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This paper describes a new way of working with the method of Organisational Role Analysis, (ORA). Whereas traditionally ORA has involved work between an individual client and a consultant, this paper reports on work between a consultant and two role holders within the same organisation. The method has been developed as part of an ongoing collaborative action research project in correctional services in Victoria, Australia. It was developed when the researchers were grappling with finding a way for the organisation to work with what appeared to be a quite rigid compartmentalisation and splitting of roles. Given a proposed re-organisation of task in relation to offenders, (viz. the introduction of case management) it was imperative that many roles within the service should communicate and work together across traditional boundaries. New ways of taking up the task had to be found through experience. New working relations were implied, but the question arose as to how these might be developed when the culture usually led to ‘like’ speaking with ‘like’ and reinforcing old solutions to old ways of seeing problems. A major outcome of our work with multiple role holders was what we have now termed ‘role dialogue’. By role dialogue we mean a process whereby organisational members converse: i) holding their own role and task in mind, ii) while creating enough reflective space to take in, and work with, information about the role and task of the other(s). Our paper will describe this outcome and give examples of how it developed. The context of the wider project The project within which the role analyses took place is a collaborative action research project between researchers from the Graduate School of Management at Swinburne University and a correctional services organisation. The aim of the project is to assist in the development of case management as the organisation’s primary approach to offender management and development. In contrast to the common method of imposing a blueprint for organisational change from above, Swinburne is assisting this organisation to take an action learning approach where-by change is gradually shaped and tested by those responsible for the actual work. The general aim of the research is to develop ways of exploring the implementation of case management into correctional services, predominantly through using correctional officers (unit staff) as case managers. Although this staff may be supported by specialist welfare workers, it is the unit staff who are in day to day contact with prisoners and who are perhaps best placed to know the prisoners in their institutional lives. Custodial staff members have taken on many aspects of case management over the past few years, particularly through the use of the Individual Management Plan for offenders and prisoners. However, before this project there had been no systematic way of understanding what case management meant to different staff members, nor any a systematic way of implementing case management throughout the system. The research task is being achieved collaboratively through a series of stages. First, to discover and analyse the existing practice and understanding of case management throughout the correctional service; then, second, working with staff to develop a rigorous operating case management model that is flexible enough to suit various locations and offender categories. The work reported on here was done subsequent to the initial analysis that involved the researchers in interviews with a wide cross section of staff from a variety of correctional facilities across the state of Victoria. In order to describe the role analysis work, it is worth quoting a section of the report that we gave to the organisation management and all those who had been interviewed. What is described here in terms of ‘isolated roles’ was background to the use of role analysis. An organisation has at its centre, a primary task or set of tasks to perform. These are the reason for its ongoing existence. For correctional services, this task is ‘officially’ understood as carrying out court orders, which in turn is about incarcerating or otherwise constraining the activities of offenders, whilst encouraging them to address their offending behaviours, with the aim of reducing the risk of re-offending. However, different role holders or workers in the organisation studied engage with the primary task from different perspectives. This simply states that by virtue of his or her role and associated tasks, a Governor, for instance, will engage and work at the primary task with a different idea about that task, than, say, an Industry Supervisor or a Community Corrections Officer. Each role will have a slightly different task idea (Chapman, 1996) in mind. It is evident from talking to people in the organisation studied that the task idea of managing offenders and convicted criminals is changing. Increasingly, staff is asked to think of offenders and prisoners in terms of individual needs and circumstances, rather than simply as recipients of a unitary institutionalised procedure (such as imprisonment or supervision). This is so, even though the task is ‘officially’ framed in terms of managing orders and sentences, rather than in terms of engaging with people. This is so, even though for many role holders, the experience is of engaging people; of engaging offenders (often known as crims), whether this is welcomed or distasteful; filled with anxieties and uncertainties or chances for job satisfaction. The changing task idea seems basically to be officially framed as managing a process whereby an offender can take up greater responsibility for dealing with his or her offending behaviours. More often, it is experienced by field staff as helping offenders to learn new ways of dealing with their lives; particularly within the institution of prison or the institution of criminal justice more broadly. The official framing is often different to the lived experience. The changed task comes on top of the task of maintaining security and is experienced very differently in different locations, with different populations of offenders. The task is operationally different in prisons and in community corrections Interviews with staff indicate that they see the primary task idea of the organisation as changing. Role holders have different responses to this. What’s more, we believe the data indicates that different people are exposed to, and see, different aspects of the changes that stem from the change in task idea. This is not simply because some choose to see one thing whilst others choose to see another. Of course, attitudes come into play, and the interviews indicate that many people believe that some changes are not implemented solely because of poor attitudes. However, we are arguing that different roles engage with the task differently and hence are exposed to only a part of the whole. For instance, security chiefs, or those roles more oriented to security tasks, tend to see case management in terms of security. Industry people, who have through their roles a lot of day to day contact with prisoners, understand that aspect of case management that focuses on the prisoner’s needs, say about getting in contact with family, or fears about bullying within the culture. They have a different understanding of the importance of programs and feel the tensions coming from head office about meeting their production targets. They tend to value the industry program as most useful in developing a work ethic and providing a correspondence with life outside of prison. Many of the people interviewed were able to see the perspective of roles other than their own. Sometimes this was because they had been in those other roles at one time, sometimes because they were clearly willing to think about the connections between their own work and the work of others. It seemed clear to us, however, that the system was poorly organised in terms of facilitating work across roles. Yet this is what is required for a more integrated case management process. There is a lack of organisational infrastructure to support an understanding by all role holders of (i) their own role and (ii) how this fits with others to (iii) engage the new task idea as a whole. Consequently roles tend to be isolated in the work, with few or no ‘role bridges’ in the structure to link one role with another. At times this role isolation is bridged informally or personally, but the need for linking is not taken up in the actual structuring of work. The change in organisational task idea that we have described, and that was described to us by the respondents in this research has implications for the task of case management. Through interviewing many people, we had the impression that different roles are seeing different aspects of the overall task. Some have a much broader view than others, some think that they have the commanding view, whilst others simply feel the effects of their engagement with the task. But it is only in the bringing together of the perspectives and experiences of different roles that the fuller implications of the change on case management as a practice could be understood. It was through this idea of the bringing together of different role perspectives, that the idea of paired role analysis was developed. Before describing how we effected such a process, we will briefly describe what we understand by organisational role analysis. Organisational Role Analysis ORA was first developed for work with individual managers to aid them in an exploration of their role as it is discovered, developed and lived within the organisation (Reed, 1976; Quine and Hutton, 1992; Armstrong, 1995). It is a method that enables the individual role holder to discover his or her role in the context of their institution-in-the-mind (Armstrong, 1991). This is done through one to one intensive work with a consultant, who, through a series of meetings, aids the role holder to examine how his or her role has been shaped in the light of their experience of the institution as a whole. This is no simple cognitive exercise. Not only is the role idea explored, but also the way in which the role holder comes to hold significant emotional roles within the organisational system, and the way the emotional experience of a role has become internally organised as part of what we term the ‘organisation-in-experience’ (Long et al, 1997). Real discovery and learning emerges with a willingness to recover emotional, social and cognitive meanings within the role and its tasks. This requires both client and consultant staying in touch with the immediacy of their experience within the sessions as well as their joint capacity for reverie and reflection on material brought to the session from the workplace. Collaborative work is central to such an endeavor, as is a psycho-analytical attention to unconscious processes. The researchers had included ORA as part of the original design of the action research. Our intention was to do an initial organisational diagnosis (around the project focus of case management of offenders) and then to work with people in key roles to further explore the role and to aid role holders in formulating important areas for change. The diagnosis, which involved individual and group interviews and observations across the whole organisation, indicated that different roles engaged with the overall task of case management in quite different ways. Whereas this is not surprising, and one might reasonably expect different role holders to have quite different organisational experiences and frames of reference, the degree to which different aspects of the task were compartmentalised seemed quite dysfunctional. For example, those who worked in industries where many prisoners spend up to 6 hours a day, rarely spoke to those who worked in the area of educational programs, where prisoners might spend day time and evening hours. This was not simply at the operations level but within regional management also. The research team and the project steering group believed this needed to be addressed in the project. Out of this problem, the research team devised a new way of working with the ORA method. Several pairs of roles within the organisation were identified as demonstrating opposite sides of an important organisational split. Role holders were then invited to take part in ORA sessions with a consultant – a member of the research team. Taking part, however, meant agreeing to ORA where two role holders worked together on exploration of each role and the meaning that each role had for each of the pair. We were aware that this move, from a conventional dyadic structure for the ORA, to a triadic structure of a consultant working simultaneously with two clients, involved a fundamental shift in technique and focus. However, at that point it seemed like an appropriate approach and we resolved to monitor our work for what it revealed. In the interim we kept referring to the technique as organisational role analysis. What we did The research team designed the ORA sessions in a session prior to contracting with the corrections personnel who were invited to take part. Because of the initial interviewing task described above, the researchers knew the names and roles of a large number of potential role holders who might take a part in the process. Thus the researchers were aware of: The representation in the sample of roles representing the splits that had been encountered in the first phase of the research; The logistical difficulties that were likely to be encountered in setting up ORA sessions with researchers and role holders in different locations, in different roles and with different tasks; The place in the organisational hierarchy represented by the nominated sample of possible working pairs. Our initial report to the organisation had identified the issue of role isolation. Although many roles were affected by the change in task idea related to case management, there were cultural and structural impediments for collaboration across roles. Following this, it was decided by the collaborative project steering committee that different role pairs might represent particular organisational splits and that the organisational role analyses could be conducted with these in mind. For instance, some splits noted were: uniformed and non-uniformed staff members; prisons and community corrections staff members; industries and programs staff members; security functions and case management functions; suburban and country; head office and field staff. The researchers worked with others on the steering committee to select potential pairs for the role analyses. While we assumed that steering committee members from the organisation might be best placed to suggest potential participants, in was only in retrospect that we came to recognise that this assumption itself might be flawed because most of those on the steering committee were from head office, itself only one side of a head office-field split. Consequently, because head office staff members did not always know the exact operational nature of many roles within the organisation, pairs were selected somewhat blindly. Further, while some of the pairs selected allowed for the outcomes of the role analyses to lead to new practice implementation, other pairs were less able to do this. Some pairs were more constrained in the work they were able to effect because of geographical distance, their placement in different sub-systems that rarely interacted, because they came from quite different hierarchical positions in the organisation and because they had little authority in the areas where their different roles might interact. Nonetheless, six pairs were eventually selected, each of the three researchers working with two pairs. Potential participants in the ORA project were pre-issued with a brief description of ORA and its place in the objectives of the overall collaborative action research project. The design of the work was for pairs from roles within public corrections to work together with one of the university researchers for four ninety-minute sessions. Roughly these were: Session 1: Introduction Working with the concepts underlying organisational role analysis, especially those of the organisation-in-experience and the finding, making and taking of a role; Linking these concepts specifically to the role holder’s own roles within the organisational context; Connecting the task of the role analysis to the wider collaborative task, viz. through exploration of organisational dynamics and structures, to assist in the development of case management as the primary approach to offender management and development in the organisation studied. Role Drawings Both members of the working pair were asked to do two role drawings. The first was to represent oneself in role, as related to other roles within the workplace, however self defined. The second drawing was from the perspective ‘as if one were the other’. As regards this second drawing, a methodological divergence occurred due to the three researchers’ differential interpretation of ‘as if one were the other’. One researcher asked the pairs to draw ‘as if each were in the other’s role’, i.e., demonstrating their own perception of the others’ role. The other two researchers asked their pairs to do a drawing of their own role the way they believed the other in the pair perceived it, i.e., demonstrating their own perception of how the other saw their role. The divergence was serendipitous because it cast different lights on the institution-in-experience held by individual workers within different roles. Initial Processing The remainder of the first session was spent in relatively brief processing of the four drawings done by the role holders. Session Two The second session placed the spotlight on one member of the working pair. Examined were issues of role perceptions, role idea, role relatedness and task idea. Also explored were the relationships and relatedness of tasks and roles to other tasks and roles within the organisation, and also to the primary task of the overall collaborative research project. This ‘spotlighted’ member was required to hold to his or her organisational role throughout the session, albeit within a spirit of collective inquiry. The researcher had the single role of inquirer with the task of facilitating the uncovering of role and task ideas held. The second member of the working pair had two roles. The first was to join the researcher in this exploration. The second was to relate from within their own organisational role to what was emerging. Session Three The third session placed the spotlight on the second member of the working pair. Session Four The major focus of the fourth session was on the interaction between roles. That is, the working pair was required to examine what each of their roles had to say to the other and how that might affect the conceptualisation and performance of task. Again, this activity required that participants held in mind the task of the overall project. Role connections were explored in relation to case management as it might be practiced within the role holder’s specific work location and in the organisation as a whole. The role drawings were used as a reference point and provided subjective data throughout the sessions, but became less important as the data they held was brought into the conscious minds of the working trio – researcher and role holders. Outcomes The most notable outcome from the paired organisational role analyses was the emergence and experimentation with what we have now termed role dialogue. In simple terms, this means the process of role talking to role, rather than person to person. We will elaborate this working definition after presenting details of the outcomes. Role dialogue occurred more or less successfully in the working pairs depending on a series of constraints. (We will refer to the more negative constraints later in a section on problems). However, workable and creative role dialogues were achieved. This seemed to be related to several factors, which we will now describe. 1. Holding to role and the ‘reflective stance’ was central to the process. The role holders necessarily represented something of a range of abilities to take on board the concepts worked with and to understand the nature of their role within the broader systems of the organisation and the overall collaborative project. General intelligence, articulateness or position in the hierarchy, however, seemed less to matter than the individual’s capacity to take up a reflective stance vis a vis their own and others roles. This required holding closely to the roles required for the process and working from these. 2. Role relations rather than personal relationships were important. In their ongoing work, some role holders worked relatively closely together, whilst others knew each other only from some distance. In either case, personal liking, admiration and a similar position in the organisational hierarchy appeared to have little to do with the ability to get into role dialogue. If anything, dialoguing in role transcended personal likes and dislikes, interpersonal experience or role distance. Hence a Prison Governor was able to understand more clearly the role of Community Corrections Officers and their context for work. Both came to see how different expectations about the development of offenders were affected by the role context including how factors such as training, gender and age affected the ways in which the role of case manager was experienced and taken up. Underlying the emergence of role dialogue was - for some working pairs at least- a developing ability to appreciate something more of what taking up a role means. For most, task meant ‘job’ and role meant ‘place within the structure’. Such a way of thinking meant that role functioning was seen simply in terms of personal capacity and personality. Judgements about this might be made at an interpersonal level. Where the role holders were able to change their role-in-experience through relating role idea to task idea, aspects of the role dialogue themselves took on new meaning. Role dialogue meant that task could be engaged role-to-role, so that personal capacity and personality issues became relatively unimportant. This was important; particularly if the people involved worked within the same sub-system of the organisation. While the notion of dialogue had previously been experienced as two people talking to each other, participants were able to find ground where role spoke, and could be listened to because issues of personality were temporarily suspended. The unsurprising outcome (at least to the researchers) of this discovery was that the substance of interpersonal dialogue quite often took the form of gossip about co-workers. The substance of role dialogue, however, was the more fruitful and more enjoyable engagement with task. 3. The need to move from a position of ‘role narcissism’ to ‘role centredness’ through dialogue emerged as crucial. We mean by ‘role narcissism’ the tendency in some people to regard their own role as the dominant or most important role within the organisation. All other roles are then regarded as subservient to this role. This can apply also to role sub-systems. Thus an ‘industries manager’ within a prison might hold a view, and a concomitant institution-in-experience, which might be expressed as: ‘if we didn’t get prisoners to work, and customers to buy these products, the whole system would collapse for lack of sufficient funding.’ A senior Prison Officer might express his or her role narcissism as: ‘case management pays lip service to do-gooders, while we make the system work by keeping the crims locked up.’ A programs manager might say: ‘we are the only people who understand that the real purpose of corrections is about offender development and rehabilitation. Everything else is secondary.’ Role narcissism, one might say, fills one’s entire role space and leaves little room for the role holder’s consideration of other roles in the system. In the paired role analysis, however, the emergence of role dialogue surprisingly was not hindered by initial role narcissism. Almost the reverse was true. This was because the clearer the role holders were about the importance of their own roles and tasks, the more easily in role were they able to enter negotiations which are the backbone of role dialogue. The creative move in role dialogue was from a position of total role narcissism, which disregards the power and importance of other roles, to one of ‘role centredness’. Here other roles are recognised as important but one negotiates from a position of centredness, strength and confidence in the importance of one’s role. The desirable aspect of role narcissism, i.e., the centrality of role and the consequent ability to stay in role despite the pulls that might be exerted by others to move out of role, aids this process. In role centrality it is as if the initial narcissistic position provides the emotional fuel or background to the work, much as Bion (1961) considers that the basic assumption energises the work group. What we are suggesting here is that the process of role dialogue moves the players from initial role narcissism to role centredness, and it is this that promotes good negotiation. We also suggest that role dialogue will fail when the less desirable aspects of role narcissism are not transformed; that is, if players remain intransigent about the absolute centrality of their own roles. Take for instance a senior area management team. Role narcissism may be reflected in a fiercely locked-in competition for resources, where persons in roles responsible for particular functions consider only the needs of their own area. Alternatively, dialogue across roles to achieve a satisfactory overall budget and to balance the needs of different functions might be the result of managers negotiating from a role centredness, which also recognises the context of the overall system. This is not just about developing a common way of seeing, or a ‘shared mental model’ (Schein, 1993). It involves a potential space for learning that allows participants to be in touch with the organisation-in-experience that is manifest in their role narcissism. In the joint role analysis such instances arose. One occurred in a role-based exchange of insight between an industry manager and a programs manager. The industry manager’s double task was: a) to produce quality factory output at a profit for contracted customers; and, b) to keep a diverse population of prisoners ‘gainfully’ employed for six hours a day. The programs manager’s task was to work toward the provision of conditions for the personal development of prisoners as a means of addressing their offending behaviour. As colleagues, the two managers had a fairly superficial and defensive relationship in which they joked about their competition for prisoners’ time. Each felt their role was the most important in engaging the prisoner, and each had argued for prisoner time. In the paired organisational role analysis, where dialogue occurred between roles (rather than between persons), it emerged that industries in the region concerned were not truly productive because about one third of the prisoners involved were, in essence, unemployable. Further, it also emerged that these were the very prisoners with whom the programs manager needed to work. The outcome of the dialogue was an increase in the capacity of each manager to engage task and transform role competition into role complementarity. Both roles were required for working with appropriate prisoners. A role-based working relation was formed and enhanced through the development of the dialogue. Another example was the case of a Community Corrections Officer who believed that the holding of the burden of an overwhelming case-load was what held the whole system, Atlas-like, from collapse. In role dialogue she discovered that she could access support from a highly specialised therapeutic sub-system whose favored position she had both envied and eschewed. 4.Working in new ways across organisational boundaries-in-experience and in-the-mind became possible through the effects of role dialogue. Role dialogue allowed participants to think of their task and role contexts in new ways. For instance, an officer whose prime focus was in the area of ‘security’ began to think about how his role might support case management through his own interactions with prisoners, whereas before he had seen security issues as completely separate from case management. A Senior Community Corrections Officer was more able to take up the authority of her role after role dialogue with a Prison Governor. Through relating his experience in moving into a general manager role, the Governor was able to identify boundaries between different levels of roles, which was helpful to the Senior Corrections Officer in distinguishing the authority and accountability of a ‘senior’ position. Moreover, for this pair, beyond identifying the boundaries of their specific roles, each was able to identify more clearly the points in the system where ‘continuity of care’ across prisons and community corrections was largely non-existent. The result of this was that each was subsequently able to work in new ways with the ‘other’ sub system. Another role pair discovered a shared emotional connection when considering the capacity to say ‘no’ as a boundary condition of their roles. This affected their self- management in quite separate roles. The Prison Officer described part of his custodial role as ‘riding shotgun over the prisoners’ baser instincts, like greed and aggression’. For instance, there was a need to exert control over bullying tactics during meals because some prisoners would attempt to take food from others. He was concerned that an expanded role of case management, would threaten his authority to say ‘no’ in such situations. Alternatively, the Community Corrections Officer in this pair increasingly found she couldn’t say ‘no’ to the demands created by a system that seemed to be dealing as much with the mentally disabled as the criminal. Through their dialogue they explored what became spoken of as ‘the boundary of "no"’ and its contribution to the idea of good authority and how this was connected to the possibilities for case management in a correctional services system.
Constraints and problems We found several constraints on the method used and some issues that indicated those situations where the effectiveness of paired role analysis was reduced and the emergence of role dialogue hampered. First, the role dialogue may be less effective where the roles involved are structurally distant in the organisation. Unless the roles and tasks of the role holders are inherently able to ‘touch’ each other on a fairly regular basis, the process might become at worst a rather empty intellectual exercise, and at best, a shared experience for learning with reduced hope of effecting organisational outcomes from that learning. As with any other organisational skill, role dialogue requires practice and the chance to effect real outcomes. Nonetheless, this ‘at best’ outcome of dialogue between role holders who have little to do with each other on a day-to-day basis has advantages if the learning from the dialogue is internalised. For example, a Senior Prison Officer when working with a Community Corrections Officer was reminded of his ‘acting’ role as a staff development officer. Listening to the struggles of the other role holder enabled him better to work on this aspect of his own role. Were he able to take this work back to his workplace and use it as a basis for dialogue with others there, one might consider that the paired role analysis had opened up the possibility of full role dialogue through opening up a new space within his own role. Second, there existed in this exercise, a considerable temptation for the researchers to step out of the collaborative researcher role into the role of consultant or teacher. This appeared to emanate from a belief in the organisation that as consultants or teachers we might be seen as ‘expert’ in the field and able to give clear directions to operatives. This would fit with the normative culture and save our co-researchers from the anxieties and pain concomitant with action research, where outcomes cannot be predicted. Alternatively, we believe there was also an unconscious belief that as consultants we might be controlled, forced to ‘report’ and hence become disregarded when we did not produce what was immediately deemed to be required. Moreover, the pressure we experienced to become teachers was exacerbated by the genuine feeling among some role holders that they had not yet been appropriately educated for the practical and emotional demands of taking up the role of case manager. It was important to the creative outcomes of the role dialogue that the researcher held firmly to his or her role as researcher. This emphasised the collaborative nature of the exercise, as the researcher was not the only enquirer into the organisational process. It also placed the experiential discovery of the potential of role dialogue and the negotiations within it firmly within the role holders’ court. Third, the paired organisational role analysis suffered the difficulty inherent in many learning endeavors of how the learning of a few members might become available to the organisation as a whole. The culture of the organisation under study is characterised by an unconscious desire - perhaps indicative of a parallel process -to keep its members ‘locked up’. Thus organisational splits are entrenched and the climate encourages gossip rather than dialogue, and competition rather than negotiation. Where participants have been able to stay with the full experience of ‘role relations’ rather than personal relations, the effects of the paired role analysis have been more sustainable. Fourth, the exercise required a safe environment and a collaborative state-of-mind between participants and researcher. This was achieved in the current research by assuring confidentiality and anonymity. Only general findings were to be reported. Also, the researchers attempted to provide conditions for the sessions that were private, undisturbed and quiet. Often sessions took place away from the workplace at the University. In any case, the time and task boundaries were firmly kept. These conditions are not easily achieved in workplaces, particularly in the corrections environment, where privacy is rarely achieved for a variety of reasons. We recognise that role dialogue may be less easily achieved in the workplace where such conditions are not present, and where managers, often despite themselves, provoke an atmosphere of ‘getting it right’ (not getting it wrong) rather than of collaborative exploration. Finally, the experience has indicated the importance of carefully selecting pairs for role analysis. Leaving selection to the senior managers within head office may lead to the process being dominated by a narrow perspective. However, had we left the selection to staff in particular locations the learning that emerged across locations would not have occurred. Should we do this again, we would take into account the factors that we have discussed in this paper. But then, some important learning often occurs in the most unusual places. Conclusions Organisational Role Analysis is a powerful method of working with role holders to enable them, through an examination of the internalised institution-in-experience, to more fully recognise and take up issues of accountability and authority in their work roles. Throughout this method role holders are able to examine unconscious system dynamics that lead toward their taking an emotional as well as a task role in the system. Consequent understandings enable role holders to form hypotheses about their own part in system dynamics. In the project reported here, role analyses were conducted with pairs of participants from the same organisation. We had in mind the splits that we had discovered in the organisation, so selected pairs to represent opposite sides of these splits. Basically these splits reflected an organisation that was compartmentalised and roles that worked in isolation, despite the fact that the focus on offenders was common to all roles and areas. We expected role holders to learn more about each other’s roles and that they might learn to better manage themselves in role through such an exploration. We also expected that participants might learn more about the organisational splits identified, and might begin a process of improved communication between roles. We found that this worked well in many cases. Most excitingly, we found that in some instances, what emerged was what we have come to describe as role dialogue. Whereas there were many specific outcomes of the paired role analysis sessions, we do not report these in detail. They were: a) the many insights gained by participants and applied to their ongoing work, b) the new connections made by role holders to other role holders, and connections to other roles in general, and, c) the data gained through the process which was now available to the broader collaborative research project. For this paper, we have concentrated on the outcome of role dialogue as an idea. In this conclusion we will summarise the meaning of role dialogue and how we understand it to be achieved. By role dialogue we mean a process whereby organisational members converse: i) holding their own role and task in mind, ii) while creating enough reflective space to take in, and work with, information about the role and task of the other(s). The activity encompasses: collaborative negotiation of role boundaries in relation to a common task, which might involve, for example, regularly redefining the parameters of the task, the resources to carry out the task, the respective authorities and accountabilities of role vis a vis each other; a shift from the exclusive intra-subjective space of role narcissism to the admissive inter-subjective space of role centredness; The conditions under which role dialogue is best sustained include the following. It requires a ‘protected environment’. In the collaborative project the University researchers provided a role function to protect the workspace. A similar role or function would be required if role dialogue were to be developed in an organisation not as part of action research. It requires the development of a collaborative state of mind where problems and complexities can be shared, and where an exploration of the institution-in-experience of each participant can be carried out without fear or favor. This collaborative state-of-mind is not readily given, neither can it be commanded, legislated for nor does it appear simply through good will. It emerges from engaging with work where the participants learn the conditions under which they can trust each other. Role dialogue occurs when participants hold strongly to role and adopt a reflective stance. Without this, the dialogue becomes a take-over by one role rather than a true negotiation of boundaries. Such a take-over may be consciously or unconsciously achieved, but it may well occur when a participant is out of role. Holding strongly to role may involve a degree of role narcissism, which during the emergence of dialogue becomes the more creative role centredness. Role dialogue may develop best where participants work in close relation to one another and the operational details of the task can be shared. In any case, it will only occur when ‘role’ talks and listens to ‘role’. This may engage interpersonal process, but is not consequent upon it. Role dialogue can successfully operate between people who are antagonistic to one another personally. The key ingredient is the respect for role and the task from which its authority is derived.
References Bion, W.R. Experiences in Groups Tavistock Publications, London. Armstrong, D. (1991) ‘The Institution-in-the-mind: reflections on the relations of psycho-analysis to work with institutions’ paper presented at a conference: Psycho-analysis and the Public Sphere, East London Polytechnic. Armstrong, D. (1995) ‘The Analytic Object in Organisational Work’ paper presented at the ISPSO Symposium, London. Chapman, J. (1996) ‘Hatred and Corruption of Task’ AISA Working Paper No. 3. Long, S., Newton, J. and Dalgleish, J. (1999) In the Presence of the Other: Developing working relations for organisational learning. (forthcoming) Quine, C. and Hutton, J. (1992) (‘Finding, Making and Taking the Role of Head: A Grubb Institute perspective on Mentoring for Headteachers.’ Grubb Institute Publication. Reed, B. (1976) ‘Organisational Role Analysis’ in C. Cooper (Ed.) Developing Social Skills in Managers: advances in group training. Mac Millan, London. Schein, E. (1993) ‘On dialogue, culture, and organisational learning’. Organizational Dynamics, Autumn, v22, n2, pp40-52.
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