Using Mintzberg's Configuration Model To Review The ...

Using Mintzberg’s
Configuration Model To Review
The Development Of Home
Treatment Teams In Shropshire.
Gemma Styles and Julia Jones

Critical organisational theory
Critical organisational theory is
concerned with how organisations
function (Tsoukas, Knudsen 2003).
The analysis of potential problems
(Thompson, McHugh 2009).

The concerns
There will be no coherence in the service offered across the
four areas covered by the community dementia teams
That a broad strategy passed down from the commissioners
may result in the expectations not being met
That increased complexity and hence input/hours with
individual clients may adversely affect activity recording, this
data is used by the commissioners to allocate funding resources

The professional organisation
The professional organisation:
professionalism is key and strategy requires individual or group learning
Professional teams are characterised by being led by highly trained
professionals, who provide largely standardised work. These
professionals can work independently, show loyalty to their profession
and strategy tends to be that of an emergent kind, as group or individual
learning is the preferred method of strategy formation.

The diversified organisation
This is a large collection of individual
professional teams bound together by shared
administration, training and leadership teams.
the majority of the people at the operating
core would be described as health
professionals

The political organisation
The political organisation. An
organisation that has to respond to
conflicts, forces (political or business)
and forms its strategy based in the
power school (Mintzberg 2011a).The
commissioning body can be described
in this way.

The first concern
That there will be no coherence in the
service offered across the four areas covered
by the community dementia teams.
The differences are predominately
pertaining to geography, commissioning and
resources rather than ethos.

What is home treatment
Medication management
Positive risk taking
Support with attending appointments
Promoting social inclusion
Arranging and completing parts of physical health checks
Liaising with family members, other professionals and other agencies
Relieving carer stress
Education
Signposting
Flexible Working

How the team behaved
used words such as ‘evolved’ and ‘intuition’ in order to describe
the development of the service. This demonstrates that they
have all developed an emergent strategy.
The Teams are learning from themselves and other
professionals around them by reading up on current evidence
and benchmarking against other teams (Guven-Uslu 2005).
Mintzberg describes professional teams as being more loyal to
their profession than to the company

The second concern
That a broad strategy passed down
from the commissioners may result in
expectations not being met.
“Are we doing it right”

How the commissioners behaved
a political organisation that provides broad overarching deliberate
strategy
that the expectation of emergent strategy is not communicated.
However what could be seen as lack of guidance from commissioners
could alternatively be described as professional respect.
a Foundation NHS trust has the ability to decide on its own strategy
(Davies 2012)

confidence
The Teams display a lack of confidence in
their own abilities to make strategic decisions
All showed a sense of relief to learn others
had developed similar services
This indicates the issue of leadership

Leadership
Mintzberg states that management and
leadership should not be separate (Mintzberg,
Ahlstrand et al. 2010
the Francis report recommends that leadership
is taught at every level of the Trust from the
operating core upwards (Francis 2013).

The third concern
That increased complexity and hence input/hours with
individual clients may adversely affect activity recording,
this data is used by the commissioners to allocate funding
resources
Recording activity in terms of contacts with patients made
by staff originates with the Department Of Health. The
NHS as a whole records contact with one million patients
every 36 hours in England alone (Davies 2012).

Outside the model
Mintzberg collected data on what managers do with their time
first in 1973 and later, in ‘managing’ (Mintzberg 2011a).
He recorded that managers worked at an unrelenting pace and
that time is spent doing a number of brief, varied activities in an
environment where they are constantly interrupted.
This description could also apply to the case load work of home
treatment staff (Jarvis 2005).

Further learning
How can The Trust develop a stronger corporate image so that
the members of the different professional teams show loyalty to
the Trust as well as to their own professional bodies?
How can The Trust and the Commissioners communicate that
emergent strategy is what they require and promote this as
positive?
How can Team management support staff and allow them to
grow in confidence in the area of developing strategy and
services?

More Details
gemmastyles73.blogspot.com

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