Organisational Change week 3
Freelance workers and contract uncertainty: the effects of
contractual changes in the television industry. Dex, Willis, Paterson
and Sheppard
Broadcasting legislation, increased competition and technological advances have
change the working practises and contracts of the UK’s 28,000 production workforce.
Prior to the 80’s, the majority of tv workers were in salaried long-term jobs employed
by broadcasters. Since the 90’s, the majority of the workers have been on fixed-term
contracts of varying length but as little as one month for some individuals.
The change to freelance or self-employment has been a direct result of redundancy
from a salaried position as re-organisation took place.
Sparks (1994) pointed out that the labour intensive nature of programme making
means that it is very difficult to cut the cost of production without reducing labour
costs. Some workers would have found themselves as powerful players who can bid up
the price- star writers, performers and directors.
The pressures on budgets have grown increasingly through the tendering for licenses
and franchises and the advent of Channel 5 as a low budget channel.
Freelance workers face uncertainty of not knowing whether they will get the net
contract. They will also have to negotiate rates for the job which in earlier times would
have been fixed salaries with annual increments.
When tv workers were asked to indicate the extent to which they saw uncertainty, and
on average the majority of men said they intensely disliked uncertainty (39.1%) and
the majority of women intensely disliking uncertainty also ( 39.7%)
However, when the question: ‘To what extent individuals thought that stress was a spur
to creativity”, approx 20% of both men and women thought that stress was always or
sometimes a spur to creative work; whilst two thirds of men and women thought that
stress could sometimes or occasionally be a spur to creativity. 13-14% said that stress
never spurred creative work.
Individual’s feelings about uncertainty are related to his or her relative stable
personality characteristics.
Uncertainty was more of a problem for older workers. Workers aged in their 40’s, were
found to dislike uncertainty, whereas people in the 30’s+50’s were indistinguishable
from workers in their 20’s. This might be because workers in their 50’s tend to be less
bothered about uncertainty as they were reaching the end of their careers. Whereas
those with longer to go were more bothered. Younger workers were said to get panicky
when they were looking for a new job.
In comparing human capital and labour market conditions, people earning a higher
income, the less the level of dislike of uncertainty, as it seems that the higher income
shields from the negative aspects of uncertainty. However this may be built up from
additional jobs or longer hours, not necessarily higher earnings per hour.
Being married, according to the results of the study, showed that there was less dislike
for uncertainty then amongst young workers. This may be because most couples in the
90’s were dual earners.
Working as a freelancer and owning/running a small company were negatively
correlated with liking uncertainty. An independent company owner said “ I love making
documentaries. I just hate the business of selling and the insecurity of running a small
business.” This group however, may differ from the self-employed in general, many of
whom value the autonomy and find it outweighs any additional risk that is incurred
(Dex and McCulloch, 1997).
High levels of stress arose with people in their forties and those living in London. A
39yr old freelancer described his problems as “extremely demoralised, considering
desert island life. Currently lost at sea. Massive compromise, stressful, unsatisfying and
fighting chronic depression.”
However higher monthly income levels reduces stress. Stress also appeared to be lower
for owners of independent companies, although not significantly.
Television workers faced risk and uncertainty in a number of ways. Individuals have
their own specific related risks to the related specific jobs they had with its extent of
under or over supply, their location and level of integration in the appropriate
networks and their own attitude towards risk.
People earning income from outside television grew as you go through the age groups:
29% in their 20’s compared to 51-52% in their 40’s and 50’s. Of those who had
alternative income sources, women (48%) were less likely than men (63%) to have a
smaller amount of additional income and more likely (33%0 than men (28%) to have
over 50% from non-TV sources. Women are more likely to gain from print journalism
whereas men are more likely to gain from consultancy and radio sources.
Women’s levels of stress across the states was higher than men, perhaps because men
find it easier to reduce risk by diversifying their interests.
Informality has been found tor educe uncertainty because the closure associated with
networks also reduced competition (Fevre, 1989).
Spending time maintaining work contacts declined as age grew: 73% in their 20’s, 635
in their 30’s, 55% in their 40’s and 47% in their 50’s. it can be said that network
building is more of a feature of younger and new entrants to the labour market who do
not have established networks to draw upon. However, the frequency of this activity is
still high with people in their 50’s, possibly because the need to engage in this activity is
a relatively new feature of television labour markets; on which ha been promoted by
the changing structure of the industry.
Men were more likely to work with people they had before (55%) compared to women
(42%). Little variation throughout the age bands. 80% of men and 59% of women, had
spent time seeking commissions for long-running series as a way of responding to
uncertainty.
Considerations of the effects of uncertainty in organisations have to led to theorists to
note that collecting information reduces uncertainty, especially collecting the latest
information (Stinchcombe, 1990). Therefore it gives employees the concern of having
to be ‘where the news breaks, wherever the news breaks’.
40% of men and 30% of women said that in response to uncertainty, they had stayed in
the same job at the cost of possible career advancements.
All in a Day’s Work
At the end of the day 36% of us are too tired but to slump on the sofa. This is as a result
of the work intensification of the 1990’s- workers meant to put in longer hours and
work faster.
‘More for less’ is an old tool used by employers to reduce labour costs and improve
competitive advantage.
Britain used to be famous for ‘tea-breakism’ according to the French, but those days are
long gone, with most people now having their coffee or tea by their computer screens.
From the statement ‘my job requires that I work very hard’, in 1992 , 32% of workers
said this was true; n 1997, it had jumped to 40%. (Francis Green).
Saltfillas:
Predominantly female workforce, and had few spare resources to protect itself against
the pace of globalisation- deregulation, increasing competition and the rapid expansion
of European trade.
Management treats employees fairly if they have done a fair day’s work.
Factory workers job is to keep the lines moving, sorting out any glitches, ensuring
supplies are ready and removing the finishes product. Repetitive hard work.
Tracey, production and quality manager, been with the company for 25 years. She said
there used to be many ‘tea-breaks’ and in the 80’s the superiors would bribe (pay rise)
them not to do it.
People always have something to do, during the last 6 six years this has been a big
change. Therefore example of people working harder than before.
If someone wants a toilet break, someone else has to cover for them. The machines
never stop, whilst cleaning and maintenance are doing after hours.
Workers that have been there for a long time, who are change averse, are taken to one
side and spoken to, and told that “if you don’t like it, we will lose contact.”
Computers assist the speed-up of the flow of work to ensure the line and packers are
constantly being juggled to meet orders by the deadline.
The company has diversified into different products, which increases the complexity of
aligning into a continuous stream of work the machines, packers, supplies, orders and
deadlines.
Labour is intensely managed, and therefore it is a pre-requisite that employees are
multi-skilled. The company also conducts on-the-job training since 1980 due the
flexibility advantages.
They communicate clearly with their employees: “ we can give you a pay rise, but that
may mean cleaning sometimes”. When someone is sacked, they are not replaced, their
simply is shared out between people. Management tells its workers that the survival of
the company depends on them, and that wins their co-operation. Thus the attitude is
that “we are all in this together”.
They use Just-In-Time for deliveries ensuring that no stocks are sitting around in
warehouses, wasting money.
Even with the most sophisticated planning, demand can still be unpredictable, leading
to sudden intense periods of work.
Small suppliers like Saltfillas have had their relationship with their customers
revolutionised as there are fewer of them, and consolidating and concentrating meant
that the balance of power has shifted away from the supplier. Supermarkets have a firm
grip over them i.e. a European company undercuts them on a bid with a long-standing
customer, and they is told to match their price, they have no option but to do so.
Saltfillas has a story familiar to firms throughout the UK manufacturing, as increase
competition coupled with de-industrialisation has enabled employers to push through,
bit by bit, a process of work intensification
Francis Green argues that the biggest single factor driving work intensification is
information technology. It enables greater use to be made of time and ‘fills up gaps that
would otherwise be natural breaks in the pattern of work’.
This can be backed up by the evidence that 42% of workplaces, who had introduced
new technology in the previous 5yrs experienced a substantial increase in the pace of
work.
The introduction of new information communication technologies leads to changes in
both the job process and the whole way the work and organisation is structured.
Green found that where there had been reorganisation the rates of intensification were
dramatic, with 45% reporting substantial increases in comparison to 29% where there
had been no change.
If that reorganisation introduced greater involvement of workers (i.e. more
responsibility) the proportion of workplaces experiencing work intensification
increased again, to 48% compared to 30% where there was no increase in worker
involvement.
IT has increased the pressure on employees to perform, as companies are subject to
more exacting regulations and control. Less room for shoddy work, due to the
technology that enables the tracking of products, and if a hair is found in a product it
can be traced back to the worker who was packing one of the thousands of boxes that
day.
IT transforms the traditional hierarchical structures of bureaucracy, by facilitating
supervision and removing the need for layers of managerial control.
At lower levels of the labour markets, IT has often been used to increase pressure and
to reduce autonomy. However for professional and managerial jobs it has actually
increase both pressure and autonomy. The higher the level of the employee’s computer
skills, the greater the degree of anxiety.
Two separate issues about how technology can increase the burdens of work:
The volume of information available- 82% managers mention the proliferation of the
information they had to deal with as a cause of long hours. The marginal costs incurred
by the sender have shrunk to a few minutes (due to sending email as an attachment),
while the costs of the receiver to read, digest and consider the information are as timeconsuming as ever.
David Lewis, a psychologist, describes in Information Overload (1999), how the brain
becomes tired trying to keep up, and loses its powers of concentration and the ability to
think clearly or rationally.
Secondly, many of the new transformation technologies transform accessibility- the
mobile phone has dismantles many of the special boundaries of work by introduced by
industrialisation. In the last 20yrs, mobiles phones, laptops, company intranets and
home PCs have dissolved the separation between our work and private lives.
Some people believe 24/7 accessibility is a price worth paying for greater freedom over
when she works. The trade-off is privacy and boundaries in exchange for a degree of
autonomy.
Technology has also transformed accessibility within orgs. Email has bred its own
character ad tone of democratic directness and informality. Despite the overload
(which has been passed onto secretaries) its accessibility and privacy continues to be
seductive, and reconfigures office relationships, subverting hierarchies and
strengthening more egalitarian networks.
Email has some significant drawbacks. It is a means of communicating rapidly, with
little etiquette or codes of conduct and is often imprecise. One research shows that 65%
of emails fail to give the recipient enough information to act upon, and therefore this
can lead to ambiguities that can lead to workplace tensions and incorrect instructions
being carried out.
Email is also said to be a form of distraction. Checking your email every hour 2 or 3
times, breaks up concentration. This process can take up to 25% of employees’ time.
The higher you rise in an organisation, the bigger your electronic in-tray: an average 22
emails a day at junior management increases to 47 at the most senior, and the figure is
constantly growing.
Emails have a disproportionate impact on long and anti-social hours because they are
typically dealt with either at the beginning or end of the day.
Bendis found, in her study, that emails were used to seek ‘positive strokes’, particularly
from a manager to an underling, the reply being the modern-day equivalent of a pat on
the back.
The quality of the network is what determines the success or failure of the organisation
or individual: you never know from what point will come information which may
determine opportunity or disadvantage.
The individual, with a network of useful relationships is at the nodal point of
intersection where information is accurately analysed, decisions made and power lies.
The more points of intersection the nodes bear, and thus the more flows of information,
the more effective the decision-making and the potential for brilliant strategic
breakthrough, and of course much more work.
The speed at which information is processed and acted upon becomes a critical source
of competitive advantage. This is where IT is transforming our concept of time, hugely
speeding up many processes and putting the capacity for human beings to adapt their
organisation of work, and to keep up, under constant severe pressure.
Mike Harris, Chief Executive of Prudential: “as soon as you spot a gap in the market, it
has to be exploited. That urgency is part of the culture, and it causes stress invariably” +
“you no longer have the forms of protection because of deregulation”.
Organisations are under intense pressure to remain competitive, and the bigger the
potential pickings, the sharper the competition. It is that need for competitiveness
which becomes the cause and justification of work intensification.
Workers are unsettled by the ‘impatience’ of dominant stakeholders. As Will Hutton put
its: “the more liquid a financial asset, the less committed the owner must be to the longterm health of the underlying investment. If the going gets tough or conditions change
the investor has already made provision for their escape”
Loyalty and hard work for a company no longer count for anything, redundancies are
an unavoidable fact of life. The agile company has to delayer and downsize.
In 2001, according to OECD figures, Britain was second to only South Korea for the
proportion (41%) of workers ‘unsure of a job even if they perform well” the insecurity
was regarding their personal position, not that of the company.
In 2003, Britain topped the international insecurity league, well ahead of the USA and
the rest of Europe.
There is a strong correlation between the highest rate of insecurity is found among fulltime workers in the prime of their careers; managers are amongst the least secure. This
sense of fear plays a large role in the overtime hours spent.
Self-employed workers tend to work longer hours than average. By 1999, the
proportion of self-employed who were in education, business or the health services had
nearly double to 29%.
Insecurity and uncertainty has led to the syndrome of ‘presenteeism’- being seen to
work late- which has grown during the last 15 years.
Presenteeism is driven by several factors such as:
 greater assessment of performance (80% workplaces implement some form of
appraisal system) and one third of worker’s pay is linked to performance.
 Flatter, fluid organisations make promotion harder to achieve (chance plays a
bigger part, being in the right place at the right time can be critical- achieved
through longer hours potentially). Working longer hours can show you are more
committed than your rivals.
 70% British managers are affected by major restructuring every year- playing
the right office politics can get you in charge of a major project or department,
play it badly and you’re restructured out of a job altogether.
Nearly 60% of managers say they are spending far more time on office politics. 80%
workers feel they weren’t involved in the decisions around restructuring and nearly
50% didn’t feel that reasons were adequately explained to them.
Its impact is destructive, with nearly half of managers reporting less loyalty and over
60% reporting lower morale. Only one worker in three trusts their boss.
Insecurity intensifies the need for control says Yiannis Gabriel, Professor of
Organisational Theory at Imperial College. He goes on to say that ‘amongst managers,
feelings of insecurity are generate by volatile economies, global markets and
technologies revolutionising information systems and government policies.
W.H. Auden said that it was only bearable to be apart of an organisation if you were
indispensable. Or at least if you felt yourself to be indispensable.
Britain’s GPD per hour is far behind France and the USA (29% ahead) and that of
Germany (27% ahead).
Michael Porter said that there are no furother productivity gains to be had from
employees working longer hours, or from getting more people into employment.
‘Labour for utilisation’ is already at a high level, and he suggested that the answer could
be in a higher-skilled labour force, higher capital intensity and more effective use of
technology.
Weakly regulated labour market makes it easy to hire and fire workers which reduces
the incentive to invest in skills and technology as a strategy to reduce labour costs.
Psychological Success and the Boundaryless Career. Mirvis
and Hall
The Boundaryless Organisation and Career
Handy (1989) describes a model of the boundrayless organisation as a shamrock leaf.
 The first leaf- the most important for continuity and organisational survivalcontains a core staff managers, technicians, and professionals. Highly skilled
individuals expected to make a major commitment to the organisation, and who
derive identity from it.
 The second leaf contains contractors, and specialised people and firms, often
outside the organisation, who serve a variety of needs- supply, distribution and
routine control functions.

The contingent labour force- part-timers and temporary workers who provide a
buffer as a cover for the workforce
This shamrock allows the firm to get a richer picture of its environment and to flexibly
respond to opportunities and threats- without a lot overhead and bureaucracy.
Hall and Mirvis (1994) argue that people will need more varied work experience to
cope with complexity and change in their task environments.
They will also need to be flexible and to have the competences required to self-design
much of their personal and career development. (DeFillippi and Arthur, 1994)
In turn the ability to learn-how-to-learn will be crucial to their success in cobbling
together an enriching career path (Hall, 1991).
What is different about the Boundaryless Career
Career development will be more cyclical- involving periodic cycles of reskilling. It will
be marked by more lateral, than upward movement and will culminate in a phased
requirement.
It will not help employees plan their careers due to uncertainties in the future of
organisational needs and therefore they will have to manage their own career and
develop it themselves.
Finding a substitute for organisational identification is another psychic challenge that
will face those charting a boundaryless career.
A Protean View of Careers (Hall, 1976)
The protean career is a process which the person, not the organisation, is managing. It
consists of all the person’s varied experiences in education, training, work in several
organisations, changes in occupational field etc. the protean career is not what happens
to the person in any one organisation. (Hall, 1976)
Several advantages that accrue from this concept:

First, it opens up new ways to think about work over time. It also encompasses
careers marked by peaks and valleys, by early or late bloomings, and by movement
from line of work to another (Hall, 1993)

Second, it enlarges the career space. Tendency to associate a career with paid work
and to draw sharp distinctions between people’s work and non-work lives. A more
elastic concept, acknowledges that work and non-work roles overlap and shape
jointly a person’s identity and sense of self. i.e. doing voluntary work, time off to raise
a child or pursue hobbies.

Opens up new ways to think about the relationship between employers and
employees. There is some evidence that at least some of the most able and ambitious
working are taking change o their work careers by choosing ‘to pack their parachute’
rather than following any corporation’s definition of career development (Hirsch,
1987). Constantly on the look out for better situations, more money, or extra leverage.
Making sense and coming to terms with the boundaryless career may be even more of
a challenge to those who have neither the talent nor the means to live like stars.
Aging over career
People are expected to periodically plateau having worked their way through the
boundaryless organisation. In other words they become mature when having become
settled in a line of work and chances of upward mobility slow down or stop.
One way to help people develop over the course of a boundaryless career is to keep them
moving through a number of career cycles of exploration-establishment and
maintenance-disengagement, rather than trying to prolong the maintenance stage of their
career.
The practical and psychological benefits of seeing careers in terms of repeated
development cycles could be substantial. i.e. a second cycle exploration might encourage
young person- after working to pay off debts- to go overseas to rethink earlier career
decisions. In the same way, it can invite an old person- after experiencing several cycles
of disengagement- to become engaged again by working part-time, rather than retiring.
The notion of going back to school to earn a degree, acquiring new skills or selfimprovement fit into the career concept.
An important way to experience psychological success during the ups and downs of
career cycles is to cultivate adaptability. Hall (1986) refers to this as a ‘metaskill’ as it
enable people to accommodate to new tasks and relationships, and to incorporate new
roles and responsibilities into their personal identities.
One survey of US firms with 100 or more employees found that 56% offered personalgrowth training to their employees (Gordon, 1988).
People who can adapt to the challenges of aging over several career cycles will have
increased security within their organisations, and a better chance of finding a rewarding
job if they choose to leave their company or be laid off.
Integrated Identity
A recent survey found that 3 out of 5 Americans workers rate the effect of jobs on their
personal and family life as ‘very important’ in making employment decisions. The survery
reports that nearly half of the workforce rates the family-support policies of employers as
a key consideration in their job choice.
Hall and Parker (1993) argue that just as companies are becoming more flexible in
structure, staffing and world systems, so, too, they need to be more flexible in the way
they view work roles.
There are indications that more and more firms are offering flexible, work-at-home
options, part-time employment, and even job sharing and career breaks under the rubric
of work/family programming (Parker and Hall, 1993)
The temporariness of work assignments in the future (cf. Bridges, 1994) coupled with
advances in telecommunications technology, will afford many more people the
opportunity to work part-time, or from their home, or on a seasonal basis.
The syndrome of ‘career success/personal failure’ identified by Korman and Korman
(1980), illustrates how some organisation compartmentalise their lives and fulfil their
work goals at the expense of other subidentities. In some respects, the boundaryless
career could heigthen this self-fragmentation: the combination of the psychic challenge
and financial insecurity, for instance, could prove to be a narcotic for workaholics
(Machlowitz, 1978)
There are financial and psychological costs in changing one’s identity- a job or career
change might enhance one’s self-picture, but may put additional pressure on spouses and
children to make up the difference- or else the change necessitates a lowering of one’s
lifestyle.
A common complaint of the many women and fewer men who have tried to adopt a
balanced orientation in their work, and family responsibilities is that their reputation,
advancement potential, and, ultimately, their incomes have all suffered (Googins, 1990).
Hall (1986) calls the development of personal identity another ‘metaskill’ needed to
experience psychological success over the course of the career.
Employer-Employee relations
Rousseau identified two types of employment contracts: relational and transactional.
Transactional is defined in terms of monetary exchange over a specific period of time,
with the employer contracting for specific skills use for specific tasks.
Relational contracts is not time bound, instead it establishes an ongoing relationship
between the person and the organisation, and involves the exchange of both monetary
and nonmonetary benefits, including mutual loyalty, support, and career rewards,
including mutual loyalty, support, and career rewards.
Rousseau argues that ‘make’-oriented firms, in Miles and Snow’s (1984) terms, are more
likely to establish relational contracts, while ‘buy’-oriented organisations are more likely
to offer them transactional contracts.
Boundaryless organisation can employ both of these types of contracts.
For some people, periodic and unpredictable changes in their employment status and
degree of membership in a company are certain to create confusion and upset. Add to this
the stress of changing assignments, work groups, work location, plus the possibility of
unemployment, and the likely result is fragmentation and, ultimately, a loss of identity.
In a real sense, firms’ boundaries will not hold people as firmly as in the past.
Others, however, will experience more degrees of freedom than before, as it will be easier
for people to change jobs and employers; there will be less stigma attached to it- whether
the action is voluntary or forced. Also, it will be easier for people to return to a previous
employment.
Under the relational contract, the locus is on the employer: job security is a company’s
policy. Hence employees can attribute steady pay increases and employment to standard
practise, rather than to their own unique effort and performance.
A question to help you understand this is: “Are employees really seen as contributing, or
are they being kept on and humoured because of the firm’s loyalty to long-time
employees? Why should plateaued employees upgrade their skills or take on
developmental assignments when they will be valued and kept on.
Under the transactional contract, it is possible that transactional employment will give a
boost to people’s self-esteem as the locus of responsibility is firmly on the individualthey are based on current value to the organisation. The resulting sense of selfresponsibility means that people can attribute continued employment to their own
efforts and achievements.
Under the relational contract, through promotion from within, mentoring and
socialisation, and various rites of acculturation, many employees come to identify with an
organisation. Sometimes they fully internalise company values and link their identities to
their organisation.
Under the transactional contract identity develops more around a person’s skills and
competencies, since these comprise the currency he or she has to exchange. Today this
marks the identity of many skilled professionals, whose response to the standard query
is, usually: “I do Y”
It is expected that many employers will try to capitalise on people’s commitment to their
work, by making sure that they provide them with challenging and stimulating
opportunities to do their own thing.