Managerial Agency: Social and Psychological Power in Leadership

By Mark Morris

Managerial Agency describes the science of psychological influence and its use in leadership. Combining psychological, and sociological with leadership literatures, Managerial Agency provides a model of operating, and a method for managers to achieve their aims through the work of their colleagues. The Managerial Agent influences team members and bosses to accept and adopt their viewpoint and priorities as their own, so being self motivated to carry them out.

Managerial Agency borrows from the sociology of agency, authority and power; from the psychology of development, identity and personality and from theories of groups, politics and culture marrying these insights with those in organisational, leadership and charisma theory and practice. The Managerial Agent targets their colleagues’ “habitus”, their inner construct of values, views and attitudes; shaping it to conform to the Managerial Agent’s own, thus creating an organisational or industrial ally in achieving their aims.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Mark Morris
• Release date: Aug 29, 2020
• ISBN: 9781005941123

Mark Morris

Mark Morris is a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst living in the UK and working in the UK National Health Service in Cambridge as a Consultant Medical Psychotherapist. He trained in medicine and psychiatry in Glasgow, Scotland as the seventh generation through the University of Glasgow, although the others studied law. He moved to London in 1990 to train with the British Psychoanalytic Society and after training in the Cassel Hospital Richmond as a psychotherapist, he worked in the Charing Cross Gender Clinic and as a consultant in St Bernard's Hospital (the old Hanwell Asylum that housed Charlie Chaplains mother for a period) before moving to be the Director of Therapy in HMP Grendon, the internationally renown high secure prison treatment facility run as a set of therapeutic communities. Next he worked in the Tavistock/Portman clinic, another NHS forensic psychoanalytic unit before spending a decade in independent sector hospitals leading secure personality disorder units and hospitals, before returning to work in the NHS.His research interests have revolved around the personality of leadership, an subject in which he completed research doctorate in Keele University, and continental philosophy, particularly phenomenology, with its overlap into understanding psychiatry and psychopathology. He has written mainly on psychotherapeutic issues pertaining to working with people with personalty disorder and antisocial personality to date. Approaching retirement, he plans to write more, so watch this space.

Book preview

Preface

This book is the second to come out of a research doctorate thesis carried out between 2005 and 2015, with the initial research question about whether being psychopathic was a management competency. That is to say whether being psychopathic makes one a better manager/leader.

Thankfully for us all, the research concluded that this was not the case, but in passing it did identify a model of how effective leadership works. It is this phenomenon, coined, managerial agency is adumbrated in this volume.

Contents

Chapter 1. Managerial Agency, an Introduction 9

Managerial Agency – Genesis

Managerial Agency is not…

Free-Will and agency

The continuity of the self and the social

Power

Charisma and Leadership

The Managerial agency Model

Part One: Agency 25

Chapter 2 The Philosophy of Free Will 27

Clarifying and confusing philosophy

Physical and psychological determinism

Will, free will and the terror of choice

Pragmatic dialectics

Agency and Managerial Agency

Chapter 3 Structures and Agents 49

The extremes: ontological totalitarianism

Situated and strategic agents

Archer’s morphogenesis

Structure as a category error

An object relations theory of structure and agency

Agents and managerial agency

Part Two. People: the continuity of the 79

self and the social

Chapter 4. Self, Group and Organisation 81

How the self works.

Developing a self.

Inheriting a self.

Groups

The community and the organisation.

Self, group and organisation.

Chapter 5. Ideal Speech and Pluralism 117

The political macro

The ideal speech situation

Vicissitudes: the forces of anti-truth

Pluralism, cacophony and chaotic order

Pluralism in the internal world.

Self group and organisation

Chapter 6. Personality and culture 143

Personality biology

Personality types, traits and disorders

Constructing the social

Organisational culture

Culture and the leader’s personality.

Personality, culture and managerial agency

Part 3. Power 173

Chapter 7. Power as politics 175

Ancient Greek Power and Politics

Medieval power: Hobbes and Machiavelli

A on B power: Modern politics

Managerial (personal) power

Politics and Managerial Agency

Chapter 8 Power theory. 195

Contextualising the power issue

Mann’s four sources of power

Power as a collective

Power as internal; Weber’s herschaft

Power as knowledge: Foucault

Power and Managerial Agency

Part 4 Leadership, management and 227

management agency

Chapter 9 Leadership 229

Leadership and management.

Born leaders

Emergent leaders

Leader’s behaviours and philosophies

Leadership and Managerial Agency

Chapter 10 Charismatic Leadership 259

Approaches to defining charismatic leadership

Good and Bad charisma.

A developmental/evolutionary theory

Culture (reprise)

Charisma enchanting the workplace

Chapter 11 Managerial Agency 285

Molding follower’s habitus.

The three stages of managerial agency

A seduction

B enrolment

C consolidation

Managing up

Managerial agency through other lenses

Creating and conducting the we intention

Creating a world

The morality of manipulation

References 317

By the same author 331

Chapter 1

Managerial agency: Introduction

Managerial agency is a model that combines the wisdom of management science with psychology and sociology. Managerial Agency as a concept provides a leader with both a set of tools that enables them to make things happen the way that they want within their team, but also enables them to contextualise and understand the foundations and drivers behind their own activity and the behaviour of others both senior and junior. The Managerial Agency model puts in the manager’s hands an ability to understand how an idea on one person’s mind can be located as a good idea in other people’s minds, and then becomes the default way of thinking and doing things of a group, of a team, and of a whole organisation.

The key concept that Managerial Agency is addressing is managerial effectiveness; the extent to which the manager can get his subordinates to do what he wants, and thereby deliver their objectives. The key to managerial effectiveness is to get subordinates to want to do what the manager wants, so that they not only do it, but that they do it well, to the best of their ability, and with more energy and dedication than they are paid for. Managerial effectiveness is to be found in the manager that can get their team to enact the manager’s vision with energy and enthusiasm, so that the task not only gets done, but gets done well, and gets done with enthusiasm and the personal dedication of the individuals involved.

Managerial Agency as a concept was developed to capture the specific thing that made the difference between people in organisations who get things done, who progress with their ideas and priorities, and those who don’t. Importantly, these successful people are not necessarily those with all the position power, or those at the top of the organisation. Structural power is important, but as a contributor rather than being the determining factor. The key factor to getting things done is something that combines a knowledge of the organisation with a knowledge of its people. A knowledge of the organisation as another, bigger and more complex person.

The French have two verbs to know, one is savoir which is to know something in the sense of having knowledge of it; one may or may not have a knowledge of the declension of French i.r. ending verbs. The other French verb to know is connaitre which is to know someone in the sense of having a relationship with them, having an organic and alive feel for them as a dynamic and engageable thing. The people in organisations that can get things done, know their organisations in the connaitre sense, as a living being that they can play with, as part of a relationship.

The theoretical grounding for Managerial Agency derives from four main theoretical areas, philosophy, psychology, power and leadership. With a philosophical understanding the free-will/determinism debate, one can explore the application of this question in the social realm through the sociological dialectic between structure and agency. Next, the psychological phenomenon of selfhood is extended into the social, cultural and organisational realm, particularly using the democratic political concept of pluralism as a unifying process behind debate and decisions in the social realm, but also internal world of the self, and providing a platform for a managerial agent to influence the thinking and decision making of the group or organisation simultaneously with the individual minds of staff or team members.

Following the corrosive critique and ridicule of all things by postmodernism, power alone survives as a legitimate concept and as a valuable social currency, and power is the third part of the Managerial Agency jig saw. Power captures the contribution of structural authority to being able to get things done, but also identifies the important and potent role of ideology. Finally, the fourth part is the contribution of leadership, traditionally the commodity assumed itself to be that x-factor that enables people to get things done, that determines effectiveness and galvanises followers to the enthusiastic enactment of the manager’s agenda. For the Managerial Agent, leadership is an important contributor, but not the whole story.

In essence, Managerial Agency is a process where the manager identifies the values and beliefs set of the other (where the other is an individual, team or organisation), accesses it and molds it. In its new version it incorporates the manager’s agenda. In this way, the other starts to enact the manager’s agenda, engaging with it as if it were their own, and as if it were in their own interests.

More traditionally, in the management literature, a distinction is drawn between leadership and management, where leadership is of the spirit to use Lord Sim’s phrase; leadership inspires, whereas management guides. Traditionally, management is more transactional, for example the manager providing a bonus for meeting a target; a negotiated transaction between the two. Many pages are wasted discussing which of the two, management or leadership is the subordinate concept and how they differ. The Managerial agency concept overarches the two, combining more psychological elements of leadership with the important elements of structural and transactional authority imbued in the concept of management.

Managerial Agency: Genesis

The writer is not a captain of industry or a celebrated leader in his professional psychiatric field. The writer is an NHS psychiatrist working with psychiatric patients who have personality disorder, that can lead them to self harm and/or become violent when in a crisis. The writer has had various leadership roles during his consultant career, but it has not been these roles per se that have crystallised the Managerial Agency concept. The genesis of the concept has two tributaries, one being autobiographical and the other professional.

The writer’s intellectual journey through the sciences to medicine, philosophy, psychiatry then psychoanalysis, can be caricatured as two decades of increasingly intensive naval gazing and self absorption. With his first consultant post, and lifted from the ranks of obedient passive trainee doctors to being a player in a large NHS trust, the solipsistic introspection was put aside; the new demand was to be able to get things done. Being effective became the new focus; watching people who were effective in this way, watching people who were not, and trying to work out the difference (1): Trying to be able to emulate the effective ones; being a potent agent. This was the preoccupation, to which the answer nearly a quarter of a century later, is Managerial Agency.

The second tributary is professional. The writer’s practice is with people who have personality disorder. A person with a broken leg (as a physical problem) or hearing schizophrenic voices (as a psychiatric/mental illness problem), own their own problem. The pathology is clearly in the patient’s body (leg) or (hallucinating) mind. In contrast to this, people with personality disorder locate much of their pathology in the other; the person with antisocial personality disorder steals my car, disrupting my life; or seduces the ward sister or breaks the jaw of the charge nurse, disrupting the therapeutic unit that they are being treated in. The pathology of people with personality disorder manifests itself in the other, in the observer; in the second or third party. Consequently, clinical work with people with personality disorder requires a very close monitoring of the ebb and flow of the relationships surrounding them; very close monitoring of the organisational and team dynamics in the unit that is looking after them. The writer has been in the privileged position for a career to be able to observe the interplay between particular personalities and organisations.

The trigger for the Managerial Agency model was an instance where the patient disagreed with the plan that had been agreed by all the professionals and senior management. The patient would not accept the plan or agree to it from any of the team, so that a very senior manager had to be wheeled in to insist upon it, and instruct the patient to comply. The very senior manager was duly wheeled in, met the patient, and came out to announce that all the agreed plans would be changed to what the patient wanted.

This incident; the power articulated by the patient; the ability of an individual locked up and detained to cancel the plans of the professional team articulated true organisational agency, and for the writer crystallised a wish to explore and fully understand this phenomenon. Other examples are when an individual patient galvanises his peers to enact a riot in a treatment unit, or the well publicised Dagett allegations made in the late 1990s about the personality disorder unit in Ashworth hospital, resulting in the extensive judicial enquiry by Judge Fallon, which found the patients had effectively taken over the asylum (2).

Managerial Agency is not

There are many factors that make managers or leaders successful in their role, one of which is their Managerial Agency. Some of the other factors, while important, are not included in the current account, and several bear repetition both because of their being critical success factors, and also because their explicit exclusion delineates the area that the Managerial Agency concept does cover.

Managerial Agency is not about the strategy of the organisation in its external environments; about what to do as an organisation. The management or leadership role has been likened to being the captain of a ship, standing on the bridge, having to steer a course for the boat/organisation through and between the different obstacles that are presented. The metaphor is better extended to the boat being in a race, so that the decisions made by the captain are critical in winning, where the race represents competitive advantage in the market place.

Strategy is not an easy thing to define. It is less about an explicit plan of campaign, and more about the approach that will be taken in planning it (3). Strategy has been distinguished from tactics, where the plan is the tactical level, and the strategy is the conceptual level above this, setting out at a higher level the prioritisation and relative importance of the various options that will be weighed up in deciding minute to minute what to do (4).

Devising a good strategy requires well informed intelligence of the various environments that the organisation operates in (market; financial; regulatory and so on); in the metaphor, in order to know what to steer the ship towards; to know what can be passed close by, and what needs to be given a wide berth. The Managerial Agency concept brackets out entirely all of this external environment scanning and associated strategy planning. Managerial Agency is about getting things done within the organisation. One may need to take a strategic approach to bringing about change within an organisation, or think strategically about how to get buy in to the manager’s vision, but this is internal strategy rather than external.

The interface between external environment scanning and strategy development and the Managerial Agency concept is that If the organisations strategy in the external environment requires such and such change of process within the organisation, then the manager will require to effectively change the process and ways of working of his or her team, and this will require Managerial Agency. But the Managerial Agency concept is relatively silent about the process of forming the external environment strategy.

Secondly, Managerial Agency is not about change management. There is a whole literature of change management and techniques (5). The main difference between change management and Managerial Agency is in that the former is all about techniques; about developing charts and diagrams that help the change manager to identify allies and enemies of the change, about developing a sense of urgency or crisis in order to soften up the organisation and dislodge some of the conservative entrenched interests and so on.

Life is about change, and so is leadership and management; helping organisations be innovative, agile and flexible in their operations to be able to maximise on opportunities that present themselves. And all this agility and flexibility goes against the human wish for order, routine and predictability. So achieving change a frequent and task in management and leadership roles. The change manager will sit with their identified change champions and plan the overthrow of the conservatives with their charts, their diagrams and their project plans. The Managerial Agent on the other hand will simply change themselves and commence the new process, and in doing so, the rest of the team will come along with them. For the Managerial Agent, change is not planned, but just part of the day to day process of flexible business, which the team and organisation will go along with, like a school of fish or a flock of starlings changing direction as if all are of the same mind.

Enough about what managerial Agency is not. The book is divided into four sections, free-will and agency; people and groups; power and leadership which are very briefly annotated here. Part one goes back to basics, looking at the sociological concept of agency and at it’s philosophical counterpart free-will. Part two goes back to the basics of people; at the self and personality; at social engagement and at the social matrix within groups, culture.

Having covered this groundwork, part three again borrows from sociology to look at the concept of power, less explicitly examined in the managerial literature, but central in modern and post modern understandings of society. The final section looks at leadership, arguing that its central driver is charisma. Finally, the managerial agency model itself is explored.

Free-will and agency

In constructing and defending an argument or thesis, one has to be clear about ones philosophical foundations. If one wants to get things done as a manager, one can’t believe in fate. If it is all about fate; if we really have no impact on the world, then the notion of management and leadership is somewhat redundant, as managers, like everyone else, is powerless in the face of the cogwheels of fate.

The chapter on free will (Chapter 2) discusses the implications of living in a determined universe. Science increases the mass of knowledge about how things in the world work, why things are the way that they are, and why we make the decisions that we do. As science discovers more and more, so the world seems more and more deterministic.

But humanities self conception is predicated on the concept of free will and having choices to make in life about how to live it. Morality, criminal justice, and the whole approach to life assumes that one has free will with which to make choices about what to do.

As more is discovered, belief in free will looks more and more counter factual. William James captured the contradictions in the issue brilliantly, resolving the riddle by declaring that his first act of free will would be to believe that he had it (6).

The free will debate provides a philosophical foundation for the subsequent chapter on agency, which surveys different approaches, proposing that they can be placed on a spectrum between those more structural (like Marxism or structural linguistics) , and those that are heavily agency based, like Adam Smiths rational choice theory describing how the (ideal) market place works.

The agency chapter (chapter 3) proposes that in general, sociological and managerial standpoints are at odds, with sociological explanations. Sociology is more structural, emphasising the constraints on people; Rousseau’s chains that everywhere man is in after being born free (7). Opposed to this is management science where the starting point is agentic, assuming that leaders can be potent and make a difference on their environment, leading and changing things as they choose.

From a structure/agency angle, the Managerial Agency concept appears as a method for managers to be able to actively structure their subordinates external and internal worlds, setting the self maintaining cultural expectations and mores within the workplace.

The continuity of self and the social

A central argument within the Managerial Agency concept is that there is continuity between the thoughts in individuals minds, and the cultural mores and attitudes that groups develop. These cultural mores and attitudes get reified, solidified into structures, which are just how people have always done it, and which are not questioned The Managerial Agency concept aims to give the manager the levers to effect, change and mould these very processes to better get the job done. Part two on people and the social sets out some of the ground work necessary to understand this

Chapter 4 reviews theories of how one develops a self subjectively, looking particularly at psychoanalytic and psychodynamic theories that see the personality is molded by developmental challenges. From this start, it then expands into looking at groups of people, again understanding their functioning and development psychodynamically. Finally, it expands to looking at larger groups, communities, and organisations, again looking at the theoretical underpinnings.

In the same way as philosophy is important as a foundation, so chapters four and five provide foundations from different perspectives for understanding how an individual influences and impacts on culture. Broadly, chapter 4 psychodynamically, and chapter five socially, examined through the lens of social discourse.

Chapter five starts with the way that ideas and then the power associated with them moves around and coalesce within political systems. It charts the process of free and ideal speech, then through the combination of forces and lobbies; argumentation and pressure groups that together comprise the pluralism of democracy. It then relates this account back from the macro to the micro, providing an account of that self same process taking place within the minds of people. People themselves are psychologically a mass of contradictory and fragmentary thoughts, impulses and ideas (I want that donut: I want to be slim).

An internal version of free speech, debate and various pressures (biological, moral, habitual and so on) determine what the individual actually does in the same way that the actions of the state are determined by the direction that results from the combination of all the various vectors that pull on it in different directions. The self arbitrates and sets decisions in the internal world in the same that that the leader does in the social or political world. From this perspective, the managerial agent needs to recognise that their role in the social world of influencing and leading the group is the same as what they need to do in the minds of individuals; developing a vision or meaning that people can identify with and follow; nudging people towards making decisions and developing attitudes that falls in with the managers aims and priorities.

Chapter six synthesises the two previous chapters, describing approaches to understanding personality, particularly the psychological, that have as their starting point the internal experience, and then paralleling how an internal psychological culture (holding that the taste and crunch of fresh donuts is good, but that being slim is also good, leading to a tension); paralleling internal culture with description and accounts of culture in the external world, for example the literatures about culture in social groups, or in organisations in the management literature. The argument is that the role of the leader is to shape and determine the internal culture of followers, and that the managerial agency concept turns this from an observation of a function of management, to being an active tool in the hands of managers to change follower’s activity, values and attitudes to ones favourable for their increased activity in which ever direction the leader wishes or requires.

Power

Prior to the last two hundred years, men of science (sic.) worked across different disciplines. Descartes’ day job was as a mathematician; Voltaire was a playwright, political agitator, and all round wag; these both making major contributions to philosophy. There now exist silos of knowledge, with very parallel discourses taking place in adjacent silos, but not crossing over.

One can see how the boundaries between them might be maintained, with left wing louche tousle haired penniless academics in their jeans comprising the sociologists, and right wing be-suited sharp and ambitious young people on the manager’s side, doing their expensive MBAs. But for management science, and sociology, there is much that overlaps, in the exploration of how groups form and their dynamics develop

Particularly useful for the management sciences, is the concept of power from sociology, which one might think would be central in looking at an issue like leadership. The third section of this book looks at the issue of power, firstly in its more applied form; through the process of politics, and secondly in a more theoretical way, where it provides a substrate that even the ideologically corrosive influence of post modernism is unable to dissolve.

Chapter 7 traces politics through from the Ancient Greek and its derivative Roman culture, through the medieval, presumed default power structures of the war lords, on to look at Hobbes and Machiavelli as two theorists constructing accounts during the English civil war and in Medici Florence respectively.

Hobbes argued for the legitimacy of royal power on pragmatic grounds that without it life is nasty, brutish and short(8) and that a powerful king ensures some order. Machiavelli’s perspective is different; given a bad press for the apparently psychopathic notion end justifies the means, although is arguing, like Hobbes, that a structure of authority is better than anarchy, and his account is about what one has to do to consolidate and maintain authority and power (9).

Contrasted with this are more modern accounts of political power, looking at Dhal’s account of pluralism (10) and the way that practically political authority is maintained, and critiques or qualifications of this including Luke’s (11), annotating the practical application of Marx’s notion of false consciousness, where workers are duped into compliance. A second modern concept of applied power is that of the manager, and the five sources of personal power. These include being able to reward, to coerce, being in a legitimate position of authority, having expert knowledge, and referent power, where the individual is a role model.

Chapter 8 delves more into the theory of power, looking in the main at four theorists, starting with Mann, who has provided an account of Western history based upon the postmodern focus of power as a core dialectic running through human affairs (12). Next, Parsons, account is adumbrated, who proposes an economy of power, where the power is to be found in the collective (13). For the Managerial Agency model, the most important accounts however are those of Weber and Foucault. Weber’s concept of hershaft/authority is clear that people obey and confirm to authority not because of real external coercion, but because of an internal programming (14). Critical in this account and for the Managerial Agency model, is the fact that power is an internal psychological thing. The manager who wants to get people to do things needs to be able to access and modify this internal programming.

Foucault’s account of power basically equates it with knowledge, and with this knowledge, ideology. While Mann has ideology as one of his sources of power, the combination of Weber and Foucault’s arguments emphasise its centrality in the articulation of power. The task of the managerial agent is to acquire sufficient knowledge of the pre-existing ideologies of followers, and then to construct new ones in line with the manager’s own values and priorities.

Charisma and leadership

The penultimate section looks at the twin issues of leadership, and the catalyst that enables leaders to operate, namely charisma. Chapter 9, as the leadership chapter, firstly discusses distinctions between leadership and management, providing a model of management as a meritocracy, and then in that context, identifying leadership as adding a spiritual dimension to the workspace, that can make a material difference to the productivity of a team or organisation. There then follows an annotation of the three broad different models of leadership, personality based theories, emergent theories, and then behaviours and philosophies.

Trait theories of leadership argue that great leaders are born not made, and that the personalities of some people naturally have the qualities and capabilities to be able to lead organisations strategically, and people. Trait theory was the first intellectual theory of leadership, so that the secret of leadership was looked for through the study of great leaders of the past (15).

Following this came the observation that the behaviours of leaders are different in different settings. For example, a leader of a university department having a different style to someone overseeing a factory involving manual work. Contingent theories of leadership propose that the leadership will be specific to the work environment, varying based on the nature of the industry or task, as well as other factors, such as the receptiveness or ease of the leadership task (16).

Finally, leadership activity can be atomised into a variety of different behaviours (learning and using subordinate’s names frequently for example), or philosophies, that have derived from a successful leader reflecting on how they have operated over their career, and identifying some critical factor

Chapter 10 explores in some detail the final piece of the jig saw contributing to the model of managerial agency. It looks at various models of charisma. Starting with Weber’s, who emphasised the irrationality that leads to fidelity in a charismatic leader; that they emerge during times of uncertainty, and that they are unstable because their cache is irrational hope, which when it inevitably disappoints, leads to their fall (17).

Other writers describe the phenomenon itself, including the 4 Is model, the Is standing for idealised influence (believing the leader has exceptional ability); inspirational motivation (the leader having clarity and an inspiring vision) Intellectual stimulation (the follower buying into and being intrigued by the leader’s strategy) and individualised consideration (18). People who met Hitler had a solemn hand shake and met a steady gaze, feeling he saw into and connected with their hearts; the leader makes followers feel individually taken into account and matter.

The account then looks at the question of bad charisma, at ways of distinguishing good and bad, and at an evolutionary theory of the development of charisma, and risk of it going bad. Finally, the issue of culture is returned to, in the context of it being both eminently malleable by charismatic leaders, and from a critical realist perspective, being the middle term between the agent and structure.

Managerial agency

Chapter 11 sets out in the Managerial Agency model, reviewing the various contextual and contributory literatures that have been explored in the book, then setting it out as a three stage process, seduction, enrolment and consolidation. The Managerial Agent tunes into the group zeitgeist or matrix to be able to start communicating, converting them into a team that is listening (the seduction phase) Next they use transactional leadership methods, as followers start to depend on the leader, and feeling emotionally engaged with the task; the enrolment phase. Finally, the leader consolidates their authority using more structural management techniques to consolidate their authority.

The