Patricia F. Katopol Dissertation Proposal Defense May 23, 2005 pfk@u.washington

1. Patricia F. KatopolDissertation Proposal DefenseMay 23, 2005 pfk@u.washington.edu An Exploratory Study of the Information Culture of City Government Support Staff and its Implications for Managerial Decision-Making

2. PROBLEM #1

3. “A request by a decision maker for information is a signal of decision relevance and thereby an invitation for information sources to try to manipulate the content or increase the implicit price of information.” (March and Sevon 1984, 102)

4. PROBLEM #2

5. Bosses don't need toknow everythingthat's happeningin the office.http://us.deskdemon.com/pages/us/career/bossrelationship

6. Overview • What • Questions • Assumptions • Frameworks • Who • Environment • Actions • Culture • Method

7. What - The Research Question • In an organization, how is the decision-making function at one hierarchical level affected by the manner in which information is obtained, exchanged, and transferred at another hierarchical level?

8. What - Answering the Question • What is the information culture of support staff (SS) in city government offices? • What implications does that culture have for the decision-making of the managers they support?

9. Assumptions 1. Institutionalism affects the actions of both support staff and managers. 2. SS are affected by roles, power and authority and that they may exercise power and authority themselves. 3. This exercise of power may manifest itself in the way SS transfers, or does not transfer, information to the managers they support.

10. Frameworks - Institutionalism • Organizations adopt practices that increase their legitimacy, thereby increasing their likelihood of survival. However, in adopting these practices, the organization’s actions become less rational and less effective. • The organizations “reflect the myths of their institutional environments instead of the demands of their work activities.” (Meyer and Rowan 1991, 41) • Despite their individual information requirements and different environments, organizations tend to look like each other due in part to the pressures of coercive, mimetic, and normative isomorphism.

11. Frameworks - Roles, Power and Authority • Acting within roles and obeying behavior standards, imparts credibility and power. • Roles, and the identities that accompany them, provide a basis for decision making. • Can different types of power and authority be identified in SS information culture? If so, that might indicate that some power, and therefore, some valuable information, is outside of managerial control and access.

12. Frameworks - Cognitive Work Analysis • Emphasizes the actor and the work, not the technology • CWA provides an analysis of the situation in the following dimensions: work environment, work domain, task situation, social organization, and the actors’ resources and values. • The designer is free to design the system required by the work, not by the designer. • Its use of social and organizational analysis adds depth to research on information seeking behavior in context. • In using CWA, the researcher can apply those theories most useful to the particular study.

13. Who – Support Staff & Managers Support Staff • A high level assistant, working at the direction of a manager and having independent duties; not a clerical worker. • In 2002, approximately 1,526,000 ‘support staff’ - executive secretaries and administrative assistants • Traditional roles: • perform and coordinate administrative activities • store, retrieve, and integrate information for dissemination to staff and clients • New duties: • train and supervise staff • conduct research on the Internet • operate and fix office technologies (US Bureau of Labor Statistics)

14. Who – Support Staff & Managers Managers Managerial duties: • Interpersonal - provide information • Informational - process information • Decisional - use information (Mintzberg 1973)

15. Who – Support Staff & Managers The Relationship • The most useful characteristics for support staff will be communication and interpersonal skills. • A close working relationship with the manager is one of the most valued skills. (Occupational Outlook Handbook 2004-5)

16. LET ME REMIND YOU

17. Bosses don't need toknow everythingthat's happeningin the office.http://us.deskdemon.com/pages/us/career/bossrelationship

18. Environment - New Public Management • "asked to do far more with much less, to do so quickly and under great political pressure" (Kettl 1997, 454) • Make more and different types of decisions than previously • Decisions now have a higher element of risk • New government initiatives require - “coordinated network building” and “external collaboration” which differs from a bureaucratic paradigm emphasizing “standardization, departmentalization, and division of labor."(Ho 2002, 440)

19. Actions - Decision-Making I • Most of a manager’s time is spent in decision-making • Managers try to improve their decisions, so that they have positive outcomes for the organization. • Improved decisions can be made by reducing uncertainty • Uncertainty can be reduced by the acquisition of information • Decision-makers seek to reduce costs associated with information gathering by making decisions based on the information at hand.

20. Actions - Decision-Making II • Nearest source of information will be consulted first, with less accessible sources used later. • If information needs can be satisfied quickly from nearby sources, effort is rarely taken to seek out more distant or additional sources. • Decision-makers often forgo quality over easily accessible information.

21. Culture - Information Culture I Those shared values, norms,assumptions, and practices surrounding the gathering, manipulation, and transfer of information amongst a specific group of people. “a highly developed information culture correlates positively with successful business performance and is closely connected with activities, attitudes, and business cultures initiating successful results.” (Ginman 1988, 104)

22. Culture - Information Culture II • Katopol vs. Ginman: • “successful business performance” doesn’t equal successful public administration. • Focus on support staff, not CEOs • Participants are influenced by, rather than influence, others’ information behavior • Novel approach to information culture • ‘Organizational culture’ provides a more useful tool for analyzing SS culture

23. Culture - Organizational Culture A pattern of shared basic assumptions • learned by the group • to solve problems of external adaptation and internal integration • considered valid • taught to new members as the correct way to perceive, think, and feel in relation to those problems. (adapted from Schein 1992)

24. Method I • Qualitative • Naturalistic • Researcher and participants are in the setting (Seattle City Hall) in which the phenomenon occurs. • Exploratory • “little or no scientific knowledge about the group, process, activity, or situation they want to examine but nevertheless have reason to believe it contains elements worth discovering.” (Stebbins 2001, 6) • CWA as conceptual framework

25. Participants - Support Staff • 5-7 in different departments • 90 minute semi-structured interview: • Background • Task Situation (information gathering in general and specific information tasks) • Organizational Analysis, Allocation of Roles (work assignment, supervision) • Social Organization and Management Structure (SS view of departmental and organizational culture) • Historical background (how were these tasks done before?) • Task and workstation observations • Follow-up interview after task observation • Document review

26. Participants - Managers • 5-7 department heads • 60 minute semi-structured interviews: • Background • Task Situation (decisions based on SS-provided information) • Organizational Analysis, Allocation of Roles • Social Organization and Management Structure • Historical background

27. Limitations • Small number of participants • Inconclusive nature of qualitative research • “inconclusiveness actually comes in degrees; research can be more or less inconclusive.”(Stebbins 2001, 40) • Inability to generalize • Highly representative sample reduces inconclusiveness and allows tentative generalizations.

28. Generalizability • Institutionalism similarly constraints all actors in all organizations. • Roles also exert forces on actors. • These forces tend to make people act in similar ways. • Ergo, I would expect to find that support staff information culture, and its implications for managerial decision-making, would be similar in other similarly situated organizations and my findings may be generalizable to some degree.

29. Usefulness - I hope this study will inform: • Researchers in human information behavior - new group of actors, imposed queries in business setting, deeper look at context • Management - support staff information culture has unique value that may have positive or negative implications for managerial decision-making and which may make unaccounted-for contributions to organizational knowledge • System designers - include wider array of workers in the system’s design

30. Thank You

31. References Bureau of Labor Statistics, U.S. Department of Labor, Occupational Outlook Handbook, 2004-05 Edition, Secretaries and Administrative, at http://www.bls.gov/oco/ocos151.htm. (last accessed September 15, 2004). Deskdemon at: http://us.deskdemon.com/pages/us/career/bossrelationship (last accessed March 15, 2005). Ginman, M. (1988). "Information Culture and Business Performance." IATUL Quarterly 2: 93-106. Hood, C. (1995). "The "New Public Management" in the 1980s: Variations on a Theme." Accounting, Organizations and Society 20(2/3): 93-109. Kettl, D. (1997). "The Global Revolution in Public Management: Driving Themes, Missing Links." Journal of Policy Analysis and Management 16(3): 446-462. March, J. and G. Sevon (1984). Gossip, Information, and Decision-Making. Advances in Information Processing in Organizations. L. Sproull and P. Larkey. Greenwich, CT, JAI Press, Inc. Meyer, J. and B. Rowan (1991). Institutionalized Organizations: Formal Structure as Myth and Ceremony. The New Institutionalism in Organizational Analysis. W. W. Powell and P. J. DiMaggio. Chicago, University of Chicago Press. Stebbins, R. (2001). Exploratory Research in the Social Sciences. Thousand Oaks, CA, Sage Publications.

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