The Importance of Employee Language and Organisational Discourses - Case Study Example

Business Research Methodology Critical Analysis of a Journal Article Epistemological and Ontological Dilemmas Faced by Researchers in the Organisational Analysis of Organisational Culture and Change Meteab, November 2009 Selected article: Research Dilemmas in Management and Business Studies by John Mendy, University of Lincoln, UK, which appeared in The Electronic Journal of Business Research Methods in 2007 Abstract The attempt by the author of the article in question, is to highlight the dilemmas that arise from structural approaches to studying the complex and dynamic phenomena of cultural organisational change, and demonstrate the usefulness of symbolic interactionism and stories in terms of what contributions they can make in resolving some of these dilemmas. Descriptions of the contrasting approaches are given together with the author’s own study and findings. These then form the basis for discussing the ontological and epistemological dilemmas involved followed by the author’s own analysis and concluding remarks. In the critical analysis, these issues are again discussed from the writer’s perspective within the context of highlighting the strengths and weaknesses of the article content and approach to pointing out these philosophical dilemmas. Table of Contents Epistemological and Ontological Dilemmas Faced by Researchers in the Organisational Analysis of Organisational Culture and Change 1 Abstract 1 Summary of Article 2 Descriptions of Differing Approaches 2 The Author’s Study and Findings 4 The Philosophical Dilemmas Involved 5 The Author’s Analysis and Concluding Remarks 6 Critical Analysis 7 Conclusions 9 Bibliography 10 Abstract 1 Summary of Article 2 Descriptions of Differing Approaches 2 The Author’s Study and Findings 3 The Philosophical Dilemmas Involved 5 The Author’s Analysis and Concluding Remarks 6 Critical Analysis 6 Conclusions 8 Bibliography 9 Word count: 3, 458 (excluding this page and bibliography) Introduction The philosophical framework that guides the business and management research is a very important consideration and a fundamental component because it dictates the nature of the entire process. The researcher may even be unaware of the philosophical basis of the research, but by knowing the precise stance the researcher is taking, the research aims, objectives, assumptions, perspectives, orientation, limitations, and so on, can be much better understood and grounded. Furthermore, the choices that have to be made while undertaking research often pose dilemmas. The context used by the article to demonstrate such dilemmas in management and business studies, is the importance of employee language and organisational discourses. That is, how employees experience cultural organisational change when their working practices are changed. For this purpose, the researcher uses empirical data on ‘Aspects of Organisational Culture and Change’ in four organisations located in the English counties of Lincolnshire and Nottinghamshire. Magala’s (2005) theories and conceptual analysis of such changes are used by the author in order to critique the structurally maintained position adopted by Strauss & Quinn (1997). The attempt is to highlight the dilemmas that arise from structural approaches to studying the complex and dynamic phenomena of cultural organisational change, and demonstrate the usefulness of symbolic interactionism and stories in terms of what contributions they can make in resolving some of these dilemmas. As a number of constructs are used in the article, it was deemed appropriate to explain two of these in the introduction, so they are listed and described below. Employee presence – This is the level of contribution made by an employee to the functioning of an organisation. Employee contribution – This is the set of experiences and reactions of employees to maintain, promote or resist against the functioning of an organisation. The main philosophical issues confronted by business researchers in conducting organisational analyses are usually ontological or epistemological based. In other words, it is with regard to the nature of being, and the actual research method used and its scope and validity. This article deals with some of these philosophical dilemmas through highlighting deficiencies in the structural approaches. Summary of Article Descriptions of Differing Approaches According to Strauss & Quinn (1997), “cultural meaning can be studied through an exploration of the ‘extra-personal’ and the individual ‘intra-personal’ positions” (Mendy, 2007). Thus, cultural boundaries are determined by both what takes place within the organisation, and what takes place outside of it, and there are ‘maintained cultural values’. In their theorising, it is suggested that both internal and external relationships shaping the interactions are crucial; ‘created and maintained’ to define the organisational culture’. The dilemma posed in this approach is the manner in which intra-personal and extra-personal interactions determines employees’ preferences for “engaging in certain interactions, certain cultural changes and making use of certain forms of language and symbols and not others” (Mendy, 2007). In Magala’s (2005) approach, the concept of emotional intelligence is given importance “and other approaches as complements of the cognitive processes through which employees’ languages are expressed” (Mendy, 2007). Employee presence and reaction to cultural changes are therefore caused by “enshrined social patterns … norms, values and deep-seated beliefs that result from their enshrinement” (Mendy, 2007). Furthermore, these norms and values are expressed through various modes of language, stories, and through symbols that are mutually agreed upon, rather than being maintained. The recognition is that individuals in organisations are already socialised and this underlies their interactions within the organisation. Differences between individuals are not therefore identifiable by the ‘maintained’ framework alone; rather, they require a framework that “recognises the myriad of employees’ cultural norms and values that constitute their identity and give meaning to their interactions with one another” (Mendy, 2007). Magala (2005) therefore recognises the significant cultural changes and the implications on people’s behaviours. This is a more comprehensive approach than that of Strauss & Quinn. However, even this approach poses other dilemmas. It is noted that many of the media of communication are computer aided, and “cultural values that they inadvertently create have begun to reflect on changing employee behaviours …” (Mendy, 2007). This in turn creates “‘paradigmatic’ schools of thought with massive ontological influences on how project teams, tasks and role cultures operate” (ibid). Thus, individuals perform their functions based on their own socio-cultural and ethnic backgrounds. Reality then, does not exist externally but arises from “what has been co-created between speech actors, experiences …[and] the mass media” (Mendy, 2007). The aforementioned differences explain some of the epistemological dilemmas, but the problem remains in generalising the results. In addition, Mendy (2007) describes Mead’s (1964) symbolic interactionism before presenting his own contribution of stories. The former is a sociological perspective dealing with how individuals relate to their environment. Stories were used on the basis that the world is understood through social artefacts. The Author’s Study and Findings The notion of presence was used to examine “the extent to which employees are willing to participate in organisational cultural change interventions”(Mendy, 2007). In particular, the “the possible shift in employees’ presence in terms of how the dividing line between the personal and organisational may be moved to the advantage or disadvantage of one of the participating parties such that the experiences of the personal or the organisational may be enriched or impoverished by this movement” (Mendy, 2007). The four organisations chosen for the study were Longhurst Housing Association (LHA), Laurens Patisserie, Prospects, and Eden Supported Housing Ltd. It involved 51 interviews between January 2004 and July 2005 based on 18 open questions covering management traits, cultural/moral beliefs and values, and extent of participation in the change. “The questions were designed to provide data that might ‘demonstrate the dynamic nature of the relation between different roles in organisations that experience useful changes’” (Mendy, 2007). The experiences of managers were reconstructed based on the notion of a platform in which “employees react to the colonising or imposing managers” (Mendy, 2007) before the employees who were then asked to validate the reconstructions, and if necessary to modify them. The guiding research question was “What are the consequences on employees and others when organisations change adopting totalising tendencies in their efforts to improve efficiency and performance?” It was shown that employee presence was paramount to the functioning of an organisation, and therefore “the consequences of organisational cultural changes on employee behaviours could not have been maintained and sustained by top-down managerially imposed approaches as the behaviours of such ‘colonising’ actors have been resisted by employees through language and other less-overt reactions …” (Mendy, 2007). The choice of language of employees is shown to indicate their “cognitive representations of personal and collective experiences” (Mendy, 2007). In the initial study, the display of employee resistance was countered by reinforcing ‘mechanised’ forms of managerial ‘colonisation’, i.e. constant control and supervision, in order to impress upon them the culture of a completely ‘maintained’ organisation. That is, “the boundary between the personal and organisational became blurred and impoverished” (Mendy, 2007). However, this resulted in ‘exacerbated employee stress levels’. They had to work longer hours thus reducing their quality of life, became emotional, and this only led to frustration and being de-motivated. This reduced their ‘presence’, encouraged ‘cultural jamming’, and instances of open resistance. Over time, a ‘cultural divide’ between the ‘maintained’ management and employees began to develop and grow. The culture that developed was not the same as Strauss & Quinn’s ‘maintained’ position. Rather, a blame culture had developed, employee expectations and interest had changed, inter-communication weakened, uncertainty and unfairness increased, sub-cultural identities formed, job alienation occurred, and so on. In short, the central channel of communication had broken down, and employee presence “has shrunk considerably in scope and participation and contributions to organisational cultural change had become reduced or withdrawn …” (Mendy, 2007). However, it was not only employees, but also some managers that reduced their presence – not in the form of regret, but through preoccupation with power and control. Nevertheless, this still led to distancing them even further from employees, not to mention the loss of respect. Furthermore, the fragmentation in communication and the establishment of secondary non-command communication channels could not be prevented even after creating an employment tribunal. This also affected outside communication. The writer (Mendy, 2007) claims, “Such phenomena contradict to a great extent Strauss & Quinn’s theorising on how organisations culturally ‘reinvent’ themselves and how the revolving aspects and issues can be studied”. Strauss & Quinn’s theoretical analysis of organisations assume that they “can be perceived and studied as stable and integrated entities” (Mendy, 2007) whereas Mendy’s analysis suggests that they are not. On this basis, the writer proceeds to resolve the dilemmas and deepen understanding of the complex phenomena of employee experiences by examining Magala’s (2005) approach, which incorporates the importance of language. The interviews also highlighted the themes of conflict of interests and value mismatch. In addition, the managers appeared to be responsible and caring towards their employees. Although they tried to reduce their presence due to the imposed change, there was a growing rift between them and the employees. Regardless, respondents showed that the interactive experiences were dynamic during undergoing stressful cultural organisational changes. What also appeared, were “unexpected sub-themes such as implicit and explicit conflict, overt and covert resistance and so on” (Mendy, 2007). This showed the human side of the issues, and was again something in conflict with Strauss and Quinn’s perspective. Employee experiences were interpreted with reference to their expectations. The Philosophical Dilemmas Involved The assumptions and dilemmas concern how organisations and management researchers perceive the nature and role of humans, their behaviour, and their relation to the world around them. There are alternative perspectives that the researcher, each with certain strengths and weaknesses that the management and researchers need to consider. Moreover, each employee has his or her own individual consciousness, and “the consequences of organisational changes on employee behaviours are created through the inter-subjective sets of meanings between respondents and researcher (Mendy, 2007). Variety in the experiences is indicative of collective cognitive recollections and how employees interpret and respond to organisational changes. The way employees interact displays social reality and its meaning. These may be exhibited to managers but multiple assumptions and differences also tend to exist. The dilemma is for the researcher to then integrate and generalise the findings. This task is rather idealistic because it cannot account for specific fragments and sub-cultures. Therefore, “Social and organisational reality rests not on following rules but in what the system of interactions mean to respondents that presents itself to the researcher as following a pattern” (Mendy, 2007). Presenting a pattern may seem rule-like, and this structural impression contradicts the very purpose of portraying employees’ real experiences. The above-mentioned ontological assumptions also lead to further epistemological dilemmas in that the different world=views create “different forms of knowledge for the social and organisational worlds we inhabit in and try to construct and analyse” (Mendy, 2007). In other words, the constituents of knowledge change, and there is ambiguity over what can be considered as ‘objective’ knowledge. On the other hand, the subjective view being focused on processes takes knowledge as expressing the manner by which the researcher subconsciously imposes his or her own perspective on a phenomenon. In fact, the origin of knowledge inherent in the assumptions is conflicting “because their viewpoints on what forms organisational and social reality are equally polarised” (Mendy, 2007). These dilemmas remain unresolved in business research methodology. The Author’s Analysis and Concluding Remarks In the absence of a notion of ‘presence’, “managers tend to show behaviour with unreasonable levels of destructive effect” (Mendy, 2007). Mendy therefore suggests, by acknowledging and managing presence, “such behaviour may be avoided and may make companies better places for employees to work in, to learn and develop” (Mendy, 2007). It usually takes organisations a considerable time and effort to restructure in order to cope with the ensuing challenges. He further points out that communication is an important part of interactions between different levels of the hierarchy. That it is very important is evident given that managers try to improve this through various means such as forums, newsletters, notice boards, etc. However, the focus needs to be improving and balancing employee presence. In other words, employees need to feel that they are “valued and dignified human beings” (Mendy, 2007) regardless of whether the organisation is changing or even downsizing. “It means that they can do so without first increasing or maintaining the damage that they try to reduce” (Mendy, 2007). The author (Mendy, 2007) concludes by pointing out firstly, that he took a “phenomenological approach to research in management and business studies”, and that this is justified “as one moves from the objectivist end to the interpretive and subjectivist end of the research continuum”. He then reiterates the deficiency in Strauss & Quinn’s culturally ‘maintained’ position to lend support to symbolic interactionism and the use of stories. The latter two ”recognise the importance of language and organisational discourses validated by speech actors through which consequences of organisational cultural changes on employees’ experiences and reactions can be richly understood” (Mendy, 2007). In arriving at this conclusion, he also point out, that he did not delve needlessly on “reducing the complexities and dynamic interactions entailed in this study to an ‘objective’ form of measuring relationships in what would appear to be rule-like, concrete, static and regulated” (Mendy, 2007). Nevertheless, the rendering of “knowledge generated from employees’ experiences of cultural changes as relativistic and context-specific …” (Mendy, 2007) makes the epistemological dilemma remain. He admits that this is due to the “thrilling complexity, ambiguity, fuzziness and unpredictability of culture and change studies” (Mendy, 2007). Hence, the interactive approach was adopted in this study. Critical Analysis The article makes good use of symbolic interactionism and stories to highlight the importance of speech actors in the context of organisational change, as this enables clear illustrations to be made of the actual inherent dilemmas. This is in contrast to the method employed by Strauss & Quinn (1997) involving what is called ‘maintained analysis’ to show how change is implemented through managerial intervention and the employees’ reactions. The problem with the latter is that the importance of language choices, apart from the internal/external interactions, are not properly considered. Mendy does well to bring this point out because language is one of the most important aspects of cultural expression. He correctly states that language is “a central part in accounting for cultural differences because it is through employees’ uses of language and the extent to which they maintain, increase or reduce their presence during organisational change that different ‘spectacles’ for perceiving the world are created” (Mendy, 2007). The author establishes this by including examples of actual employee responses to the questioning, which strengthens his argument. By not including this aspect, dilemmas arise as highlighted by Mendy (2009). The ‘created and maintained’ interactions, which define the organisational culture, could be characteristic of transient relationships, i.e. that themselves change over time according to the nature of the relationships and wider context. On the other hand, the author correctly identifies Morgan’s (1986) theories as more comprehensive. This is so because they incorporate all employees’ needs “to work towards the attainment of collective organisational goals” (Mendy, 2007). Similar is Schein’s (1985) concept of ‘shared’ perspective. To put it another way, Strauss & Quinn’s concept of a ‘maintained’ position does not clearly demarcate the boundaries between personal and organisation, whereas individual employees do differ in their level of contribution to organisation presence. The standard management model is one wherein all individuals participate to fulfil the organisation’s functions and tasks equally to enhance its overall performance. In other words, “the presence of all employees guarantees organisational effectiveness” (Mendy, 2007). However, as Mendy (2007) points out, this model denying a prolonged imbalanced boundary between individual and organisational presence, only allows for temporary dominance of one or the other. A major criticism of Strauss & Quinn (1997) was based on findings from the researcher’s own study, in which the organisational culture was deliberately modified to make them completely ‘maintained’ organisations. However, the method utilised is questionable because of the creation of artificial organisational conditions in which the employee responses that occurred were expected. It would have been better to study cultural changes in organisations that have themselves adopted the rigid command structure and the opposite where organisations have undergone liberalisation reforms. Even if the employees were unaware of the study purposes of the deliberate imposition of a stricter organisational culture, the management certainly knew. A mechanised organisation simply does not promote a culture of integration and cooperation. Hence, the idea that organisations cannot be studied as stable entities is not strictly correct. Contrary to the artificial change imposed in the study, an organisation that has originally been mechanised would only employ people who can ‘fit in’ the culture than those who cannot. Similarly, people would be attracted to work in organisations that suit their cultural outlook, and either way the organisation would be stable. In this study, the employees had no such choice. Nonetheless, the author does successfully demonstrate what can be achieved when the researcher is mindful of exactly “what can be considered credible and valid knowledge that can be generalised in organisational and management studies” (Mendy, 2007). Magala’s approach is more realistic because humans are after all both emotional and capable of thinking. Cognition is therefore a very important process that was not considered by Strauss & Quinn (1997). Moreover, socialisation is an increasingly stronger factor in determining employee behaviour nowadays due to the socio-cultural changes taking place in society today. This contrasts significantly with Strauss & Quinn’s (1997) simple perspective and structural/functional, which would be considered obsolete now. There is now a much greater variety in employee backgrounds, experiences, perspectives, and so on, that these place conflicting demands upon management who would otherwise prefer to cope with change intervention strategies involving much less inherent conflicts and tensions. The role of individual and group culture should not therefore be underestimated, nor should it be considered as static. Cultural norms and values vary both between individuals and over time. This dynamism contrasts with the stable and maintained perspective. As far as the dilemmas are considered, Mendy (2007) makes it very clear that the philosophical underpinnings of structural and other approaches are at opposing ends along an epistemological continuum. The example given of the objectivist perspective illustrates that viewing the world in structural terms leads to “an epistemological position that stresses the importance of studying relationships that are rendered concrete, static and … ‘maintained” (Mendy, 2007). These in turn cause researchers to unduly focus on empirically analysing causal and concrete patterns and relationships. Mendy makes a good contrast with the subjectivist perspective as well to put the dilemma in context wherein reality is seen “as a projection of human experience and interaction” (Mendy, 2007). As the author mentioned in the conclusion, studying cultural change is no easy task. Furthermore, to utilise an objective form of measurement instead of employing the phenomenological approach would have made this study no different to other quantitative studies in which complex phenomena are reduced to rule based measures. Moreover, the researcher was ingenious in highlighting the stark nature of the philosophical dilemmas involved. In doing so, he dealt with the very underlying basis of the assumptions made to clarify the fundamental deficiencies in Strauss & Quinn’s approach; rather, why their approach has become incapable in the rapidly changing socio-cultural environment we live in today. In short, what Mendy (2007) is really trying to prove, is the greater need for using qualitative approaches to research when it is necessary to understand such complex and dynamic phenomena as employee experiences of the cultural changes in organisations. After all, humans are not mechanical entities with static ‘maintained’ positions. A very important point raised in the article aside from the issue of philosophical dilemmas in conducting research, was when Mendy (2007) mentioned the importance of good communication in management-employee interaction, and even more so when he wrote the need for employees to feel as “valued and dignified human beings”. Conclusions Instead of using the same method that reduced the complexity of human behaviour in an organisational setting in response to cultural changes, the author highlights the structural approach’s own structural weaknesses. Herein lies the greatest strength of this article, because it shows the fundamental dilemmas that arise by contrasting them with approaches that are more suitable. Culture is a complex phenomenon, and studying cultural changes is an even more complex undertaking as individuals differ in their responses and it is a dynamic process. For the business researcher, this article succeeds in clarifying precisely what philosophical dilemmas arise by taking certain research approaches, and thereby points out why the selection of a suitable approach is such an important consideration. Bibliography Magala, S. 2005. Cross-Cultural Competence, London: Routledge. In Mendy, 2007. Mead. 1964. In Mendy, 2007. Mendy, John. 2007. Research Dilemmas in Management and Business Studies. The Electronic Journal of Business Research Methods. Volume 5, Issue 2, pp. 49-60. In Mendy, 2007. Morgan, D. L. 1997. Focus Groups as Qualitative Research, London: Sage Publications. In Mendy, 2007. Schein, E. H. 1985. Organisational Culture and Leadership, San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. In Mendy, 2007. Strauss, C. and Quinn, N. 1997. A cognitive theory of cultural meaning, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. In Mendy, 2007. Read More