MICHAEL DEMPSEY - Cranfield University

Leadership
In the public mind, all the interviewees in this research would have
been described as trade union leaders, with the possible exception of
two or three functional managers in CWU. Some were career
professionals (IT, research, library, finance), some were managers
elsewhere before they were appointed to posts in the union, some had
been appointed from other unions. They may well be ‘moral activists’
(Undy and Martin 1984), whatever that means, but many were not
appointed from a restricted recruitment base. One General Secretary
joined from another union; another Deputy General Secretary went off
to be General Secretary of another union. The characterisations of
union leaders cited in Chapter 2 (e.g Undy and Martin 1994, Allen
1954), whatever their validity at the time they were written, seem
something of a caricature today in what we observe in the case study
unions. Some, in subjective assessments, seem to the researcher to be
intellectually brilliant (a characteristic discounted by Allen 1954); others
display businesslike characteristics (contrary to observations by
Barbash 1959 and Clark and Gray 1991).
This research has examined not ‘trade union leaders’ per se but ‘trade
union managers’ It attempted to gather evidence as to what ‘trade
union leadership’ meant to trade union managers, but this was
inconclusive. As Chapter 9 comments, there is a sense of strategy and
it is possible to discern a thread (in Exhibit 9.9) of belief that influencing
is a component of the role, consistent with the definition of Paton and
Clark (1999:36) that ‘leadership is influencing other people, in ways
that are more or less acceptable to them, regarding certain core issues
that face the group or organisation’; together with its corollary that
‘leaders are those people who are expected to be, and are seen to be,
influential on important matters’. This is of interest but the evidence is
not strong enough to support any conclusion on the matter.
Resource deployment
As noted in Chapter 2, Willman et al (1993:53) presented a series of
hypotheses relating to union finances. Two of these can be
summarised as follows:-
• Formal financial systems will be neither common nor rigorous in
trade unions and financial issues will only be to the fore in
moments of crisis or where survival is at stake, for example in
the course of strikes or when mergers are discussed
• Union leaders will seek to centralise the management of funds,
whatever Rule Book provisions there may be, and seek to
depoliticise income and expenditure decisions
Willman et al (1993:203-5) found that the first of these propositions met
only limited support. They found unions that planned for the future and
pointed to the growth of technology in facilitating this. The second, they
found, was substantially supported, particularly with the growth of
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