MICHAEL DEMPSEY - Cranfield University

‘Legitimate’ managerial actions - stakeholders
Although the choice not to undertake ‘doing’ roles may be related to
capability:-
Nobody does the blue horizon stuff; that is they think the time it
takes is too much but I worked with C in IRSF. C was great at
the blue horizon stuff but he was crap at the day to day stuff. He
did not need to do the day-to-day stuff because there were other
people in the organisation but he was terrific at the blue horizon.
(Interviewee B)
There is little further data around this issue. PCS managers were
addressing in detail their managerial roles and this may well account
for their lack of attention to their action roles, or the distinctions
between them and the roles in which they were required to innovate or
to undertake hands on tasks.
‘Legitimate’ managerial actions
6.17. There are, as has been rehearsed, particularly interesting issues
around the issue of stakeholder management in PCS because of the
way in which the Principal Rules have restricted the power of
Conference to take certain decisions, conversely offering more power
to members who vote in ballots. This is posited on the view that
activists are not always representative of membership opinion.
Given this background, one would expect that the process of
stakeholder management, managing in particular the various
components of the democratic structure, would not be straightforward:-
I would have thought that my style would have led me into
priorities of managing the union as an organisation, a
democratic organisation that the members themselves want to
participate in, this organisation that you’ve got responsibility for.
So I would have thought my key role is to make sure that I have
good relationships between myself and the senior elected
officials. Very difficult. That’s a managerial task in which it’s
crushingly difficult to find out what the priorities are. It is
extremely difficult and if we are looking at the problems, the
problems are associated with interpreting the wishes of senior
lay officials who in the main, in our union, are themselves
managers of fairly large organisations or potentially managers of
large organisations. They are managerially trained and
understand about setting objectives and priorities, project
management. (Interviewee K)
As expressed, this view seems to describe a setting which would be
familiar to managers in the public sector or in a democratic voluntary
organisation. And, indeed, this was an analogy which was drawn by a
functional manager:-
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