MICHAEL DEMPSEY - Cranfield University

‘Legitimate’ managerial actions - stakeholders
‘Legitimate’ managerial actions
4.15 The issue of stakeholder management, in terms of managing within the
union’s democratic structure, is complex within the CWU because of
the number of officers who are themselves elected and in some cases
have seats on the Executive Council.
I think the relationship that I want with (elected) officers is where
we are all working together and we have got loyalty to one
another. That does not mean to say that you have got yes men.
Unfortunately, what has happened with a number of the officers
is that they have gone into the system of pandering to political
groupings. (Interviewee D)
Executive Council members in general are elected only for one year
and, as discussed above, this brings its own problems. It was
suggested that the time Executive Council members held office
prevented them from taking a strategic view and also that they could
lose the respect of employers by not being able to negotiate a deal in
circumstances where a term of office was due to end.
These issues around representative rationality were discussed earlier.
The issue here is how managers actually managed, given these
governance frameworks and the systems of moral rules that influence
their behaviour. It was suggested that practice had differed between
partner unions:-
I know I keep saying this, but I think the NCU were much better
at doing that.(managing relations with lay members) That's one
of the bits of their culture that we tried to bring into the merged
CWU and I think it's working much better now. But it is
horrendously difficult. (Interviewee A)
An analogy was drawn with the public sector in approaching the task:-
I think that (public sector) is one of the best analogies because
you have elected members and the appointed staff. I think that
because they employ large numbers you've got more clearly
defined structures but there are some similarities there and
sometimes the lay members will seek to interfere with the
running of the organisation -- sometimes, even justifiably. This is
a balance (Interviewee O)
But frustration was expressed with the system and the potential
constraints it imposed on managers:-
In a business, if D said "right, from tomorrow there is no more
paper in the building because we have not got the money", that
would stick and it would have to stick because otherwise his
integrity would probably be challenged and he would probably
have to go. And the business would go under. In our
organisation, if David says there is no more paper tomorrow and
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