informal coalitions

Informal Coalitions is featured in the Spring 2007 editionof Cutting-Edge Global Publishingfrom Palgrave MacmillanBUY YOUR COPY OF THE BOOK ONLINEView the full catalogue (PDF File - 8 pages of A4)

The nature and dynamics of organizational coalitions

A colleague recently drew my attention to an excellent article on the nature and dynamics of organizational coalitions that I had not come across before. It was written by three senior academics at the University of California (Stevenson, Pearce and Porter) and published in 1985 by the Academy of Management Review.

Its title, The Concept of ‘Coalition’ in Organization Theory and Research, hardly sets the pulse racing! But it has some important things to say about the characteristics of coalitions, which resonate strongly with those discussed in Informal Coalitions. In particular, the authors challenge many of the ways in which the term has been misused in the past. They argue that this has led to "… great confusion as to whether it applies to collections of individuals, to collections of subgroups, or even to the entire organization."

I see this article as adding value in two ways. Firstly, the authors offer a definition of the term "coalition", which provides a useful framework for thinking about their nature and dynamics. Secondly, they offer a number of hypotheses about the process of coalition formation. This post considers the first of these.

Paying for performance at the Olympics?

I was dismayed to read in yesterday’s Sunday Times that the British Olympic Association (BOA) is drawing up plans to pay bonuses to athletes who win medals at the 2012 Olympic Games in London (Team GB to be rewarded with gold for gold).

This is not to say that our athletes don’t deserve recognition for their sporting achievements and a generous reward for their efforts. Far from it. But advocating a crude form of performance-related pay as part of the strategy for securing more medals seems to me to miss the point on several levels:

High-expectations leadership – moving from vicious to virtuous circles

Some years ago, when I was a manager in a large industrial plant, we took the decision to scrap a whole raft of ‘performance measures’ and related practices that had been introduced some years earlier under the guise of productivity improvement and management control. Despite widely-held concerns that poor work practices would increase if controls were relaxed, we pushed on with the decision.

The reasoning was simple. If we were ever to unlock the vast wealth of untapped talent in the business, we needed to change the expectations that managers - throughout the organization - had of their staff.

A relational view of identity in organizational dynamics

In a previous post, I used the slogan from Orange’s latest advert to introduce the nature of individual identity in organizations as seen from an informal coalitions viewpoint. A reader (signing himself GDA9) strongly dismissed this view, adding the following comment:

“‘I am who I am because of everyone’ - What a bloody wrong concept of identity. It shows that the person who made up the slogan can't place boundaries on his own identity - a sign of psychosis. A person is who they are because of their personality traits, memories, ideas, the sense of self, consciousness, etc. NOT because of external factors or others' identities. It doesn't take a philosophy professor to understand what identity is.”

This view of identity as an innate part of the individual is well established. So there will no doubt be many who will be reluctant to embrace a socially constructed and relational view of identity. I therefore thought it would be useful to take time out to say a bit more about this contrary perspective – as I see it - in this new post.

The time machine of organizational decision making

In Technology, Management and Society*, Peter Drucker describes decision making as

“… essentially a time machine which synchronizes into one present a great number of divergent time-spans.” 

“Our approach today,” he goes on, “still tends towards the making of plans for something we will decide to do in the future. This may be a very entertaining exercise, but it is a futile one.”

Incredibly, Drucker first made this statement to a management conference in 1957!  And yet, 50 years on, the notion that present and future decision making are separated in time still dominates management thinking; the former focusing on current operations and the latter on the visions, strategies and plans intended to realise the desired future.

So how do Drucker’s insights on the time dimension of decision making and the need to focus on the present play into current thinking about the dynamics of organizations?