Content area
Full text
The rationale for interest in management by walking about
Much debate on human resource management (and its variations) has centred on the role of a specialist leadership function in business organisations adopting innovatory, high trust work relations. Accounts of successful "leaders, heroes and chief executive officers" are readily available ([42] Pettigrew and Whipp, 1991, p. 139), almost all of which claim to resolve the tensions inherent in the employment relationship by substituting high trust work relations for asymmetric relations of power, domination and coercion. For example, the precise process of cooperative, high trust work relations was first popularised by [41] Peters and Waterman (1982) as they analysed the eight key criteria of the most successful organisations, organisations which were assumed to have magical qualities. Their first principle "a bias for action" involves a certain degree of action orientation which means that an organisation has a degree of fluidity and informality that allows for communication and exchange of information quickly and easily at all levels (p. 19). Both authors were captivated by the wandering around approach carried out by Ed Carlson of United Airlines, Bill Hewlett of Hewlett-Packard and Big Jim Daniell of RMI who rode around the factory in a golf cart, waving and joking with his employees, listening to them, and calling them all by their first name - all 2,000 of them. [41] Peters and Waterman (1982) characterise these wandering around events as a "technology of keeping in touch, keeping in constant informal contact" (p. 123). This technology, they go on to argue, can be seen as an innovative method that pays attention to employees, not to working conditions per se, and they identify the process as one which gets the desired interests of one group across to others by management by walking about (MBWA) (p. 122).
This example also echoes management and academic writers (e.g. [47] Savolainen, 2000; [33] Nicoll, 1994, [31] Morden, 1997; [48] Shenar, 1993; [37], [38], [39] Peters, 1988a, b, 1992; [40] Peters and Austin, 1985; [21] Goldsmith and Clutterbuck, 1984; [14] Deal and Kennedy, 1982; [34] Ouchi, 1982), following [41] Peters and Waterman's (1982) view, that is: management leaving the office, moving around, listening and talking to employees, discussing and sharing with them organisational problems as well as...