The paper seeks to understand something of the emotional life and emotions that accompany working at the organizational boundary between the information technology (IT) function (build and operate information systems) and business functions of the enterprise, particularly for IT middle managers and the associated roles. The paper considers what explanations psychoanalytically informed organization research may offer in making sense of this and how socio-analytic thinking (Bain, 1999) may contribute to possible hypotheses for shaping action and intervention to improve organizational and individual outcomes in the work system.

The paper focuses attention on the experiences of IT managers and staff in their work interactions with the business units they support and the ways they manage the pressures and demands imposed on them in doing this work. These pressures are imposed by undertaking the actual work tasks and by the enterprise as a whole. It considers the psychological and emotional experiences of being a member of this IT function that in turn is part of the technical system of work in the enterprise.

As is evident from other studies into social defences in work groups and enterprises (Menzies, 1970), this paper identifies and explores these ‘established’ behavioural patterns of defence in work groups within the information technology function. These defences are socially constructed patterns of behaviour that protect the group from its painful experiences of the task by reducing anxiety. Of themselves, social defences are neither good nor bad. It is the extent to which they dominate the task that indicates their usefulness or inappropriateness to completing required work outcomes. These patterns repeat themselves in the face of the ongoing threats and pressures that emerge in the course of the technical work with the broader business system.

The organizational area of information technology (IT) and the work tasks of information system (IS) development and operation, represent an area of organizational study in need of inquiry. These work tasks require extensive collaborative efforts between business groups within the enterprise and their supporting IT or IS groups. The degree and effectiveness of this interworking is needed to increase as technology evolves and as business pressures to quickly get new products to market increases. When the collaborative work on these tasks is poor, there often is significant wastage of the enterprise’s resources and opportunities.

In the interests of exploring these questions and issues, examples and data are used from a research case study of a large telecommunications enterprise. This enterprise is a very heavy user of information technology and is highly dependent on the effectiveness of its IT function in supporting all areas of its business.

The central example from this case suggests that an unconscious, socially constructed set of defensive behaviours exists in the work system and is focused on the tension experienced in the IT middle management roles. IT middle managers in the case study organization are chronically absent from their work groups. I look at the effect this has on the IT work group, both at the level of the group’s task and the emotional experience of the individual and group. It is suggested that this absence of middle managers from their work groups can be seen as a form of psychological splitting between management and staff groups.

In endeavouring to further understand this, the following working hypothesis has been formulated,

“the abandonment by IT middle managers of their work groups is a socially constructed defence against the unbearable tension middle managers experience in reconciling business demands with IT capability.” The social defence reconciles the unrealistic hopes of the IT senior management group for systems delivery with the actual uncertainties and anxieties faced by the IT work groups in doing the detailed work tasks of information system delivery. IT senior management are seen by middle managers as detached from the reality and experience of the work task of delivering information systems. The IT work groups are known by middle managers to be fearful of punishment and blame for not being able to deliver or failing to deliver. The paper explores this using data from the case study.

Significance of IT Business relations to enterprises’ effectiveness

The IT function of an enterprise provides the enterprise’s business operations areas with computer based information systems, enhancements and fixes for these information systems, development of new systems for the support of new products or work processes, as well as management and planning for these diverse and complex technical activities. It requires understanding of the i. computer and telecommunications technologies, ii. nature of the enterprise’s business activities, iii. processes for working with computer systems, and iv. processes of engagement with the broader enterprise. This is the case whether the IT function is provided in-house to the enterprise, by an external organisation or by some hybrid of the two.

The IT function of an enterprise can be a source of significant wastage in resources, delayed time to market, direct cost and lost opportunity cost. For some enterprises in certain industries this can amount to many tens of millions of dollars lost or wasted. The need to have the IT groups operate effectively is a significant success factor for most enterprises today.

The middle management layers in the IT organization structure play a major part in the IT-Business relations. The pressures on the IT middle management layer are substantial and stem from the broader work system of the enterprise and the IT group. Along with the technical task of developing and operating computer systems, these IT middle managers are charged with the actual resolution of many of these pressures and dilemmas. They include the:

ongoing cost reduction of IT operations and information system development,

need for increased work output from IT work groups,

need for information system and data quality improvement,

need for information system alignment with operational business needs as they emerge,

changes (often radical) to business requirements whilst the information system is being developed,

changing business strategies of the enterprise,

complexity of information systems, the interactions between information systems and with user groups, and

rapidly evolving technologies in all areas of computing and communications.

The Research

In the research project from which the case study example and data are drawn, qualitative research methods have been applied to the research design and the data gathering. Participative action research has been the major framework for the inquiry, within which individual and group interviews and workplace observation have combined with the researcher’s direct experience as the means for collecting data.Participative action research as presented by Long in Gabriel (1999) involves members of a particular work system involved in a collaborative research process with each other as a research team on an aspect of their own work system.

The research uses clinical research methods, where the value system of the researcher(s) is recognised in the research. The researchers are not independent of the social system being researched. Their participation in the research and the stance they take up influence, effect and even change the enterprise that is hosting the inquiry (Berg, 1985).

In making my sense of the data, I have applied theoretical concepts and frameworks that broadly constitute the discipline of socio-analysis as is outlined by Bain (1999). I have drawn on ideas that explain the emergence of anxiety in work groups and the various dynamic and fixed responses groups unconsciously make to reduce their anxiety (Bion, 1961;Rioch, 1976; Jacques, 1955). The primary task of the IT function is considered, with particular attention to the different levels of meaning that exist within groups across an enterprise (Lawrence, 1986). These are all considered within the broad systemic framework of socio-technical systems (Trist, 1951; Emery, 1960; Miller, 1967; Miller, 1990; Emery, 1993) and the integration of technical or work task system with the social or people based system the constitute the organization of the enterprise.The case study draws on qualitative data from a collaborative research project currently being undertaken in a large telecommunications company in the Pacific Rim, known here as Multinational Telecommunications Corporation (MTC). The research is inquiring into the effect that the group dynamics within and between IT groups and between IT and business work groups has on information system quality.

Introduction to the case study

The case study draws on interviews and observations across the Corporate Information Technology group (CIT) of MTC and its immediate stakeholders. This group is the largest of several IT groups in the company, consisting of 1500 staff and managers and 900 outsourced staff and managers. CIT has responsibility for the core information systems supporting MTC’s billing, service assurance, service activation and product sales processes. The MTC organization has five layers of management below the CEO and then one or two layers of supervisors leading small teams of staff. In practice these layers of management are often more extensive than the ideal that is officially sanctioned.

The IT-Business Relations

What follows are general observations of the IT-Business relations as identified from the research. They set the overall backdrop and tone that is present in the areas of MTC studied in most of the interactions between the IT and business groups. There is a backdrop of frustration and dissatisfaction with most interactions across the IT-Business relations. The focus of business frustration and its associated anger is directed from outside of the IT groups and across to them. Similar emotions are felt within the IT groups and are directed up the organizational hierarchy.

The business managers experience frustration and anger with their perception of the progress of IT system changes and Corporate Information Technology (CIT) group’s failure to deliver and over the disregard CIT staff show for their business needs and direction. They describe themselves as confused as to why the relationship with CIT continuously fails them and about what could be done to have it work well.

For IT staff and middle managers there is frustration and anger from their interactions with the authority figures with whom they interact; both their own senior manager and those of the business. Many report a fear of punishment from the most senior managers within CIT if they fail to deliver their work deliverables on time. CIT’s motto is “we deliver on time”. The most senior management hold to this and others in CIT have the conscious belief that they will be criticised if they fail and the unconscious belief that they will be punished if they fail.

Within Corporate Information Technology group we see a highly rational work culture with a rational work task. It is a culture where emotion is equated with irrationality. The primary task of CIT is to deliver IT systems and system changes to the business on time. It is quite rational and yet it has become emotionally loaded with fear of failure, fear of punishment, anger and resentment. These emotions create pressures and anxieties that spread across the CIT social system.

CIT staffs’ emotions usually seem to be denied within the work groups, by the management groups and to often be repressed by the individual staff members themselves. Members report that they

“… don’t think about emotions much, just try to shut off from them ... no one else has got any time for them or for anyone else’s problems, there are enough ‘real’ problems around here.”

Yet in talking about their experiences of work, CIT staff and managers quite quickly speak of their frustration, fear, anger, confusion and even sadness. They speak of how they suppress their feelings and some talk of the effects the emotions have on them and their immediate work group.

The dynamics identified and discussed in the following sections are reported here as outcomes from the initial phase of the research. These dynamics are important as they underpin how fully work groups will engage with their tasks and processes, thus affecting the organizational outcomes (Hirschhorn, 1988). From them it becomes possible to more fully understand the enterprise and formulate actions to sustainably improve organizational outcomes.

Environmental Dynamics that impinge on the Enterprise

There are a number of practical, well documented pressures and demands from the business environment that impinge on Multinational Telecommunications Corporation (MTC). Many of them are quite new in the company’s history. They are as follows:

Deregulation of the local telecommunications market,

A hostile consumer regulator,

A universal service obligation (USO) across the entire country for data and voice services,

Customer backlash against the perception of poor service,

Entering new markets with value added products,

New competition in all existing markets by many competitors,

Local competition from competent, experienced global telecommunications companies with new capital invested in the latest network technology,

Working with legacy technology,

Keeping share price up and profits high,

Public/Government majority ownership, and

National political influences on MTC business decisions.

Key Dynamics that impinge on the IT Groups from MTC

Anxiety gets moved around the work system, from the business units of MTC into the IT Groups, particularly CIT. Pressures and tensions from the IT work system, the business system and the broader market system produce high levels of tension and anxiety within the IT function. This is reported and experienced by individuals and groups working within the IT function of the company. This anxiety gets moved around the IT system depending on its organization structure and the status of the current development releases.

The organization (CIT) restructures when the anxieties become so unbearable to a particular work group or groups over an extended period of time that the information systems development process severely degrades to the point where it is in jeopardy of failing to function. If this were to go unchecked, it could cause the eventual failure of the whole enterprise’s functioning. At the point where the severe degradation in the IT operations and development processes is noticed, this will eventually lead to a restructuring of the work system to regain effective IT functioning. This option of last resort occurs because the IT management has been unsuccessful in identifying and rectifying the root causes of the degradation in the operations or development function. This is evidenced in the original formation of CIT, in its subsequent restructure in June 1998 and in its decentralisation and outsourcing in January 2000.

IT is used to resolve and facilitate differences between business units on the nature of particular business initiatives that the business units have been unable to resolve. This is evident in the data from the research interviews. A great many work items that support more than one business unit carry differences in the needs and expectations of each business unit and these differences require some sort of reconciliation if work was to begin. This often results in the reconciling of divergent business requirements and expectations being left to the various IT functional groups. It is often further exacerbated by late changes required by the business to the release and requirements scope.

CIT has been used as a default facility for resolving or facilitating the resolution of hitherto unresolvable business differences of opinion. For some of these items the business has tried to resolve them and failed, for some there has been no time and for others the need has not been recognised. Facilitating these unresolvable business differences has put a great deal of tension on the CIT work groups and has made the work tasks more complex and extended their duration.

Just as this has happened with respect to specific business initiatives within a software release, it has also happened in the shaping of software release contents. The competing business contentions over the priority of business initiatives from the different and separate business works lists (Product and Marketing List, Retail Operations List, Corporate Operations List) have demanded significant CIT effort in their resolution.

Key Dynamics that impinge on the IT Middle Management

The key dilemmas discussed here for the IT middle management group are:

Their absence from work groups they are directly responsible for. The part work tasks play in this and the part played by defences against the anxieties they experience in the CIT social system and in engaging with their work tasks.

Their unwillingness to represent and communicate any of their work group’s problems or negative issues to the CIT senior management. When they do communicate problems they usually put a positive spin on the message or they do communicate the message at the latest possible time.

The difficulties to and often failure in interpreting to their staff the actual meaning of messages and directives from senior management.

Their own inability or unwillingness to engage with the work issues of their staff. This is exhibited in middle managers often only being able to direct staff to meet the required project outcomes. They are often not able to facilitate the realisation of these outcomes for their staff.

There are a number of associated dilemmas that flow from this on to the work groups. These dilemmas are:

staff often experience the absence of their work group manager as abandonment.

staff are left with the group’s operational work task to do without support or ongoing direction from middle managers: their designated leaders.

staff are left to make sense of the organization, its initiatives and the senior management’s directives on their own. They have no assistance to interpret the messages, in how they should take these messages up across their work tasks nor as to how consistency across work groups will be assured.

they experience CIT as a large group, most of which is unclear and confusing to them. They only know tasks, people and actual authority figures that are local to them. How the whole of CIT functions is unknown or unclear, leaving them prone to defences of splitting, projection and denial.

Middle Management Identification with Senior Management

When one looks at the identification of middle managers to their superiors and superiors’ roles it is quite positive, although neither is there a naive idealisation. Middle managers generally are well aware of the pressures on these roles in the current work system and they directly see the 70+ hours a week the senior managers put in just to “keep afloat”. Below are some quotations from middle managers about their relations with their senior manager.

“I’m trying to learn to be like him, not just like him but also like his boss too.”

“There’s no way I want her job the way it is now. Work has already contributed to my marriage break up. Things will have to get be more balanced here for me to do her role.”

“I can see myself in Mitchell’s role. I give it 18 to 24 months. He will move on within 2 years. … I may have to move to it via a role in the business.”

“I’m also here to do what my boss wants done. Just like I expect my staff to work to my direction, so must I. I discuss what we are doing with Janet, but at the end of the day she is accountable … it just has to be done … regardless of my personal or professional feelings.”

Most middle managers interviewed did want to take up senior manager roles and believed they would learn how to be senior managers through their association with existing senior managers. It clarifies for them what works and what does not. For some middle managers this association is one of being mentored as well as being managed by their senior manager.

A more bearable Primary Task

The primary task of CIT is to deploy and operate information systems for MTC that meet agreed business expectations and to provide a sustainable systems environment in all conditions for the business operations of MTC. There are a number of secondary tasks that sit underneath this primary task and that support and realise it. For CIT to survive and succeed they all must be managed and worked with. They are as follows:

Operate and sustain information systems,

Develop sustainable information systems that are aligned with the business need and that are quick and cost effective,

Improve work process – quality, timeliness, architectural alignment, business alignment,

Reconcile competing business priorities for information systems, and
Manage skill base to support information systems work.

The research has focused most heavily on staff and managers in the planning and development areas of CIT, areas that work most closely with the secondary tasks 2, 3 and 4.

Tasks 2 and 4 require engagement with the business groups and their management. It is in these interactions that CIT members directly experience the businesses criticisms of their failure to deliver systems and the inadequacy of the systems, along with the insatiable desire of the business for IT work to be done. Task 3 supports the outcomes of 2 and 4 and is internal to CIT requiring little interaction with the business, thus no exposure to external criticism of the IT work group. Improving work process (3) is an attractive work option to IT at both levels of staff and management. It offers these beleaguered groups some respite from the specific sets of criticisms and complaint they receive from the business and also offers some hope that their work tasks can improve as too can their experience of work. The danger is that it may become the existential primary task of the IT group.

Many IT managers suggest that IT may have an impossible task. Certainly their customers, the business, have an insatiable appetite for systems and system changes to support their hopes for respective business opportunities. The IT outcomes can only succeed to a limited extent at best and will always fail some users to some extent because of structural constraints within the enterprise. These structural constraints are:

resources required for all approved business initiatives do not match available resources,

effects changing market drivers have on products and on operational business activities,

inexperience of business representatives specifying detailed business requirements,

changing business requirements and emergent clarity of requirements,

technical constraints imposed by historic systems investment decisions, and

immaturity of certain technologies to service business needs, that is, some things are technically impossible.

In its own way, the business transforms the meaning of CIT’s primary task to suit its own concerns. The business wants all ‘technology associated’ risks to be managed out of the “business equation” by technology groups like CIT. It is hoped that by doing this they can just get on with managing and developing the business, responding to market needs and opportunities as they appear with little actual regard for the possibility or impossibility of the system changes that this may mean.

There is a broad disappointment across the business units about

“IT is not being what the business wants …”, and

“… they (IT) work to their own agenda ...”

even where that agenda is defined by the technical constraints of the work tasks in systems development or by those of the existing information systems. The IT groups are seen negatively as obstructionist to business development.

Work group tensions in delivering information systems

The MTC business and its management are generally critical and blaming of CITs failures: “CIT is too slow, too expensive, delivers misaligned systems repeatedly and cost the company business opportunities”. Work groups and middle managers in CIT often experience this as being a harsh, punishing and unending undervaluing of their best work efforts. These feelings are moderated for many senior IT managers through their interactions with senior business managers. The senior IT managers gather a view based more in reality than in the interpolation of impressions and data. The senior business managers, whilst having serious concerns about the service provided by CIT, also understand the difficulties CIT has in doing its work.

Most CIT staff work very hard at what they understand their work for the business to be. They describe their constant disappointment that the business only finds fault with the outcomes of their individual and group’s work. The constancy of this disappointment and anger their customers have along with their own frustration and anger toward their management for not sufficiently supporting them and their work in the face of this onslaught from the business takes a heavy toll on staff commitment to their work tasks. Managers describe it as “… painful to see staff distressed but I have so little capacity to alter this”.

With respect to the near constant criticism from the business and the difficulties experienced by staff and staff work groups, many of CITs senior managers initiate activities within their areas of accountability to improve the work process to alleviate both business criticism and staff difficulties. At times this has occurred in a broader more systemic approach across the whole of CIT.

Exploring the working hypothesis within this organizational context

Middle managers experience the distress of their staff being unable to resolve the changes in business priority and requirements. The middle managers report themselves as being disturbed by this, particularly the frustration they feel in not being able to spend enough time with their work groups: time that would resolve many of the problems the group has. The work group’s ineffectiveness in these situations leads to chronic, incomplete or late delivery of work outcomes and the associated dissatisfaction for management and staff. Senior IT managers expect the IT function to deliver more to the business, in shorter time frames whilst accommodating more uncertainty in the business’s definition of what it requires. To quote one senior manager “… if we work smarter I’m sure we can do all this and deliver to our customers …”. The middle managers experience these demands of their senior IT managers as incompatible with the actual work tasks the work groups are undertaking for their business customers. There is a perceived disinterest of senior managers to considering this incompatibility. In the terms of the telecommunications industry “there is a disconnect”. The middle managers feel these tensions very strongly and generally consider them to be irreconcilable.

The CIT organization appears to offers them an option: to join with peer managers in a work task initiated by their senior manager, typically on “process improvements” for the overall area. This usually involves spending 50% to 80 % of their time away from their group. Whilst the staff report that these initiatives provide no improvement to the group’s process and business managers continue to report a worsening in overall delivery of IT systems and system changes, IT senior and middle managers report that these activities “ …help things work better”. These IT management “inter-group events” seem to address the anxieties of management rather than CIT’s primary task.

In this way the middle managers are officially removed from their work groups and the distress they experience in participating in the work task. Whilst this is authorised by senior management, many middle managers describe it “… as if we just abandoned the team … leaving them to their own devices …”. Some middle managers at times manage to hold the split between IT management and staff in their identification with their work groups, in their acknowledgment of the distress experienced by staff in their work groups and in their awareness of the role responsibility to the work groups they manage.

Through this virtual and temporary reassignment, middle managers are brought closer to senior management, a group they aspire to join and one they often fantasise about as ‘punishing of failure’. As such they join this inter-group activity to please senior management and to escape the coal-face tensions of the work group.

Staff feel the middle managers absence as abandonment at the times when they need to resolve issues with or take matters to the manager and the manager is not there. This can be that the manager is not present or available, not returning phone calls or emails or does not have sufficient time to spend with staff even when he or she is physically in the office. For example, one work delivery issue in a work group took 30 business days just to get the managers email acknowledgement of the issue, still with no direction on how to progress it. By this time there was no possibility of resolving it so that it would not impact the delivery date of the software to the business customer. The absence is also felt by staff as abandonment when they repeatedly do not see the leader of their work group for days or even weeks at a time.

This sense of abandonment resolves itself into the staff members’ progressive disengagement from the work task and their identification with the larger IT group they belong to and are a part of, in this case CIT. It may be replaced with a stronger than usual identification by the staff member with their immediate work group or sub-group. This group may also constitute their main sentient group within the work system.

One can certainly question how important the middle manager role is. It is clearly needed to oversee and manage a complex set of relationships on behalf of the work group. Relationships that pertain to engaging with business customers about their needs and expectations, interacting with other IT work groups on their combined IT task and the communication through the organization hierarchy about the progress of the work group’s tasks. All this needs to be done by the middle managers with sensitivity to interpreting and presenting information to each specific audience. In the absence of the manager these things get done by other staff but there is less coordination and consistency within and between these activities. The middle manager role is also needed to hold the work group as it grapples with the uncertainties inherent in its work task. When this holding is required by the work group but is not available, work outcomes suffer and the morale of the group falls. Similarly, middle managers need an effective holding environment that assists them in taking up their role as leaders and managers of work groups.

The case has shown that if the containment provided by the enterprise is not good enough or robust enough to support the staff or manager in dealing with the disturbing and chaotic feelings they have as part of their individual and collective experience of their work tasks, the system is likely to dissipate in some way. People and groups may physically or psychologically leave their work groups, the enterprise or their tasks and roles; as ways of defending against these painful experiences.

Absent Managers as a work system defence

In order to understand this proposition put forward in the working hypothesis there are some intermediate steps that develop it.

When staff had been left without managers, then no one is accountable for the wastage of the group or the non-delivery of outcomes to the schedule as expected. Staff of supervisors cannot be held accountable.

When middle managers are off doing ‘important organisation improvement activities‘ (for many, almost a second job) they have been directed to undertake by their senior manager, they are not held accountable for the failed outcomes of their work groups. Staff and team leaders take up similar authority whether the middle manager is present or not. This authority allows them to operationally work on their tasks and the natural exceptions that emerge in the course of the work task. When work events fall outside these bounds of discretion and authority, it falls to the middle manager to make decisions about action or to negotiate acceptable outcomes for the group and its stakeholders. Without the middle manager, the group looses its ability to adopt to its changing circumstances.

When senior managers establish and resource work tasks to improve IT effectiveness in order to meet business expectations and resolve existing business (customer) criticisms, they are not publicly criticised or held accountable for the failures of any of the IT releases by their managers.

In all of this, there is a general dispersal of accountability for core work outcomes, particularly outcomes that have failed.

What becomes evident is a series of group behaviours that are linked together. Whilst these group behaviours are linked in practice and in the service of the IT function’s primary task, their systemic impacts upon each other and other groups are not understood, as the impacts are non linear. No group, middle managers, senior managers or staff would consciously desire to organize work such that work groups were effectively leaderless. Yet this is the product of the interlinking of the respective group behaviours. These group behaviours are collusive and unconscious in nature in that they help manage the tensions and anxieties associated with the IT task. They do this by moving the tensions and anxieties around the system and displacing them onto roles that cannot be held accountable or onto roles that do not exist.

The IT task may be an impossible task and as the IT function fails to solve broader organisational differences, these differences fall back onto the business enterprise where they originated and went unresolved.

Conclusions

The IT groups respond to the anxieties they experience, these responses cause further tension and pressure in the social system of the enterprise, which in turn are experienced by other groups (and possibly their own group) as anxiety provoking. Cause and effect run in a non-deterministic manner across the work system, in a manner that seems so complex that it cannot be known in advance, only experienced or observed as it emerges and then not in its entirety. Perhaps the metaphor for the IT group may in fact be its worst fear and unrelenting problem: the computer program with a bug in it, where one of the strains of software virus is “absent managers”. The feedback loops within the work system (the relations between groups), often amplify the demands and pressures, the anxiety and tensions throughout parts of the IT work system and in this way contribute to its dysfunction and the eventual wastage of large amounts of enterprise resource.

Anxiety gets played out throughout the work system with one of its manifestations being the absence of IT middle managers. ‘Absent managers’ represent, at the level of the group, an unconscious splitting process between the work groups of management and staff. The split is between the insatiable demands for systems changes with the system changes that are possible to be made.

Collaborative research provides an opportunity for the research participants from within the enterprise to understand something more of the enterprise as a whole, drawing on research data from many points of observation across the work system. For the collaborating researchers within CIT this has been their experience. We have thought together on what these many perspectives of the work system may mean and what they do not mean. From this position it has been possible to plan more finely focused data gathering tasks and establish action learning projects: projects that may question the ‘work constraining’ operating assumptions and practices that have been identified through the research. One fledgling action learning project is looking at middle management roles and possible ways to liberate them from some of the intense contradictions inherent in these roles, as discussed in this paper.

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