I think that that’s
valuable information to have in the first instance.
The other thing I think is worth mentioning is that we have a
perception in the early 21st Century, which was probably a
perception in the second-half of the 20th Century, is that change
now is happening faster, and is more unpredictable, and more
uncontrollable than at any previous time in our history. And I’ve
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seen what I’ve just said quoted in a book written in 1922. So in
the 1920’s managers were saying exactly the same thing about:
the pace of change, the rapidity, the unpredictability, the
uncontrollability. One has to wonder if that experience of rapid
non-stop change-upon-change is a common one and not unique
to our time. So what one starts to see in some of the
management commentary is, on the one hand, an argument that
change is happening too fast, we need to rush to keep up,
change-upon-change, adaptive reorganisation, constant
organisational redesign, repeat reorganisational redesign; and
other commentators saying that’s actually damaging, it’s causing
burn-out, it’s causing initiative fatigue, and that’s reducing
individual, team and organisational performance; stop it. One
famous commentator argues for “painless change” in which we
see a combination of what he calls “tinkering and nudging”; small
scale changes interspersed with carefully timed, more carefully
phased, major changes so that we don’t see major changes
constantly hitting people before they’ve had a chance to embed
the last set of changes that they were hit with. That’s potentially
damaging for organisational performance. So you’ve got a
theoretical perspective on change called “process, contextual
perspective” which has, I think, quite fundamental practical
implications for the way in which we view change and the change
process and the way in which we view the timing, the phasing,
the planning, of the change process.
SUPERHERO LEADERS
SM
Almost certainly, in all the things that I’ve read, change needs a
strong leader. I know you’ve got some views in your book about
the superhero leader, and how that actually works in practice.
DB
The correct practical and academic answer to those sorts of
questions is that “It depends”; however, in the latter half of the
20th Century one sees the development of a new perspective on
leadership, variously known as: new leadership, super leaders,
transformational leadership. Even in 2007 you can attend a
programme on transformational leadership; what they are, how to
become one. What one starts to see around the turn of the
century, however, following a number of well known multinational
corporate scandals, is a series of commentaries appearing in
some of the practical management literature pointing out that in
some settings, those transformational leaders are dangerous.
One commentator describes them as a “dangerous curse”. Why?
- transformational leaders are hired specifically, going back to
our previous topic, to drive change; to drive radical change, so
they potentially destabilise the organisation and then destabilise
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it again with further radical change and you are back to what I
mentioned earlier; burn out and initiative fatigue.
Now, it may be that in some settings, in order to save the
organisation, that kind of repeated radical change is required, it’s
fine. If, however, that style of leadership is employed simply
because it’s fashionable, then it’s not difficult to see that it may
cause problems for other people in the organisation faced with
that style repeatedly. So there isn’t an argument, as always, that
says that transformational leadership is always dangerous.
There is an argument that says, as with any approach,
perspective or tool, use that with caution, don’t use the same tool,
the same approach, the same style to deal with every problem
that you might face. So it is useful to locate transformational
leadership as a fashion in that broader argument about the way
in which one might approach organisational problems in the first
place.
MIDDLE MANAGERS
SM
You seem to be championing the role of the middle manager in
the whole leadership process.
DB
A lot of the research, and our own research; I’ll come back to the
phrase “middle manager” in a second, suggests that when you
look at the implementation, not just at the initiation of a change
programme but at implementation, one very often finds that
though there may be a change leader, a project champion of
some kind, change is usually a collective exercise, usually a
collective endeavour, if you don’t have a number of people
contributing to that agenda, to that effort, change either doesn’t
happen or happens slowly. What one sees in some of the
research is the concept of leadership constellations, leadership
teams. These aren’t necessarily fixed teams either, they can be
quite fluid. So there might be half a dozen people, or ten or
fifteen; the size of that team may come and go, might enlarge or
contract depending on the needs of the change process at any
one time. So that’s quite a different concept from a single,
senior, heroic, transformational leader charging off driving a
change process. It tends to be a collective effort, and it tends to
be a fluid collective effort as well.
Yes, there is quite a bit of commentary on middle managers as
change drivers, and some commentators are talking about
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management by stealth; below the radar, which isn’t heroic, it
isn’t visible, it’s relatively slow. But we also know that small scale
changes accumulate. Strategic change doesn’t have to be big
bang; strategic change can actually be the accumulation of a lot
of smaller scale changes, which don’t necessarily have to happen
slowly. You can still drive small scale changes quite rapidly, and
these can accumulate over a period of months or a year, to quite
major strategic change. What our own research shows in
healthcare is that change responsibilities go even well beyond
middle managers, and what we start to see is the concept of
distributed change leadership, distributed change agency,
involving staff right across the organisation; a diagonal slice top
to bottom.
In one particularly successful change involving service redesign
in prostate cancer services, part of our study was to find out
how did you manage these changes so successfully? Who was
on the project team? Who was the project leader? All of those
questions got blank looks; there was no project team, there was
no project leader. When we then asked who was involved, we
ended up with a list of about 200 different people, and also in
healthcare a number of different organisations as well. So that
was quite a widespread, distributed, collective effort in terms of
managing those successful changes; with management support
but not with traditional management leadership and project
leadership.
So I’ve got a view of the change process where in some
organisations, in some settings, the transformational leader may
be a valuable mechanism for delivering the kind of changes you
want: but at the other end of the spectrum a model of the change
process that is dispersed, that is distributed, that involves
significant numbers of people from across the organisation. And
that has implications for skills development, for management
development: if you’re going to involve people in change, it would
be useful if they knew something more about the process they
were being engaged in, and the kind of tools they might find
useful. As (currently) a lot of that management development
effort is focused on middle and senior managers, and not
necessarily on those who might take benefit from it.
POLITICS and POWER
SM
Several times we’ve touched on, and I’d like to explore more, the
issue of politics and power. You’ve got a decent section on that
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and clearly that is important, and
you’ve raised it in this context a number of times.
DB
Organisations are political systems, period. If you can’t deal with
the politics of the organisation, then you are going to find the
management role a very uncomfortable one. That said, a lot of
managers don’t like the politics and wish that it could be
managed away. I think that’s unrealistic, political behaviour is a
naturally occurring phenomenon, we are ambitious individuals
and in most organisations you have what I would call a
“competition of ideas”; especially when we are talking about
change, business development, service improvement. And in
that competition of ideas, all ideas in that organisational setting
have one feature in common, which is that “my ideas are better
than your ideas”. Well two features are common: “my ideas are
better than your ideas”, and “I want to make damn sure that we
go with my plans, initiatives, and projects, and not yours because
mine are better”.
As soon as you bring creative, ambitious individuals into an
organisation you trigger that competition of ideas. And, for sure,
we can sit around the table and discuss, and we might eventually
agree in the group that Steve’s ideas are better than Dave’s
ideas. I can do one of two things at that point: one is I can back
off, accept that my business case wasn’t as strong as yours and
support you to the hilt; the second thing I can do is back off,
admit that my business case wasn’t as strong as yours, tell you
that I will back you to the hilt until I get out of the door and then
find some other way to shut you down, steal your budget, get a
budget from somewhere else, recruit members of your team
somewhere else in the organisation. That is not a daily
occurrence, but that happens, and from a management point of
view one needs to accept that. That makes it sound as if politics
is negative and bad. The problem, of course, is that some of the
time Steve, your ideas are lousy ones, and somebody really does
have to shut it down. And if we can’t shut it down by formal
means it could damage the organisation, and the team, and the
group; so let’s try and find some covert means of shutting it
down.
I think politics is also valuable because you need the debate, you
need the challenge, you need that stimulus. If you don’t have the
debate, lousy ideas get implemented. If you don’t have the
debate, even the covert political debate, then the person putting
forward the change proposal isn’t forced to: run some figures,
gather better evidence, represent the business case, speak to
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people, marshal support, visit reference sites, they’re not forced
to lift their game. It’s called the social facilitation argument. You
need resistance to change, you need that challenge. And I think,
to be fair, people are recruited into organisations because they’re
creative, because they’re energetic, because they’re enthusiastic,
because they want to run with their ideas and they want to run
with their ideas in competition with other people’s ideas. The
politics in most organisations is part of the dynamic for change,
it’s not negative at all, it’s where the energy comes from.
That’s not to say that politics can’t be damaging, of course it can,
but as long as the politics is… can I come back to the
“competition of ideas”… as long as the politics is about my ideas
and your ideas; and I don’t like your ideas; but you don’t like my
ideas – let’s discuss that and argue about it, that’s fine and I think
that’s usually productive. So long as it’s about the competition of
ideas.
When the politics is about: “I don’t like you Steve! I’m going to do
what I can to shut you down!” It’s personal. Then it becomes
extremely damaging, time-wasting and expensive. But a lot of the
time the politics is about the challenge, it’s about the ideas, and
that’s healthy, for heaven’s sake. Reasonable people, as
somebody once said, are bound to disagree. In fact there is a
book by Jeffrey Pfeffer recently, it’s on evidence based
management, there’s a nice quote near the beginning where he
says “When two people always agree, one of them is
unnecessary.”
So politics can be damaging of course, but most of the literature
reviews “all politics as always damaging”; that’s unrealistic, that’s
not what happens in practice.
ORGANISATIONAL BEHAVIOUR - FUTURE RESEARCH
SM
If I look at the future, and your direction in the research in this big
area of organisational behaviour, what’s particularly interesting
you at the moment?
DB
Two or three things. One is organisation politics, it’s an underresearched area, for obvious reasons; think of the questions you
need to ask and the answers you are not going to get. So there
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is an awful lot about organisation politics that we don’t know.
And most of the work in that area is American, it’s handled in a
very traditional, positivistic, scientific way which doesn’t really get
below the surface about the way people feel about politics, the
way it affects them, the way they use it. A huge, huge area there
which is waiting for further investigation: the problem of course is
research access; how to get managers to talk about this. Now
I’ve been successful in doing that in the past, it is time
consuming, and it’s a controversial topic. So that would be item
number one.
I’m currently engaged in a joint initiative with the Open University,
with a study of corporate governance arrangements in
healthcare, and the possible links between governance
arrangements and performance. That’s again a fashionable
topic, governance is a key issue in healthcare at the moment,
always has been, but it’s particularly key and topical now. That
project is in an early stage so I can’t really talk about the findings.
But that should produce some interesting findings over the next
year or two, which I hope will also translate into management
development programmes as well as academic publications; so
that would be a second area. Because it is also to do with
change, if there is an early finding from the study it is that
governance arrangements are not static, they are always
becoming something else in the light of the pressures and the
issues that boards of directors are experiencing at any one point
in time. So these are fluid structures, fluid arrangements. Which
immediately throws up the problem of how one might attempt to
correlate governance arrangements with performance in any
simple or straightforward way. I don’t think you can do that.
That brings me back to the third area. And it links back to our
earlier discussion of the wheel that you mentioned, which is a
diagnostic tool for understanding and managing the sustainability
of change. What we see at the moment, and have done for the
past 4 or 5 years mostly of this century, is a movement called
“Evidence Based Management” based on the apparent success
of a movement called “Evidence Based Medicine”. The problem
with the Evidence Based Management model is that it assumes
that we can gather and use evidence relating to the way that we
run organisations, in the same way that we can gather and use
evidence relating to medical treatments. I think that is false. I
don’t think that while we can study the impact of sodium chloride
on blood pressure, I don’t think you can study the impact of Total
Quality Management on organisational performance in the same
way. Biomedical science uses a traditional variance based
approach in which we try and correlate independent and
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Professor David Buchanan
dependent variables: the kinds of models that we need to use in
management are different.
The kinds of models that the Evidence Based Management
people are using rely on the biomedical, positivist framework. I
think we should be using the kinds of models based on, as I
mentioned earlier, process theory: it’s about the flow of events,
the sequence of events, the combination of factors that interact
with each other over time. You can’t separate these out into
independent and dependent variables. We need other models of
causality. I’ll mention two, there are others, one is a model of
causality based on what is called Cumulative Effects, in other
words “a build-up of pressure towards”. And the obvious, silly
example is a child on one end of the see-saw. You put a brick on
the other end, and nothing happens. Put another brick on, still
nothing happens. Eventually you put a brick on and the child will
rise. Which brick? Well that’s a silly question. You know that it’s
the combination; it’s a cumulative effects argument. You see
this publicly with government Ministers. David Blunkett was
a case in point; where one incident tarnished his reputation, but
he was secure in his job. A second incident tarnished his
reputation, but he was secure in his job. Once he got to three or
four of those incidents, “We’ve had enough, David!”- gone. If you
look back at those episodes it’s quite clear that there wasn’t a
single incident in that person’s career that eventually drove them
from office, that’s another model, but it was an accumulation of
events. So one sees that happening. So we need to be looking
not at independent and dependent variables, but at the flow of
events, the sequence of events over time, the cumulative effects,
and also at what is called “Conjuctural Causality”. You would
see an example of that on the sustainability wheel, which is
intimidating as there are a dozen different factors on there. That
is not a cumulative effects argument, that’s saying: “What
combination of issues over time leads to these outcomes?” And
if you know what that combination is, what that conjuncture of
events at different levels of analysis looks like, that enables you
to stand back and replicate that somewhere else. It might not
necessarily be that you have to copy precisely the same
configuration, but you might need an equivalent configuration, a
similar configuration. I do this sometimes in research methods
classes, by asking the group to think of the best party they ever
went to. You end up with a conjuctural explanation, which is a
combination of events on that evening; everything just came
together perfectly. That’s unique, it’s idiosyncratic, but if you
abstract from that you can work out fairly quickly how you could
repeat the best party somewhere else on the planet, but with
most, if not all of the same ingredients of some kind there. So,
I’m interested in the way in which organisational behaviour will
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evolve away from very traditional, dated, inappropriate, models of
biomedical science for evidence based management; towards
less reductionist, more process based models of explanation.
Which I think, at the end of the day, are more useful from a
practical management point of view than simplistic models that
don’t work in practice.
SM
OK, thank you.
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