MICHAEL DEMPSEY - Cranfield University

Performance management
Constantly…She is doing a job of work in this Department but I
need to understand what is being done and I need to question it
because of the job it is (Interviewee N)
The new General Secretary has some firm views about these issues:-
I suppose the first difference is a thing that is easy to rebut but
none the less it's often used -- oh, you're a trade union, therefore
you should be a model employer. That's the first thing that gets
thrown into your face but what the subtext of that is that we
shouldn't have to be bossed about. My attitude to that is, this is
a trade union, it's not a hippie commune. You can't just do what
you want…… Now that is a bit difficult to manage. My only thing
on that is that I don't see how you can do it other than by a
strategic plan and I don't see how you can, and this is where
there is real tension, do it without some kind of appraisal system.
I just can't see how it can be done.
And he believes that resistance to an objective based system,
specifically here the Strategic Plan, is because people are
uncomfortable with being held accountable:-
I think the mistake that people make when you talk about a plan,
if I say I'm getting out of that this morning and my intention is to
run five miles and part of my run is blocked by roadworks and I
run four and a half, your plan doesn't always go to plan but at
least you had some idea of what you intended to do. And the
main reason of course if you have a plan, people are
accountable to that plan and are concerned about people
saying, well what are you doing? -- I always think it's a bit like
the description of work study. People say, oh my day's different
every day -- every day my day's different. It's so different you
wouldn't believe it. And when you analyse everybody's day,
there is not that much difference. There is an amazing amount
of commonality. So the main thing was, I don't want to have to
have a plan because I'll be accountable and stuff like that.
We have already seen that the meanings influencing managers in the
CWU relate in part to their experiences of management and the
consequent difficulty which they perceive in undertaking management
roles, particularly those that involve making judgments about
performance or conduct. This evidence is consistent with those
observations. It is not clear which staff are being referred to in the
above observation. The issue of staff having dual lines of accountability
is more true in the CWU than in other case study unions because some
managers are elected. It would not be surprising if they also enjoyed
high levels of autonomy for that reason, though evidence for this did
not surface. Either of these explanations would account for their
resisting accountability within the management structure. But this would
need to be researched further.
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