MICHAEL DEMPSEY - Cranfield University

Cognitive rules and culture
Despite this, the legacy of experience in undertaking trade union roles
is still felt to be a factor in some cases:-
I think there is a residual sense that (which I suppose is a
reflection of feeling about management overall) the role of trade
unions is to defend workers against management and therefore
it is sort of awkward for the organisation to be on the other side
of the fence, if you like and I think that's true in the relationship
with the staff trade unions and it sort of seems to veer between,
you know, everybody trying to be all partnershipy and then
getting back into a sort of quite conflicty situation. But I don't
think it's easy to be very honest about it because the
organisation doesn't like seeing itself as both an employer and a
trade union. I think certainly the lay member side feels that
conflict quite sharply. (Interviewee G)
One manager explains this in another context:-
I think Unison is at a point of engaging with the whole issue of
standards and performance indicators. Then, the difficulty for
trade unions is often the language because, you know, a lot of
managers have been on the shopfloor, trade union officials.
They know the political arguments against performance related
pay, why appraisal doesn't work, you know the cynicism from
the workforce about various trendy management initiatives. So
there is a lot of that to overcome, for ourselves as well and I
think the biggest thing for management is still trying to get the
tools to develop staff and while the union says it's a priority, a
political imperative, that drives us. And its finding space, and a
balance, between the two. (Interviewee F)
As we have seen, however, some managers, though not all, have been
able to achieve that balance:-
I think it is probably very varied across different parts of Unison.
That is my impression. We had the management development
courses recently. The one I went on was mostly for regional
staff, which was really interesting because it meant you actually
met regional managers and they seemed to be completely
variable. Some of them were kind of like -- what?
Management? -- and others were kind of fantastic, really
impressive in the sense that they didn't just have development
reviews, they had six weekly one to one discussions and they
had sort of performance management, they had appraisal
techniques, one region was using a kind of social worker model
of supervision (Interviewee G)
Where difficulties exist, one manager believes that this may be due to
inadequate conceptualisation of the issues:-
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