APPEARANCE MANAGEMENT: Do managers manage?

Abstract

The word 'manage' has been defined as “to cause persons to submit to one's control”. Studies of both the operation of wage systems and of budgets show that these managerial controls are open to manipulation by employees. A study by the author described a situation in an engineering factory where the whole range of managerial controls were simultaneously manipulated. He concluded that all managerial controls could be manipulated by employees. The primacy of informal over formal organization has been demonstrated in a variety of institutional settings. The sources of power available to lower participants in organizations have been reduced by Mechanic to a number of formal statements. These show clearly why the distribution of power or influence in an organization is likely to be quite different from that implied by its formal structure of authority. Mechanic writes: “Organizations, in a sense, are continuously at the mercy of their lower participants, and it is this fact that makes organizational power structure especially interesting to the sociologist and to the social psychologist”. Or again, “When the power of lower participants is considered, it often appears to be clearly divorced from the traditions, norms and goals and sentiments of the organization as a whole. Lower participants do not usually achieve control by using the role structure of the organization, but rather by circumventing, sabotaging and manipulating it”.

Citation

Jones, R. (1970), "APPEARANCE MANAGEMENT: Do managers manage?", Management Decision, Vol. 4 No. 3, pp. 6-11. https://doi.org/10.1108/eb000934