Free Management Dissertations - However, The Main Issue For The General Manager Will Be In Convincing
However, the main issue for the General Manager will be in convincing ‘conservative Senior Consultants’ that the changes are not in fact radical, but a natural progression to a more efficient working environment. Traditionally, consultants have been viewed as a powerful group in the medical hierarchy and feel that the reforms are threatening their position. It is questionable the extent to which they will respect the requests of a non-medical General Manager, who they would not believe to have legitimate medical authority with respect to influencing changes on their working environment.
This may be linked to French and Raven (1959)’s topology of power, which splits organisational power into six bases, one of which is legitimate power. Whilst the General Manager’s power is legitimised through his role as a manager, in the eyes of the surgeons and consultants this power loses its legitimacy through lack of medical training.
The problems highlighted by the case may also be linked to the traditional management view, that those actions taken to challenge or influence organisational change processes by groups other than management are seen as resistance to change, since those actions fall outside the legitimate activities of the change program. (Hardy and Clegg, 1996) This is precisely the case with the consultants challenging the General Manager. A solution to this problem must be via a cultural change in the consultant and senior medical staff’s perception of the management, changing from purely being there in an administrative capacity, to actually running the hospital.
Taking French and Raven (1959)’s analysis further, to include an analysis of expert power, the consultants and surgeons may be seen to have expert power with respect to their medical undertakings. This gives them legitimacy when convincing lower ranking members of medical staff that their opinions outranked that of the General Manager. This will obviously prove a problem for the General Manager who will need to convince the consultants that the changes do not affect the esteem with which consultants and surgeons are held in the medical profession.
The goal of the General Manager is to manage and influence the change process by using power and influence tactics. The existing conflict of interests between senior managers and consultants can function as positive impulses to discuss constructs about organisational change and examining the hospitals’ underlying basic assumptions, values, and norms. The enactment, based on dialogue of all parties, implies a reconstruction of the influence relationship, a renegotiation of the existing power relationships, and the development of new relational contracts. However, these changes cannot be successfully implemented without appropriate communication structures.
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