Category Archives: Research Diary

The research project

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My ethical approval has been granted so I now have authorisation to proceed with the research project. The project will be taking place in an organisation that is going through a very turbulent and uncertain time. The organisation is struggling with financial uncertainty and is beginning the process of developing a restructuring strategy.

The strategy will be overseen by a project office and is split into four main strands. The impact of the high uncertainty is that many staff are leaving or have left the organisation. Many posts are now vacant and where replacements are approved these tend to be fixed term interim appointments. The project is concerned with the impact of organisational and technological change on team identity.

The population sample for the research project is four distinct teams that are likely to be some ways. The minimum change will be that the teams will need to work more closely together using a corporate CRM system. The CRM has been implemented and is being used increasingly across the teams. The system allows students to post a query that is routed to the relevant team member. The team member then takes action to resolve the issue or if another member of staff is required to take action the query is re-routed. Once the issues has been resolved the query is closed in the system.

Many issues of interest stem from this scenario such as how people interact with each other in teams that are working at a distance from each other (virtually) and how technological systems act as intermediaries and on occasions as mediators.

For this project I will be looking for situations where technological systems, meetings, papers (non-humans) act as mediators – or things that have agency. There is a lot of discussion in journals about non-humans and whether they have agency or not. The issue is not whether non-humans think through in a conscious way activities that then have an impact on humans – it’s more about how non-human things sometimes do not co-operate within networks and then cause humans to adapt or amen their behaviour.

For example a machine or a computer that operates normally on a daily basis and provides reports or the ability to process data etc. is defined (in terms of Actor-Network Theory) as an intermediary. If the machine breaks down or starts to operate in an unexpected way then the machine is a mediator – or has agency.

The machine has agency because in order to get the machine back on track, working as normal again it might be necessary for the human actor to make a call to a helpdesk in order to call an engineer to come and fix it. This situation is highlighted in the paper by Johnson (1988) where a mechanical door closer breaks down.

Another area of interest is to do wit individual and team identity.

Ethical research

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A recent news story concerning a school in Waltham Forest and a questionnaire that the local council asked children to complete as part of an initiative known as Building Resilience through Integration & Trust (BRIT). The questionnaire was designed to ask children about their thoughts and feelings. The questionnaire was anonymous, no personal details of the children were collected. The questionnaire was subsequently released onto the Internet by a Muslim activist and this resulted in parents of the children complaining to the school and the council about the questionnaire being racist and it could be used for racial profiling.

It’s not clear from the news reports wether the questionnaire had gone through any kind of ethical approval. The council has now apologised and stated that it welcomed the opportunity for debate.

A version of the story can be found here.

The impact of organizational and technological change on team identity

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In my last post I had just started in my new job and was trying to find a relevant project that combined organizational and technological change. I have now managed to find a suitable project concerning the centralising of administrative services combined with the introduction of a new corporate information system.

The information system will link a new front office function (previously back office) with faculty administration staff (previously front office but becoming more back office). These changes are likely to have an impact on how group identity is constructed and deconstructed.

The issue of in-groups and out-groups is likely to be challenged and staff members may find themselves under stress due to changes in their long held team identities. The research project is now entitled The impact of organizational and technological change on team identity.

I have received permission from the institution to carry out the project and have now submitted my RES2C, project proposal. The research committee sits in May so hopefully I will get the go ahead to proceed. The next step after this will be submitting the Ethics approval.

 

Rethinking my research project

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Due to changing my job recently I have had to rethink where I will carry out my research project. My original idea was to do the research at the university where I was working. The com pronation of organizational and technological change combined with the support staff restructuring would have been an excellent area for the investigation. Unfortunately now that I have moved to another role in another organization I am not going to be able to go back to the original site. There are a number of logistical and ethical issues to consider for example getting time to go back to the organization and interview subjects, get time to carry out observations and gain access to internal documents. Ethical issues included getting the support of the Directorship for the area under investigation and gaining access to subjects and materials with permission.

Since joining the new organization I have been working to identify potential areas of interest. The difficulty so far has been to find the combination of organizational and technological change and support team change. I have though recently identified a potential area of interest, there organization is having built a new centre for housing administrative staff to deliver customer facing services. Staff will be moving into the new build and will also be using a new IT system. The project is being managed by external consultants and is being delivered through five main project streams.

I am considering tracing the development of the new setup from August this year through to September the following year. This will enable me to work with the people concerned in their current team and group structure through to the move to the new building and the introduction of the new IT system. If I am granted permission by the organization I should be able to interview people throughout the change process and build an identity profile from the existing to the development of the new one. This project gives a good opportunity to observe staff in action and to trace ideas and actions through documents and other artefacts. This opens the door to using ANT as the research method supporting the development of the case study.

Thinking about Quantitative Research

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I have started working on my next assignment  for the quantitative research methods module. I’m using an online Likert scale questionnaire to collect the data. The population from whom the sample is being selected consists of 180 staff. The sample will be randomly selected and will consist of a 10% sample.

The each member of the population will be randomly allocated by a computer macro a number between 1 and 180. The selection of the sample will be made from another macro that will generate 18 random numbers between 1 and 180. The output numbers will be matched to the main population list.

People selected will be sent an email by email mail merge. The email will contain a link to the online survey. The aim is to gather a minimum of 9 – 10 responses for the analysis part of the assignment.

The main challenges at the present time (AKA the beginning) are:

  1. Making sure the computer macro’s work and generate the random numbers.
  2. That the selection of staff from the randomly generated list are available to complete the survey.
  3. That enough people will respond to the request to complete the survey.
  4. That I am clear in my own head what the outcome of the survey is going to be.
  5. I am looking at Factor analysis as a possible analysis technique – (Field, 2013).

I am planning on getting the survey completed and out to recipients the week beginning 17th March.

 

Field. A, (2013) Discovering Statistics Using IBM SPSS Statistics, Sage, Los Angeles, USA. 

Convergent interviewing thoughts on the process

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After completing the assignment on using Convergent Interviewing (CI) and really reading thoroughly the papers and guidance in the literature (especially the one’s by Dick, 1998) I feel that CI is definitely a method that is worth further consideration for my thesis. What I like most about it are the issues of higher validity and reliability, the focus on taking small amounts of notes rather than making full transcripts and the fact that it can be implemented as a project in its own right.

The project aspect is quite interesting in terms of getting the Reference Group together which for me is similar to having a Project Board as part of a PRINCE2 or similar project process. Organizing the Reference Group will I think be an interesting – in terms of challenging – process. I am assuming that the Reference Group would be composed mainly of departmental managers or team leaders as they would be people who would have the ability or authority to make decisions and suggestions about who should be included in the interviewing rounds.

The other interesting or challenging issue would be deciding on whether to use (at least) one other interviewer. On large projects CI tends to make use of more than one interviewer and in some of the papers I’ve looked at up to  six. Although there is always the option of carrying out all the interviews myself the big advantage is using one other interviewer would enhance the reliability of the research by allowing cross referencing and reducing bias.

Having another interviewer would add an interesting dynamic to the process of the research project. How to recruit someone to work with is an interesting problem. One thought would be to get the help of a Masters student who might be working on a similar project and to use them as a research assistant. There are possible opportunities for this in the social sciences department. This  would add an interesting additional challenge to the ethical approval process.

With CI the use of two interviewers lends reliability and reduces bias through running interviews in parallel and then immediately after the interviews have finished the interviewers immediately compare notes and decide what the key issues or themes are. From these the next round of interviews are developed.

Sharing ideas and experiences I believe is a good way of building a creative dynamic throughout the interview process. The biggest issue that I found with doing just two interviews was typing up the transcripts from the voice recording. The first interview I did was 37 minutes long and took about 2 – 3 hours to transcribe. The second was only 15 minutes long but took about an hour to transcribe. The interesting thing about transcribing that I found was making sure that I did not add or remove any words. I think dealing with interviewing 20 or 30 people would require a serious amount of organization of the material and careful planning prior to starting the work. As already stated CI technically does not make use of long transcriptions of the interviews. In fact according to Dick voice recorders are not recommended. Dick recommends only brief note taking or using mnemonics to identify themes and issues during the interview and having only a page of notes at most.

To me this implies that there is a need for quite a disciplined approach to the process. The key issue for CI is ensuring that the initial interview question is further extended and more focused in order to gather information on more specific issues. For the assignment I only focused on one of the three theories that I am aiming to use in my full research project. These are, Sensemaking, Institutional Theory and Organizational Justice. For the assignment I only referred to Organizational Justice but after the interviews I carried out I believe that all three theories are relevant to the thesis at least as drivers into a direction for the project. CI is normally or often used in areas where there is little existing theory or where an area is under researched.

For the research project I believe that CI has the potential to lead to new theory development or an extension of an existing theory.

Thoughts on why anyone would want to be interviewed, or not…

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I asked the interviewee that I used last week if I could re-interview her as part of the Convergent Interviewing process. The reply I got was interesting, basically along the lines of “you interviewed me last week why do it again?”

This got me thinking about the difficulties of interviewing and why people volunteer to be interviewed. The question is, why do people agree to take part in interviews or, what’s in it for them?

A number of points and questions arose from this thought:

  1. Getting interviewee participants is not easy. There has to be a benefit to the interviewee otherwise why would they agree to participate?
  2. What is the incentive for the interviewee participant? I think there is a very narrow and short lived engagement process that occurs in the mind of a potential participant. Possibly the potential participant’s initial thought is based on a feeling that someone is interested in what they have got to say about something – although I’m not sure what this says about randomly selected participants. Why the hell would a randomly selected person want to participate in an data collection exercise? Surely there’s even less motivation for them to participate?
  3. I can see how purposeful selection could lead to greater engagement but again there has to be some kind of incentive for the participant but I’m assuming if someone is told that they have been selected on the basis of their expertise then they might be more forthcoming.
  4. The potential difficulties of getting interview participants and getting people to agree to more than one or two interviews is potentially a difficulty if the researcher is undertaking Convergent Interviewing or just wanting to go back to speak to people again. There are also issues around timing, availability, getting a room and also if you are going back multiple times to people issues around confidentiality might come up because of something as simple as people going off for meetings.
  5. When planning interviews and selecting participants I think depending on the number of people you need to interview it would be good to have more people to interview than absolutely necessary in order to keep numbers up in case some participants decide not to turn up or walk out during an interview.
  6. In some ways small numbers of participants might be easier to manage than large numbers because you can build a closer relationship with potential interviewees and they might be more likely to make a commitment and a contribution.
  7.  I think there is a possibility that the feelings of the interviewer could have an effect on the interviewee. For example today I had a second interview scheduled with my participant from last week but I was feeling tired and did not really want to proceed. I needed to drive up some energy in order to make the interview happen again. As it turned out I did do the interview but it was not as effective as the one I did last week possibly because I was not in the mood but I also detected that the participant was also not in the mood. This could be a significant downside to interviewing – how does the interviewer keep their feelings and physical demeanor neutral so that they do not ‘contaminate’ the interviewee and influence the energy and motivation of the participant?
  8. After completing the two interviews I realized the importance of having sound questions. I found that especially in the second interview I realized that the question I asked was not specific enough but I did not want to ask a leading question either.

A lot of the literature around interviewing is based on getting a valid statistical sample and the methods that can be used to make interviewing more effective but there is not much (in the books I’ve looked at) on why people actually volunteer to be interviewed and why they don’t. I think purposeful selection of participants for interviewing might be the way forward – where this is a choice – because I think choosing people might be more effective than the random sample because of the issues around massaging ego’s on one side and people not wanting to be involved on the other.

I think I have gathered a reasonable amount of data that is interesting in terms of the research questions that I have used but I think if this was my full scale research project I would need to do a lot more work around question design and thinking more specifically what I want out of the interview. Reading the literature prior to the interviews has helped my thinking in terms of the domain of interest and contextualized in terms of what my participant has said and the restructuring process that is currently going on.

 

 

Convergent interview number two

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I am planning to carry out my second Convergent Interview on Monday 16th December with the person I interviewed this week. I’m aiming to review and draft the transcript of the interview from this week and then work out a new interview question. I will try to make sure that I am much better prepared for the next interview than the first one!

The first interview

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I carried out my first convergent interview on Tuesday morning this week. It was an interesting experience. I decided to use an information and consent form and send these to my interviewee for information. I used the LSBU forms from the ethics site. In the information form I outlined what I would be doing and what the aims of the interview were. I booked a meeting room in the university in order to ensure privacy and confidentiality. There was no telephone or computer just a table and four chairs.

It was fortunate that I had produced and sent the information form. I arrived at the meeting room about 10 minutes prior to the interview. My interviewee arrived said hello and then left to get something. I suddenly realised that due to being tied up with something just prior to leaving to the meeting room I had forgotten my notes and the interview question. A great start. Fortunately I had my iPad with me and was able to access my DropBox account where I had stored my notes and the question.

When my interview subject returned I was ready to go. My participant said that she had read my pre-interview notes and the consent form and was happy to proceed. Although I had included in the consent form a line about being able to withdraw from the interview at any time I wanted to say this but I forgot to.

I did manage to go through my notes and explain what I was intending to do. I had remembered to change the batteries in my digital recorder and I had tested it the day before. I also decided to double check the recorder instructions to make sure I knew how to use the machine.

I read in a text that once the interview has started to not touch or check the recorder as this will avoid drawing the interviewees attention to the device and interrupt the flow of the interview. I did remember this on the day.

The interview was scheduled to last between 30 and 45 minutes because the interviewee had to leave for another meeting at 11:00. After I had explained what was going to happen I spent about 5 minutes chatting about the DBA and how this module was designed to get us to practice interviewing as part of an assignment. We chatted easily for a few minutes. The interview started properly at 10:15 , I started the recorder and asked the question. I was uncertain that asking a single question would result in enough of a response. The interesting thing is that the process of convergent interviewing focuses on individuals who are likely to be able to respond to a question due to their expertise or position or interest in the issue.

After asking the question the interviewee talked non-stop for about 20 minutes without any interruption. It was not necessary for me to prompt at all. I decided not to intervene at points where I thought the interviewee was starting to run out of things to say. These points tended to be where she slowed down her speaking or briefly stopped talking. I think there is a slight fear that stopping talking is a problem in these circumstances and there is a feeling that the interviewer needs to jump in and ask another question or prompt.

Leaving the person to just stop was interesting. The short silences were actually slight moments of thought and reflection and I strongly resisted the urge to ask something. My interviewee would then naturally re-start the answer sometimes in a new direction or just continuing from where she had stopped.

At one point I did ask a follow-up question mainly for clarification and this seemed effective. It was really just a small prompting question. I did this several times in the end in order to keep the answer on track. I felt that this was within the spirit of convergent interviewing because I had not planned any but the first main question the rest became just prompts.

After 37 minutes the time was 10:55 and I decided that the interview had reached a natural stop point. I was aware that my participant needed to be away by 11:00 so I stopped the process and thanked my interviewee for her time. I said that I would be reviewing the data over the weekend and would likely come back next week with another question stemming from this first one and the result of the interview. My participant said this would be OK.

I asked her how she felt doing an interview that had one primary question and she said she had actually enjoyed the experience and felt that the experience had been like a counselling session and she had managed to talk through a lot of issues that had been of concern to her. I said I felt that she could have gone on for another hour and she agreed also mentioned that she did not really need the prompting as it was easy to talk through the issue as there was so much to discuss.

I felt that after the initial uncertain start the interview continued and was carried out well. The single question and occasional prompt asked to a person who was deeply interested in the subject was effective and produced a significant amount of useful data. I will be transcribing the data over the weekend and will see if there is another question that can be used next week. My aim now is to have one more interview with the same participant to see if convergent and divergent data emerges.

Consultation begins turbulence increases

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The university has begun a consultation process to gather the views of staff with respect of the change proposal that has been drawn up by the new VC. A series of staff forums where staff can raise issues, concerns and suggestions have begun. These are being chaired by senior managers some of whom have been given notice that their jobs are at risk of redundancy. The response of staff to the proposals at these meetings has varied between resignation and an acceptance that the Schools structure is a done deal and anger at the way that the process has been implemented. The anger at the implementation seems to fit very well with views on Organisational Justice specifically the aspect Procedural Justice and Informational Justice.

I have noticed that in the last few days formal meetings seem to always start with a discussion about the restructuring. There does not seem to be any part of the organization that has been left untouched by an element of uncertainty. I have found that asking people simple questions about the restructuring elicits long answers with strong views on the situation. This leads me to an assurance that using Convergent Interviewing is a sound method of gathering data.

An interesting point to note is in the literature on interview techniques much is made of the interview process whereby the interviewer should make an introductory statement at the beginning of the interview e.g.

  • Identify the auspices under which the research is being conducted.
  • Purposes of the research, funded or for a thesis.
  •  Indication of what the research is about.
  • Indicate why the subject has been chosen.
  • Make it clear participation is voluntary.
  • Assure the respondent that their identity will not be revealed and all information will be confidential.
  • Provide opportunity for respondent to ask questions or raise concerns.
  • Ask some simple opening questions and lead to the main substance of the interview.

(Bryman, 2012)

The interesting point is that when interviewing strangers the lead in to the main interview is probably essential in order to gain the confidence of the interviewee and to put them at ease. I have found that asking people I know and work with at work a question the usual response is for the colleague to open up with their views expansively and almost immediately. My view is that there is a strong possibility that I am going to be able to gather a lot of interview data for the assignment and the thesis project with little problem.

I have attached notes that I took at a consultation meeting that took place on Wed, Dec 04, 2013.

Consultation Meeting Notes Wed Dec 04 2013

Invitation to part time staff to consultation meetings received Thu, Dec 05, 2013.

Part time staff invitation to consultation meetings December 2014

Restructuring FAQ #1 posted Dec 05, 2013.

Restructuring FAQ 05122013

Bryman, A, (2012), Social research Methods, Oxford University Press, Oxford UK.

Turbulence continues

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The new VC has held a senior management group meeting where the change strategy was presented. A number of breakout groups were formed to discuss the changes. Feedback from the groups was essentially supportive of the strategy to move from faculties to schools. The main concerns were with the process, the perception that the institution had been thrust into a state of uncertainty and concerns about how staff will respond to this. It was agreed that staff should provide their thoughts either in teams or as individuals and feed these back to a generic email address so that the VC can start to gather view. The other main area of concern was the lack of detail in the current proposal and the fact that several senior managers have been given notice that their posts are at risk of redundancy. This was seen by many as potentially destabilising for the whole organization as there is now the possibility that some of these staff will leave before replacements have been recruited leaving the institution without leadership at a critical and turbulent time.

I am now very keen to start interviewing for the assignment as there is a lot of rich data in circulation. I would really like to interview  about ten people but at the moment this is not possible. I will however record any useful data and views here.

The issues raised at the meeting have clear resonance with the three core theories that I am considering using:

  1. Sensemaking
  2. Institutional theory
  3. Organizational Justice theory (OJ)

Issues relating to Organizational Justice are already coming to the surface, specifically issues around how the proposals for change have been developed and how these have been communicated. Staff are generally accepting of the need for the organization to change.

In terms of OJ there are some real connections between what is going on and the theory.

The study of people’s perceptions of fairness in organizations:
  • Distributive Justice:  The form of organizational justice that focuses on people’s beliefs that they have received fair amounts of valued work-related outcomes
  • Procedural Justice:  People’s perceptions of the fairness of the procedures used to determine the outcomes they receive
  • Interpersonal Justice:  People’s perceptions of the fairness of the manner in which they are treated by other people
  • Informational Justice:  People’s perceptions of the fairness of the information used as the basis for making a decision

The issue at the moment relates most strongly to Procedural Justice, Interpersonal Justice and Informational Justice. People do not understand the process that has brought about the changes, people do not consider the process to be fair and there is a deficit of information.

OJ also relates strongly to individual and team performance and has been shown to have an impact on customer service. These issues are clearly of concern to the organization. My question for the assignment research project is:

  1. What are the key issues that employees attend to during organizational change?
  2. How do these issues differ across the hierarchical levels of non-supervisors, supervisors and executives?

The interview question is:

Tell me what you think is good and what is bad about the change that is occurring.

I am planning on using Convergent Interviewing which is a form of semi-structured interviewing. The structure is supplied by the initial question and then the interviewer leaves the interviewee to speak for as long as they like. This can be up to 90 minutes. The interviewer can use small prompts to keep the interviewer talking such as asking ‘what else’, ‘how do you fell about that’, nodding but mainly being very attentive.

In some ways the change is happening about a year too soon. By the time I get to asking the question for the main project the change situation will be about a year into the change. It’ is likely that some of the staff in the institution will no longer be working there in a year. This is a little frustrating.

 

Turbulence in action

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The university where I am planning on carrying out my research project has appointed a new Vice Chancellor (CEO). The VC designate will be starting work officially on the 1st January 2014. He has though started to attend some meetings on a weekly basis with the current senior management team and individual members of staff and students. The aim of these meetings seems to be for the new VC to gain an early understanding of the institution and some of the key challenges facing it.

On Monday this week the senior management teams of the Faculties were called to meetings with Executive Deans where changes to the existing structure were outlined and a number of posts were identified as being at risk of redundancy. These included the Executive Dean and Pro-Deans of Faculty.

The main message from the Executive Dean was that although there is going to be a lot of turbulence over the coming months it is essential that business as usual continues as there are still students to recruit and the business to deal with.

I have spoken to a small number of staff in a variety of positions about the proposed changes and it seems that there is a common thread of uncertainty but for some people resignation and the view that change is absolutely necessary even if it results in their own positions being made redundant.

The trades unions today issued an email to members saying that they have not confidence in the new VC and asking the Board of Governors to cancel his contract prior to his January 1st start date.

The VC has stated that the changes are not financially driven or a post reduction process but a way of ensuring the long term sustainability and success of the institution.

According to Scott (1995) the dominant sociological view (of an institution) focused on the effects  of cultural belief systems operating in the environment of the organization. There is a possibility that people feel a high degree of uncertainty because they see a threat to the culture of the current organization.

Scott, W.R, (1995), Institutions and Organizations, Sage Publications Inc., California, USA.

More thoughts on sensemaking, organizational justice and turbulence »

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The situation where I would like to carry out the research for my assignment is changing rapidly. The new CEO has presented the plan for changing the organizational structure to the board of governors and there is a meeting on Monday 25th November with senior managers. At the meeting it is expected that information will be presented outlining the new structure.

I will need to identify some key participants to interview soon as I want to make sure that I speak to people who are currently in existing posts and roles and who may be or will be affected by changes. This will allow me the potential to go back at a later point to review their opinions on the changes after they have been implemented.

The feeling of organizational turbulence has definitely increased over the past week due to the build up to the meeting this week. There is an increasing feeling of uncertainty and apprehension. This is very rich material for carrying out the interviews. I would expect to find that people are attempting to make sense of the situation and would also expect to find that people discuss issues relating to justice and how decisions have been decided on by the executive.

Since my last post I have been looking at various papers investigating large scale change in organizations. I have also been looking at methods for organizing my assignment  literature review. In doing this I came across two related and very interesting papers. One Introducing the Literature Grid: Helping Undergraduates Consistently Produce Quality Literature Reviews by Peter Yacobucci (2012). I have created a spreadsheet for the purpose from the specification in the paper and this seems to work very well and I think it will be very helpful. I looked at using NVivo 10 for the literature review but I found the application crashed several times.

I found I had wasted a lot of time setting things up in NVivo 10 so at the moment I am sticking with the spreadsheet. During the search for a method of organizing my literature I started to search for papers  in Emerald on interview techniques. In one, Employee perceptions of organizational change: impact of hierarchical level by Jones. L, Watson. B, Hobman. E, Bordia. P, Gallios. C, Callan. V (2008).

The abstract describes the paper as, The purpose of this paper is to examine the influence of organizational level on employees’ perceptions and reactions to a complex organizational change involving proposed work force redesign, downsizing and a physical move to a new hospital. I found this paper to have several similarities to the situation that I am intending to investigate in my assignment.

I realised that as the situation is similar but separated by time and being a different field (a hospital) I noted that the authors specify two research questions that I could re-use in my own research. In my view it is perfectly acceptable to re-use these questions because the situations are different and it would be interesting to see how the outcomes of my assignment study differ or are similar to this study.

What I found to be very interesting in the paper is a reference to Convergent Interviewing. When I first read the paper I did not pick up that this is in fact a specific interviewing technique. I re-read the paper and found that the interviewers asked their participants only one question. I found this confusing at first. After looking up references to Convergent Interviewing I found that the technique is based on asking just one question. The question has to be very well crafted in order to illicit a significant response from interviewees.

In the paper there is a question that chimes with my own research so in the same way that I am going to use the research questions I will use the same interview question. According to the papers on Convergent Interviewing the interviewer should ask the question and then use deep listening in order to focus on the answer and use some small prompts if necessary. The aim is to allow the participant about an hour to 90 minutes to talk about their thoughts and views. The interviewer records the main points of the interview in their notebook.

I think it is going to be a challenging getting my participants to respond adequately to one question. On the other hand I believe that people who are struggling to make sense of a turbulent situation will be willing to talk about their feelings and opinions because they will have strong views on the situation – either positive or negative.

I will be approaching some interview candidates this week.

 

 

Thoughts on sensemaking, organizational justice and turbulence

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I have now decided to stay with the topics of sensemaking, organizational justice and turbulence for my assignment and thesis. At the session on Saturday 16th November I went through my presentation with the group after initially thinking that I would not bother as I thought it was not going to be good enough. I also had  a bit of confidence loss in what I am doing. Whilst doing the presentation  I realised that the topics and themes are actually worthwhile. I received good feedback from the group.

I need now to firm up my thinking on a whole range of issues including:

  1. Questions – I need to repeat the Goldilocks test on the questions but more importantly I need to make sure that the questions will be able to elicit responses of value to the research.
  2. Methodology – I need to make a decision at least for the assignment on the methods that I am going to use. My initial thoughts are that Grounded Theory would be a good place to start because it will allow me the opportunity to practice coding in software (such as NVivo).
  3. Scope of the assignment research project – this needs to be carefully crafted as there is going to be a very limited amount of time to carry out the actual research component and I will need to identify people who can possibly provide data.
  4. For the assignment I am going to look at doing a small amount of triangulation by finding relevant documents and carrying out some textual analysis.
  5. Ethics – I will need to inform the participants that ethical approval has been granted and that they have the right to curtail the interview if they wish to do so.
  6. Participants – I need to identify the participants for the assignment. I only need one or two people for the assignment and there is an opportunity to interview the current VC before he leaves at the end of December. I would want to have some excellent questions though before proceeding as I would not want to waste his or my time.
  7. Timeline – I need to work up a firm timeline for the research. This should be straight forward, assuming I can get the participants on board.
  8. Literature review – I need to work on my literature review very, very soon. I have been doing a lot of reading recently but I need to get my references into Mendeley and organised into categories.
  9. Theory – I need to firm up the underlying theories that I am going to use. I was thinking of using ANT which is complementary to the Case Study method but Grounded Theory is similar in terms of following the actor.

Things fall into place

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After spending the last few months investigating Actor-Network Theory, Organisational Justice Theory, Institutional Theory, socio-technical systems, service systems, sensemaking, service science and team change I have FINALLY had an epiphany that has led me to a much more concrete and plausible research topic.

I found a PhD thesis Managing Organizational Change during Institutional Upheaval, Bosnia-Herzegovina’s Higher Education in Transition by Dijana Tiplic. After reading through the thesis I realised that where I am working is an organization in upheaval. A new Vice Chancellor will be starting in January and this change at the top is already causing uncertainty throughout the organization.

I felt that the word upheaval seemed a bit loose so decided on turbulence. I have found that this is a good choice as turbulence is actually a technical term relating to large scale organizational change either as an external influence or an internal one. Some external turbulences include the outbreak of the First and Second World Wars, the 1929 Stock Market crash, the 2008 financial crisis, changes in legislation affecting businesses such as tax changes, interest rate changes etc.

Internal turbulence can be produced by a change in the Chief Executive Officer, a major IT infrastructure implementation either one that succeeds – look at the introduction of ICT’s into the newspaper industry by News International, or one that fails and almost or completely destroys the company.

I have realized that there is a good link between sensemaking in organizations, institutions, turbulence and change. These concepts are all active where I work and as the organization and it’s institutions are on the verge of a turbulent change (new CEO) this is an opportunity too good to pass up.

I am going to use the situation to investigate how an organization controls change in turbulent times and make the transition from one leader and associated ideas to another. Staff in the organization are concerned and apprehensive about the future and are anticipating significant changes. There is a view that the university will be transformed from a faculty based structure to a schools based one. This view tends to be based on the fact that the new VC’s ex-university is a schools based organization.

Speaking to various people in the organization there is a strong view that the whole place is going to be transformed into a new structure. People I speak to about the new VC tend to speak as though they are justifying their positions. I have noticed that there has been an increase recently in a focus on managing performance. This seems to be related to people / managers in the organization justifying their position or the position of their team. There is also a feeling of uncertainty amongst some staff that this change might be an opportunity to remove them.

The challenge for the organization is to manage the turbulence so that it successfully emerges stronger and better positioned in the market i.e. profitable.

So the title of my thesis is going to be: Making sense of the organization in turbulent times. I’ve Googled this title and it does not seem to exist!

Qualitative Research, Assignment 1: Background to research project

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For assignment 1 I am planning on investigating the impact of change on a service delivery team in a UK university. The team consists of 28 posts and includes 5 sub-teams each of which has a first line manager. The current situation is the the university is going through major changes with a new Vice Chancellor coming into post early in 2014. The structure of the university is likely to change from the current 4 faculty structure. There has been a drive for student facing teams to develop into customer focused services. The team structure has just  been subjected to a review and re-organisation with a realignment of overall line management. The aim of the change is to simplify the structure (previously half the team reported to a Head with the other half reporting to academic Heads and other posts. The new structure is being built from the point of view of a client:service team with demand from clients (academic departments) provided as needed.

More far reaching changes are planned for example the Head of Support Services would like to move the team from it’s current operating philosophy of operational delivery i.e. day-to-day silo based low-level customer involvement process design towards a service systems approach.

One definition of a service system is: A service system (or customer service system, CSS) is a configuration of technology and organizational networks designed to deliver services that satisfy the needs, wants, or aspirations of customers. (Wikipedia, accessed 03/11/2014). A number of key points can be derived from the definitions of service systems that have a practical impact such as:

  • Integration of organisational networks and technology
  • High degree of customer contact
  • High levels of customer satisfaction
  • The flow of services
  • Degree of customer involvement
  • Co-creation of services and value
  • Outcomes in the customer space places a requirement on the provider to have much closer cooperation and coordination with the customer
  • Co-creation is about join creation by the

    company and the customer.

These are current ideas. To be revisited shortly.

 

Servce Science Research Areas – IBM Suggestions

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On the IBM Service Science website there are some suggestions for research areas for SSME. One that resonates with me is:

People in Services

  • Customer behavior in networked environment, service social network and models
  • Organizational relationship, alignment, and culture

My research question at the moment is:

Where organizations have implemented service systems and service innovation cultures, how have staff teams been transformed and developed and what measures constitute success?

Sub-questions:

  • What is service innovation?
  • What are service systems?
  • What are the expected results of service systems and innovation?
  • What is the impact of service innovation on service culture?
  • How is customer / service value determined?
  • How scalable is service innovation and service systems?
  • What management techniques are applicable to service innovation and service systems team transformation?
  • What constitutes a service innovation?

Service Innovation and Innovative Services

SSME Some initial notes

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Services Science Management and Engineering. SSME at IBM.

Baumol’s cost disease. From Wikipedia.

Snap 2013-09-22 at 19.28.56

Invention of Service Science at IBM.

University Relations Worldwide Community. Explanation, learning and overview.

IBM Service Science Wiki. IBM Global University Programmes.

International Society of Service Innovation Professionals. ISSIP.

Service Science. Standards.

Modelling Service Relationships for Service Networks

Re-thinking the title (2) Themes (1)

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I have been looking into the field of service innovation recently and reading some papers on this. Here is a definition of Service Innovation from Finland’s research agency, TEKES.

Service innovation is a new or significantly improved service concept that is taken into practice. It can be for example a new customer interaction channel, a distribution system or a technological concept or a combination of them. A service innovation always includes replicable elements that can be identified and systematically reproduced in other cases or environments. The replicable element can be the service outcome or the service process as such or a part of them. A service innovation benefits both the service producer and customers and it improves its developer’s competitive edge. A service innovation is a service product or service process that is based on some technology or systematic method. In services however, the innovation does not necessarily relate to the novelty of the technology itself but the innovation often lies in the non-technological areas. Service innovations can for instance be new solutions in the customer interface, new distribution methods, novel application of technology in the service process, new forms of operation with the supply chain or new ways to organize and manage services.

After reading the paper Innovation, Network Services and the Restructuring of Work Organisation in Customer Services by Matias Ramirez (2004) I have changed the title of my thesis to:

An investigation into the impact of customer support teams on the diffusion of service innovations: An Actor-Network Approach.

The central themes of the thesis being:

The impact of:

  • methods of diffusion of service innovations in an organisation;
  • organizational culture on the adoption of service innovations;
  • job description design (Enforceability Criteria: Task Centered or Function Centered) and service re-organisations on the diffusion of service innovations;
  • communication methods on the how well service innovations are adopted and accepted;
  • management techniques and philosophy on how well service innovations are implemented;

There are also themes around:

  • employee discretion to take decisions, try new work methods and to introduce innovations (Function Centered);
  • re-structuring and the effect on staff, customers, services and service innovation within the organization.

Possible useful resource http://www.service-innovation.org/