MICHAEL DEMPSEY - Cranfield University

colleagues in senior positions accept their management
roles.
7. Where there is institutional acceptance of management, it is
evidenced by recognisable processes of managing people
and resources and corporate support for training to improve
management quality.
Individual managers face particular challenges. Sometimes they seem
to be in a cocoon, either because they are trying to manage without
institutional support or because they do not want to manage and find
institutional support growing and putting pressure on them to accept
roles that they do, or do not, want to undertake.
There is a good deal of evidence, particularly in CWU prior to the
election of the new General Secretary but also in PCS, of managers
trying hard to be thoughtful and creative about their managerial roles
but without feeling that they had the support from the organisation (as
hypothesis 5 would suggest) – one manager felt that the organisation
had accepted him as a manager because it had suggested that the
researcher should talk to him. There is only one example of a ‘trade
union official’ (in terms of Exhibit 9.4) the one person in CWU who did
not accept that he undertook a managerial role but there were many
examples, in all unions, of people who were rather surprised to find
themselves as managers, given their chosen career path. There were
also examples of people who were resisting particular managerial
initiatives – some of those, for example, in UNiFI who were particularly
cynical about personal development plans, even though they professed
acceptance of managerial roles. And there were many trade union
managers – people who willingly accepted the role and felt that their
organisation was behind them in undertaking it. Exhibit 9.4 illustrates
these thoughts.
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