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Article Excerpt
Those in control of some organizations seemingly institute practices that promote employees' participatory decision making. Outwardly employees increasingly are asked for their input; however, this trend does not necessarily imply that management wishes to relinquish control (Mumby, 2001; Mumby & Stohl, 1991). Rather, management uses subtle discourse to persuade employees to make certain decisions even as it simultaneously and paradoxically encourages worker participation in decision making (Stohl & Cheney, 2001). This same process is likely to occur in volunteer organizations, as these organizations also face issues arising from coordinating members' action.
Tompkins and Cheney (1985) referred to this process of influencing employees' decisions without overtly stating demands as unobtrusive control. Among the many permutations of unobtrusive control, two assumptions can be asserted: (a) organizations function through the inherently communicative process of members' decision making, and (b) individuals who view membership in their organization as a positive concept will be more susceptible to guidance from its management when making decisions. Early scholarship on unobtrusive control focused on persuasive and controlling aspects of decision making in organizations, sometimes reducing the construct to internalization of organizational values (e.g., Bullis, 1991; Treadwell & Harrison, 1994). However, more recent scholarship seeks to understand the process by which individuals resist the unobtrusive control of their organizational identification (e.g., Conrad & Haynes, 2001; Larson & Tompkins, 2005).
This study provides insight into the duality of unobtrusive control and resistance in a civic leadership organization, and begins to answer Lewis' (2005) call for organizational scholarship in nonprofit organizations. The investigation revealed that both the control and resistance features of the identification construct help to describe how members of a volunteer organization enacted or resisted the organization's decision premise in six combinations. Situated within the unobtrusive control and identification literatures, this qualitative study featured interviews with alumni and staff of the organization. Findings indicated that the relationship between unobtrusive control and resistance in an organization may be partially explained by individuals' multiple organizational identifications, professional identification, and other interpersonal relationships, specifically when examined in an organization whose product is political influence in the community rather than monetary profit.
Unobtrusive Control
Unobtrusive control is the process by which members of an organization are guided in making organizationally relevant decisions. Tompkins and Cheney (1985) identified three defining aspects of unobtrusive control: the inculcation of premises, the ongoing feedback of employees' decisions to management, and the influence of identification. First, they argued that the process by which individuals' organizational decisions are controlled involves the inculcation of value-laden premises by management in organizational members. In other words, managers employ strategically persuasive messages that are ambiguous enough to guide employee behavior in a wide range of situations (Cheney, 1983a, 1983b; Cheney & McMillan, 1990). Employees, drawing on these value-laden premises, are guided because premises logically lead to only a limited number of decision conclusions. For example, if management inculcated the premise that time is more valuable than money, then an employee confronted with an option to purchase express freight for additional costs presumably would decide to approve the increased postage.
Much unobtrusive control research, however, takes for granted the content of value-laden premises and the cognitive gaps that always exist between premises and their conclusions. Of course not all premises are equally understandable or persuasive. While premises such as protecting children might be virtually incontestable, premises such as profits before people are highly controversial. Thus, the content of value-laden premises and the gaps between premises and conclusions are likely sources of member resistance to unobtrusive control.
The second aspect of unobtrusive control is the feedback of organizational members' decisions to management (Tompkins & Cheney, 1983). The processes of premise inculcation and the member's subsequent decision create feedback between the individual and management. Returning to the example, the employee who approves express freight communicates to management that management's inculcation of a particular set of decision premises was effective.
Third, scholars studying the construct of unobtrusive control often employ a theory of identification to explain why some members' decisions may be controlled by inculcated premises and other members may resist or reject this guidance altogether. To date, researchers have not explored the degree to which this process is mindful or mindless (unconscious). The following section describes the influence of identification within the unobtrusive control construct in greater detail.
The Influence of Identification: Issues of Control and Resistance
Identification is the process by which an individual claims oneness with or belongingness to a group (Ashforth & Mael, 1989; Burke, 1969; Mael & Ashforth, 1992). A theory of identification makes the unobtrusive control construct flexible enough to account for the complex tension that exists between the persuasive (hereafter, controlling) aspects of management's messages and individuals' abilities to resist their organization's attempts to influence their decisions (hereafter, resistance; Conrad & Haynes, 2001; Larson & Tompkins, 2005). This tension accounted for by identification helps explain the complex and fragile, versus stable and monolithic, ways in which organizational members resist and yet are controlled by the premises of social groups with which they identify.
By recasting Giddens' theory of structuration into the language of identification, Scott, Corman, and Cheney (1998) described the tension between control and resistance as a duality of structure. They argued that identities both shape and are shaped by identifications. Specifically, they argued that identities structure people's behaviors. Simultaneously, however, people act in ways that help them to recognize important identities to which they belong (see also Kuhn & Nelson, 2002). Thus, Scott et al. rejected a dualism between the controlling features and the resistance features of identification. Instead, they argued for a duality between them, which explains how members simultaneously are controlled by and resistant to their identifications (see also Tracy, 2000). Though we are sensitive about reifying a false dichotomy of control and resistance, and we recognize that control and resistance features of identification co-occur, we discuss control and resistance separately for readability.
Control Features
Employees' identification with an organization influences their decision-making processes, making it easier for that organization to inculcate value-laden premises (Cheney, 1983a, 1983b; Cheney & McMillan, 1990). Individuals' levels of identification with any particular organization or group may range from highly identified to not identified (Mael & Ashforth, 1992). Highly identified members' decision making is more likely to be controlled by an organization when the process of identification results in a linking of the individual's self-concept to the organization. Individuals classify themselves and others into various social groups, thereby drawing positive implications for their own self-concept based upon the positive distinctiveness of these classifications (Tajfel & Turner, 1985). For example, if an individual claims her employment as a university teacher to be a positive and distinct membership, that individual will understand her own self-concept as being like a teacher from her university.
While there may be numerous idiosyncratic reasons why individuals choose to claim belongingness to the organizations of which they are a part, two reasons are especially common. First, individuals are motivated to identify with a group or organization because it allows them to vicariously claim the accomplishments of the group (Ashforth & Mael, 1989; Mael & Ashforth, 1992). Second, individuals tend to claim positive and distinctive group memberships to boost their self-esteem (Brown & Starkey 2000; Dutton & Dukerich, 1991). Thus, as Tajfel and Turner argued (1985), claiming positive, distinct memberships enhances self-esteem because an individual's self-concept is partially made up of salient group classifications.
These ego-enhancing features of identification provide a space for management to control organizational members' decision making. When members link their self-concept to that of an organization, their decisional behaviors are likely to become greatly influenced by management's messages. Some researchers have argued that highly identified members act and think in ways preferred by management (e.g., Bullis, 1991; Treadwell & Harrison, 1994). In doing so, unobtrusive control is reduced to internalization of values manifest in employees' total enactment of an organization's will. However, the controlling features of identification are by no means total. The construct of identification also recognizes the influence of individual resistance to management's attempts to control decision making at the individual level, thus explaining decisional behaviors in a more complete way.
Resistance Features
The control features of the identification construct are mitigated by at least two resistance features. First, an individual's process of identifying with various organizations is dynamic in that individuals maintain multiple and overlapping identifications, and the salience of these identifications change depending on the situational context (Barker, 1993; Barker, Melville, & Pacanowsky, 1993; Gossett, 2002). While many scholars have recognized the importance of identifications with volunteer organizations in the unobtrusive control process, most have investigated employing organizations, and only a few have provided empirical investigations of such organizational identification processes (Ganesh, Zoller, & Cheney, 2005; Scott et al., 1998). Mumni associations, boards of directors, Lions Club, Masons, professional and trade organizations, and Rotary clubs are examples of organizations whose majority of members are not employees. Staff of volunteer organizations, like management of employing organizations, often needs to control the decision...
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