Keywords

Introduction

“An organization seeking to create a meaningful workplace requires a meaningful form of leadership” (Namdram and Vos 2010, p. 233). But what is meant by the terms “leadership” and a “meaningful workplace?” Who gets to decide, particularly if a post-heroic perspective on leadership is taken?

According to Hawkins (2015), a post-heroic perspective considers leadership to be “a process of meaning making, in which individuals are united in the collective construction and enactment of a commonly, or at least loosely, shared understanding of what leadership is” (Uhl-Bien 2006) (p. 952). This perspective eschews the notion that leadership is a quality vested in the individual as a consequence of their specific capabilities or traits (Collinson 2008; Denis et al. 2010; Denis et al. 2012; Cunliffe and Eriksen 2011; Packendorff et al. 2014), a notion that reinforces a modernist ontology of being. Instead, a post-heroic perspective draws on a processural ontology that proposes that leadership is an ongoing socially negotiated achievement that emerges from the performances of group members as they collaboratively pursue shared goals (Grint and Jackson 2010; Hawkins 2015; Langley et al. 2013; Uhl-Bien 2006; Knights and Willmot 1992). It represents a move away from the established leader-centric approach to leadership, which characterizes leadership as situational, transformational, authentic, and charismatic, by changing the focus from leader to leadership (Grint 2005). By reframing leadership as a collaborative process, it recognizes the distributed nature of leadership in practice (Gronn 2002) and the possibility this presents for achieving meaningful dialogue across the organization.

Dialogue, like all types of communication is, by definition, concerned with the co-construction of meaning. The term “meaningful dialogue” is being used here to underline a distinguishing feature of dialogue; the way it combines respectful listening and a commitment to achieving genuine understanding in order to produce mutual understanding that incorporates the parties’ values and existential meanings. This distinguishing feature affords meaningful dialogue the mechanism to incorporate the individual’s spirituality into workplace practices in an appreciative and constructive manner. In doing so, it provides a site to manifest spirituality at work (cf. workplace or organizational spirituality), something that is widely discussed as a consequence of the “spiritual turn” (Drive 2007) but is much more difficult to achieve in practice. In part, this is because, although spirituality has always been present at work (Lips-Wiersma and Mills 2002), just what constitutes workplace or organizational spirituality remains highly contested (Drive 2007). Molloy and Foust (2016) agree:

Spirituality is difficult to operationalize or even to define. In the realm of organizations, spirituality ranges from ‘businesses that see themselves as overtly Christian, Jewish, or Muslim’ to secular companies or nonprofits that ‘focus on promoting universal ethical values such as love or responsibility and a sense of community’. (Gockel 2004, p. 159; Molloy and Fust 2016, p. 341)

This chapter will argue that, by ensuring employees have authentic opportunities to engage in meaningful dialogue with peers and managers, organizations can embrace a plurality of values and beliefs and allow these to be expressed in constructive ways that respect and give voice to spirituality. It explains how such meaningful dialogue facilitates mutual understanding between co-workers and fosters an appreciation and acceptance of diversity, which then encourages a widespread sense of belonging and individual legitimacy. These are essential ingredients in social cohesion as well as preconditions for meaningful work.

While a commonly accepted definition of workplace spirituality continues to be elusive, the concept of meaningful work is less problematic. In a comprehensive review, Rosso et al. (2010) concluded that there are four main sources (self, others, work context, and spiritual life) and six processes (authenticity, self-efficacy, self-esteem, the perception that work is purposeful, belongingness, and transcendence) that constitute meaningful work.

The chapter begins by exploring how leadership has been portrayed in the literature before examining two “liberation” models that require a departure from the well-established individualistic heroic leader styles of leadership. First, it describes “liberation management” (LM) (Peters 1992; Peters and Bogner 2002; Terry 2005), a well-known form of post-bureaucratic management that proponents believe has the potential to empower workers to exercise agency in the workplace and contribute to strategic practice through meaningful engagement. Then it compares LM with total quality management (TQM), another familiar management model that was popular in the 1980s and 1990s, which has generated an array of processes for ensuring constant quality improvement. After considering how these models might support the creation of dialogic spaces, two “liberation” projects are discussed to provide a concrete basis for questioning whether empowering frontline workers so they have greater input into strategic activities actually creates the sort of dialogue needed to ensure people can work in a manner consistence with their values, beliefs, and spiritual frameworks. Can such models create a sense of belonging and foster meaningful work?

Seeking Meaningful Engagement: Moving from Leaders and Followers to Distributed Leadership

Even a cursory exploration of the organizational studies literature reveals a strong preoccupation with individual capabilities and traits and a sense that ultimately the individual is the unit of analysis, particularly if the intention is to understand leadership, management, or workforce performance. Nowhere is this individual focus more evident than in the leadership literature which, according to Parkendorff et al. (2014), “tends to reproduce traditional leader-centric notions of individualism, heroism, masculinism, specific competencies, and unitary command” (p. 6).

Leadership seems to be inextricably coupled to the assumption of asymmetrical power relations (Collinson 2008) that authorize those deemed to be leaders to ultimately define organizational priorities, direction and activities, and reward or sanction the actions of others within their organizations. When leadership is seen in this way, followership is the inevitable consequence of leadership. Such leader-centric views mean that meaningful engagement at work involves those not in leadership roles conforming to the dictates of other more powerful colleagues and, in doing so, accepting some degree of subjugation. This view overlooks follower agency and the way leadership and followership co-construct each other (Collinson 2006). Typically, consideration of followers’ agency, particularly the agency of those at the frontline, focuses on agency that is at odds with leaders’ objectives and therefore not something they endorse. When followers exhibit this sort of agency, it is framed as deviance and resistance, two states Fleming and Spicer (2007) argue are as common as conformity in the workplace and which, according to Hardy and Clegg (2006), are usually intended to thwart managerial initiatives. Shared agency is not a phenomenon that is widely discussed, possibly because of scholars’ long-standing preoccupation with various types of heroic individual leadership.

Types of Leadership

Scholars distinguish between various leadership types. Taxonomies typically list autocratic, transactional, transformational or charismatic, and, more recently, servant forms of leadership. Burns (1978) proposes that leadership is either transactional or transformational. Transactional leadership is characterized by leaders and workers who are independent but bound to the same enterprise through the exchange services, goods, and rewards that satisfy each party’s distinctive goals (Tourish and Pinnington 2002). Transformational leadership is distinguished from transactional leadership by the way leaders change workers’ goals to align with their vision and higher-level goals. These leaders are often people with special charismatic qualities that encourage workers to embrace their vision and “make significant personal sacrifices in the interest of this vision” (Shamir et al. 1993, p. 577). Workers’ strong emotional attachment to the leader helps to explain how charismatic transformational leaders sustain high, ongoing levels of worker sacrifice. By transforming workers’ goals in this way, such transformational leadership produces a community of common interest based on mutually acceptable goals. Thus, once goals are aligned, transformational leadership has the potential to create greater leader-member cohesion than transactional leadership, which is often marked by dissent and resistance. What is clear is that both transactional and transformational leadership center around goals deemed worthy by the leader, so the scope for creating an inclusive culture that celebrates diversity and fosters freedom of expression, including spiritual expression, and tolerance is not necessarily great. Workers’ freedom is tempered by control as both types of leadership are enacted on the leader’s terms. Hope and Hendry (1995) refer to this as “the twinning of freedom and control” (p. 61). Workers’ freedom to express their personal values and beliefs in a spiritually authentic manner is constrained by the cultural norms established by their leaders. Tourish and Pinnington (2002) liken this to roaming “at the end of a leash” (p. 163).

Since Burn’s (1978) seminal work, other forms of leadership where the focus is less on the leaders have been proposed. Three that are particularly relevant for this chapter are servant leadership, total quality management (TQM), and liberation management (LM). The following sections explore each of these.

Revising the Priority

Servant leadership, liberation management, and total quality management and its offshoots have distinctive histories but are distinguished from transactional and transformational because of the greater priority they give to working ‘with’ rather than directing workers. Each seeks to empower workers to be more actively engaged in work.

Servant Leadership

According to Liden et al. (2014), servant leadership is achieved by leaders who are humble and give priority to fulfilling their followers’ needs rather than their own and whose humility encourages workers to become engaged in ways that help them realize their potential. Liden et al. (2008) propose that such leadership embraces seven dimensions: emotional healing (e.g., providing emotional support for followers), creating value for the community, conceptual skills (e.g., problem-solving skills that allow solutions for followers’ problems to be found), helping followers grow and succeed, putting subordinates first, and behaving ethically. By leading in this caring, nurturing, and ethical manner, the leader becomes a role model who motivates workers to advance the organization’s strategic objectives and, according to Greenleaf (1970), serve others without the need for coercion. Servant leadership has been found to bring benefits at the personal (van Dierendonck 2011), group (Ehrhart 2004; Schaubroeck et al. 2011), and organizational level (Peterson et al. 2012). In particular, it promotes workers’ sense of self-efficacy (Walumba et al. 2010) and, by encouraging a climate of procedural justice (Ehrhart 2004), contributes to a fair and inclusive work environment that supports diversity and self-expression.

Quality Management: The Example of TQM

Over the years, a variety of leadership theories and management models have been proposed to guide the achievement of continuous quality improvement. Probably the most well known is total quality management (TQM), a management approach that took its inspiration from team-based production systems used in Japanese industry. It consists of a collection of management practices rather than a single prescriptive model, so it is hard to assign its development to a single theorist. At its heart is the objective of harnessing workers’ experience, creativity, and inventiveness at every level in a production process in order to create a focus on constant improvement. While TQM’s popularity has now waned, it has provided the foundation for a range of contemporary models that carry forward the focus on continuous improvement (e.g., ISO 9000, Lean Manufacturing, Six Sigma, and Design Thinking).

Liberation Management: Redistributing the Power

Liberation management (LM) is an approach to management that was originally coined by the management guru Tom Peters in the 1990s and developed further by Terry (2005). In Necessary Disorganization for the Nanosecond Nineties (1992), Peters provided a model of work that was designed to allow executives to address challenges he predicted they would soon be facing as hierarchical and bureaucratic organizations were forced out of existence by new market conditions and technology. He proposed that the formation of fleet-footed project teams would be the answer to the challenges of this (then) near future and that these would require workers to be liberated from the controls inherent in bureaucratic systems. Decentralized management structures were presented as the path to worker empowerment and respect. Such liberation, Peters proposed, would engender worker engagement, enthusiasm, and imagination.

In academia, Peter’s writings on liberation management have now been largely consigned to the dusty shelves in libraries and academics’ offices, but for many executives, his teachings remain influential as they promise a new more productive way of working in an age of intensive competition and tight margins. His well-detailed model (Peters 1992) provides a template for workplace change initiatives that seek to redefine workplace relationships by redistributing decision-making power and engaging workers in strategic dialogue.

Dialogue and Dialogic Spaces

Dialogue gains its name from the Greek word dialogos where dia means through or across and logos means meaning. It refers to a form of communication that gives primacy to the development of quality relationships through respectful listening and a desire to understand another’s perspective.

A common misconception is that dialogue is simply a synonym for talk or conversation. In fact, it is a more complex notion than either talk or conversation and, as such, has generated a substantial literature (Cissna and Anderson 1998, p. 65) including a theoretical base informed by such eminent scholars as Mikhail Bakhtin, Martin Buber, Paolo Freire, Hans-Georg Gadamer, and Carl Rogers. Like all forms of communication, it is a collaborative process that creates shared meanings. Dialogue is distinguished from other types of communication like conversation by its embedded values and the fact that is needs to be understood from a processural perspective (i.e., as a process) and as an outcome (i.e., as the product of that process). In other words, dialogue as a process is often not recognized until dialogue as an outcome is achieved.

Dialogue as a process requires an atmosphere of openness and a commitment to respectful listening and the achievement of mutual understanding. To achieve mutual understanding requires quality relationships and engagement (Buber 1970). At the same time, the quality of interlocutors’ relationships and engagement become criteria for judging the quality of the product. In other words, the criteria for judging that dialogue is achieved come from the defining characteristics of the dialogic process itself (Pearce 2006 in Heath et al. 2006, p. 345).

Dialogue, by virtue of the way it pursues mutual understanding in a respectful and appreciative manner, contributes to healthy workplaces. In fact, Deetz (1995) proposes that it is a central mechanism for achieving ethical workplaces. By requiring respectful listening, dialogue not only encourages the acknowledgment of different voices but also provides a positive process by which these voices become understood. It therefore provides the foundation for constructive multivocality, respect for diversity, and tolerance.

To do this, dialogue cannot operate in a vacuum divorced from the values it enacts. It both requires and fosters a positive communication climate, a space infused with values like trust, respect, compassion, appreciation, and caring. It can be argued that this dialectic relationship between interactive environment and dialogue is the mechanism by which people come to feel valued and develop a sense of legitimacy and belonging at work and come to feel sufficiently safe to be able to express their authentic selves and experience work as meaningful. When dialogue is encouraged, the result is the emergence of positive empathetic spaces between people as they relate to respectfully toward each other (Buber 1970). These are thedialogic spaces this paper seeks to promote – interpersonal spaces that both sustain and are the consequence of dialogue. When leaders nurture such spaces, the quality of work and its meaningfulness for those involved are optimized.

Meaningful Work

Meaningful work is a popular theme in the humanist management literature (Lepisto and Pratt 2017) and has been defined in a wide variety of ways (Zorn 2017). At one end of the spectrum, it is defined as workers understanding “the purpose of their work” (Wrzesniewski and Dutton 2001 p. 180) or “at a minimum purposeful and significant” work (Pratt and Ashforth 2003 p. 311). Kahn (1990) emphasizes the transactional nature of work, suggesting that meaningfulness is achieved when workers judge that they are receiving a return on their physical, cognitive, or emotional investments. Michaelson (2009) sees this transaction in terms of “exchanging self-realization and service to others” while satisfying “market demands” (p. 3).

Grant (2008) introduces the dimension of value to the notion of meaningful work by proposing that meaningfulness “is a judgment of the general value and purpose of the job” (p. 119), while Podolny et al. (2005) focus specifically on workers’ values. They define meaningful action as satisfying two criteria: it “(1) supports some ultimate end that the individual personally values; and (2) affirms the individual’s connection to the community of which he or she is part” (p. 15).

Cheney et al. (2008) consider that to be meaningful, work needs to align with “a personally significant purpose” (p. 144) that goes beyond simply feeling good or developing personal talents. Some authors like Ciulla (2000) address the need to locate meaningfulness beyond the individual, proposing that meaningful work needs to be “morally worthy” (p. 223). In doing so, the socially constructed nature of what is considered meaningful is highlighted as well as the argument that meaningful work is inevitably a form of social action.

When these contributions to our understanding of meaningful work are integrated, they suggest that not only must the purpose of work be understood but that this purpose must be judged by the worker to be of value if work is to be considered meaningful. This value emerges at a level above simply feeling positive about work or having one’s talents extended. As well as such inward-focused characteristics, it has outward-focused qualities that link to the individual’s work to social consequences (Cheney et al. 2008).

Work must be judged as being consistent with and supported by values that have their genesis in the communities the worker identifies with while also satisfying employers’ objectives. Thus, meaningful work can be thought of as being embedded in, and indexed to, values at three interrelated levels – personal, employer, and community – and as a judgment rather than an objective achievement.

What criteria do individuals employ to judge that work is meaningful? Various scholars have addressed this question empirically (e.g., Mitroff and Denton 1999; Terez 2002), but a consensus remains elusive, possibly because workers’ notions of meaningfulness are shaped by the types of work they engage in and the contexts in which this work is embedded. Cheney et al. (2008) propose an intersubjective approach in order to understand how work is judged. They propose there is a need to take into account “historical, economic, and cultural contexts but also to recognize shared conceptions of meaningful work within particular sites or networks at particular times” (p. 145). What is clear is that meaningful work embraces work life at many levels and cannot be conceptualized as a unitary concept (Lepisto and Pratt 2017). In this regard, Rosso et al. (2010) (as noted earlier) provide an excellent synthesis that highlights its complexity by the sources (i.e., self, others, work context, and spiritual life) and processes (i.e., authenticity, self-efficacy, self-esteem, the perception that work is purposeful, belongingness, and transcendence) that constitute it.

The Crisis of Meaning

There is mounting evidence that workers are increasingly experiencing a crisis of meaning as work encroaches further into personal time and spaces in this age of connectivity and distributed ways of working. In some sectors, the freedom to work from anywhere is being accompanied by a proliferation of employment contracts that reframe workers’ relationships with employers and work (e.g., short-term contracts), while at the same time, offices are being replaced by hot desks and shared open-plan workspaces, and workers are being encouraged to take advantage of new digital platforms that allow work, particularly knowledge work, to be geographically and temporally distributed. Some workers relish the opportunities new ways of working are creating for them to craft their work patterns around family and recreational needs. Others experience these new ways of working as an erosion of the commitment of the employer to employees and their well-being as well as a sign that individuality is only a consideration if it can be harnessed for the pursuit for competitive advantage. Increasingly, organizational research is supporting these concerns and proposing that these new ways of working are coupled to a crisis of meaning that workers and society at large are experiencing (Holland 1989). As workers work more, give more of themselves at work, and are subjected to endless changes as organizations strive to adapt in order to remain competitive and deliver increasingly higher levels of return to shareholders, work becomes less fulfilling and more oppressive. Drive (2007) proposes that “the spiritual turn” is a fitting response to this crisis of meaning. It challenges leaders to consider how their organization’s programmatic meaning making and existential, individual meaning can support each other.

Linking Dialogic Spaces to Meaningful Work

The relationship between dialogic spaces, existential meaning, and meaningful work has not been widely explored in the literature, but it becomes clearer if this relationship is examined from the vantage point of the communication constitutes organizations (CCO) perspective (See Putnam and Nicotera 2008; Robichaud and Cooren 2013; Taylor and Van Every 2000) that proposes these dimensions are inextricably linked. The CCO perspective asserts that communication is not merely something that happens in organizations, but it is also constitutive of them. This means communication “is the means by which organizations are established, composed, designed, and sustained” (Cooren et al. 2011 p. 1150). It constitutes the dialogic spaces that this chapter argues are a key determinant of the meaning and meaningfulness of work experiences and where individual existential meaning can be performed and appreciated.

Adapting to Contemporary Circumstances

There is no doubt that twenty-first-century organizations are operating in demanding times that are constantly challenging their established and taken-for-granted modernist approaches to organizing. Technological advances, changing lifestyles, and increased migration are transforming workforces and markets and creating new performance expectations that traditional bureaucratic ways of organizing seem increasingly unable to meet (Jamali et al. 2006). Top-down command and control management and hierarchical structures are proving increasingly unsuited to such rapidly changing environments. The growing need for organizations to be flexible and respond to the challenges of rapidly changing environments has led to a new management perspective that positions workers as a capital asset rather than a factor in production. As this view takes hold, worker commitment, empowerment, teamwork, trust, and participation are becoming fundamental objectives (Jamali et al. 2006). Tapping workers’ creativity, enthusiasm, and inventiveness is now seen as the key to developing the organization’s creative potential and ensuring it can flourish in this new environment (Black and Porter 2000). The question this poses is whether this can be of benefit to the worker. Does mobilizing the workers’ creativity, enthusiasm, and inventiveness help to address the crisis of meaning and foster meaningful work? It may just represent a new form of exploitation and create greater cynicism about the ability of organizations to create mutually enriching partnerships with their workers.

Liberation in Practice

The following sections discuss two projects, one inspired by LM and the other by TQM, in order to see whether such initiatives encourage the sort of dialogic spaces that can foster meaningful work.

Liberation Is “Calling”

Two French studies the author has participated in are showing that liberation management projects have the potential to install new values in workplaces as workers are given the latitude necessary to bring their minds and souls to bear on how they engage with their co-workers, how decisions are made, and, ultimately, how business is done. The following section explores one of these liberation management projects.

TELTEK (not its real name) is a French call center that serves companies in a conglomerate of subsidiaries associated with a large multinational company. It employs a range of lawyers, engineers, and other professionals to offer advice on matters spanning automotive engineering (e.g., ways to fit new transmissions to vehicles) and gaming law (e.g., how to legally navigate issues related to running an online gaming facility) (Arnaud et al. 2016). TELTEK’s LMP was initiated when the chief executive officer (CEO) decided that call center staff were best placed to come up with innovative new strategies for meeting customers’ needs and ensuring ongoing company viability because they were the employees engaging with customers on an hour-by-hour basis. This meant they were constantly hearing the customers’ concerns and could detect changing trends in these concerns.

Motivated by this rationale, he introduced a liberation management project (LMP) designed to engage call center staff in strategy teams set up to discuss, design, and implement new strategic practices. For these frontline staff, this project issued an invitation to use a wider range of their capabilities by engaging in new ways of thinking and relating at work. While the project reflected the CEO and his executive’s values and beliefs about work and worker engagement, by shifting power and agency toward the frontline, it also paved the way for workers to negotiate new ways of working that accommodated their personal values and beliefs. The project gave them the license to promote changes that would allow them make their work more meaningful.

Workplaces are complex and dynamic webs of relationships, which play out in a context defined by established behavioral norms. In workplaces like TELTEK where work routines seldom vary, it is not unreasonable to assume that these behavioral norms become strongly entrenched, taken for granted, and therefore particularly resistant to change. Customers’ inquiries may vary, but the process of responding to them has a very predictable pattern that reinforces workers’ expectations about how they engage with customers, co-workers, and line managers. The LMP set out to challenge this predictability by stimulating new conversations. Workers were encouraged to take time out from the call center to join other workers in rooms normally designated as the territory of administrative and managerial staff. Here workers and managers discussed ways to reorganize work and, in so doing, to improve customer service and profitability. Not only did these conversations provide the opportunity to talk about new topics, they also created spaces for engaging managers and other frontline workers in new ways. New interactional dynamics emerged that contrasted markedly with those supported by the call center environment. New skills were learned, and existing skills not utilized in the call center work were employed.

As the LMP progressed, the new way of working it sought to institute produced a range of unexpected relational costs that began to limit how its potential to positively transform the workplace was realized (Mills and Arnaud 2016). Workers’ “habitus” (Bourdieu 1990a, b; Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992) – their taken-for-granted assumptions about how work is done and power is distributed at work – proved to be a stumbling block to empowering workers and improving profitability.

While new conversations were established to reconstructing workplace strategic practices that fostered opportunities for greater personal expression and had the potential to transform into truly dialogic engagement, not all frontline call center workers chose to participate in the LMP. Negative relational consequences emerged as two broad groups of workers emerged, those embracing the opportunities and those choosing not to do so. These divisions became so pronounced that they colored the tone of strategy team meetings and threatened to scuttle the LMP (Mills and Arnaud 2016). Mills and Arnaud’s (2016) findings suggest that providing the opportunity to work differently was not enough. Each worker had to confront the system of practice-based predispositions that constitutes the “space of possibles” (Emirbayer and Johnson 2008, p. 27) that shapes their “intelligent moral and rational action” (Crossley 2013, p. 292) and is at the heart of how they perceive the world of work and the positions they take in that world. The LMP introduced new positions (e.g., as strategist) that could not be aligned with some workers’ sense of the possible positions they could take. For these workers, their perceptions of appropriate positions to take at work were constrained by their sense of what the “real” work was and the positions they saw as allowing this real work to be performed. Even workers who did actively embrace the opportunity to assume the position of strategy team member voiced a sense that this was not a position they were comfortable with. For example, one call center worker, quoted in Mills and Arnaud (2016) commented:

I’ve got the feeling that my position is not coherent with what I really do [what he sees as his primary job/contribution] within TELTEK. (Front-line employee)

The TELTEK study (Arnaud et al. 2016; Mills and Arnaud 2016) suggests that readiness to embrace dialogic spaces that can lead to liberated practice is contingent upon the degree to which workers can find the positions conscionable in practice. As will be shown in the next section, the designer and instigator of the second example of a liberating project tried to liberate workers by reframing departments as small self-managing businesses. This offered workers greater agency but, in contrast to the TELTEK LMP, by assuming positions in practice that were universally familiar. The translation from team worker to partner in a small business operation did not necessarily involve a substantial cognitive shift or change in performance. The conversations that had previously occurred could simply become more dialogic and purposeful.

Work Center Management: A Case of Self-Managing Teams

Work Center Management (WCM) was the title given to a new way of managing work that was introduced into Food Corp (not its real name), a New Zealand food-processing factory (See Mills 1997, 2005). In defining this style of management, the factory manager took core TQM principles such as continuous improvement and coupled these to the practice of providing immediate financial data so workers could appreciate the impact of their actions and the financial status of the company and use this information to create a management system that generated a small business culture within a large one. This process and rationale are captured in the following quote from the factory manager who designed and led the implementation of WCM:

What I have done is that I have understood that concept [of providing immediate financial information] and then taken it the next step and added the people values to it, the empowerment values to it, the concept of individual businesses, the internal customer supply relationships similar to what you would have with external customers and so just expanded on the concept and the key thing behind my belief as to why it will work is that inherently a Japanese culture-type system cannot be adopted in New Zealand because we are not Japanese. We don’t think that way. Our culture is not developed that way but one of the key strengths of the New Zealand culture is we’re a country full of small businesses and really all that has happened here is to take that culture and put it into a large organisation and turn a large organisation into a cluster of small businesses which New Zealanders like working in. (Factory Manager)

The management model was then rolled out across the factory, transforming existing departments into self-managing teams with the freedom to innovate in ways that would streamline production. The emergent way of working embodied the factory manager’s personal approach. As he said:

…at the end of the day the change and the culture and the philosophy of an organisation is determined by the leadership of the day and so what has happened here is a reflection of the way I feel. (Factory Manager)

This WCM project differed from the liberating project at TELTEK in several important regards. Firstly, TELTEK’s LMP involved creating pan-organizational strategy teams, whereas the WCM project retained the division of labor across the factory while giving existing department heads [Work Center Managers in the new system] greater say in how they worked and the license to promote new ways of working that aligning with WCM’s general cultural principles. They could therefore tailor the way liberation was performed to the aptitudes and values of their work teams.

The objective was to provide more opportunity for collective agency and accountability so that a more constructive, quality ethic was installed. By reframing departments as small businesses called work centers (WCs) and treating other WCs as customers, the factory manager hoped long-standing tensions between departments would be replaced with a service orientation. To this end, relationships across the factory were reframed as customer-service provider or customer-product provider relationships. Implementing WCM challenged the forepersons (i.e., lowest level of management) within the WCs to engineer inclusive dialogic spaces and to relinquish some of their power so collaborative and more consensual decision-making could occur at the frontline. The redefinition of power and authority was the biggest challenge and, in at least one department, required interventions and personnel changes. Some workers could not revise work habits and expectations formed in traditional hierarchical management systems such as the one that had always prevailed at Food Corp. This was revealed by the prominence of oppositional and alienated discourse among these workers (Mills 2005). Both types of discourse involve the worker taking positions that inhibit respectful listening and do not foster respect or a sense of common purpose and belonging.

Oppositional discourse positions the group that a worker identifies with as confederates in conflict with those in authority through the use of combative metaphors (e.g., “it’s a battle ground”) and “them and us” constructions. Alienated discourse positions an individual worker as someone who has been marginalized by the organization and is expressed through the use of numeric metaphors (e.g., “I’m just a number around here”) and “me and them” constructions.

The second difference was in the way the workers in the two companies engaged with senior managers. In TELTEK direct engagement occurred between call center operators and the executive team. In Food Corp the WC managers provided the interface between frontline staff and the executive team. In part, this was a consequence of size; Food Corp was a much bigger organization than TELTEK.

The third difference was in terms of the composition of the workforces in the respective companies. In TELTEK the frontline staff were typically graduates. In contrast, very few frontline workers at Food Corp held formal educational qualifications. The two workplaces were similar, however, in that TELTEK’s call center workers and two of the three WCs studied in the factory were engaged in work that did not require collaboration. Table 1 compares the interactive environments in the three representative departments at Food Corp prior to the introduction of WCM. This comparison reveals that the interactive environments in the transport and production departments contrasted starkly with the collaborative and inclusive communication climate that prevailed in Containers.

Table 1 Comparing the interactive environments in three indicative departments at Food Corp
Full size table

These pre-change departmental profiles provide insights into why the workers in the containers department responded most positively to the opportunity to exercise more agency and assume greater responsibility for how their WC operated. Their long-standing way of working had positioned them in ways that accommodated greater individual initiative within the context of a collaborative environment. This was much less the case in Transport and not the case at all in Production. In Transport, the foreperson coordinated the work, establishing a daily work schedule for each worker, which they then carried out independently of their co-workers. The only initiative a worker could take was to respond to an urgent request for help from a co-worker, but the response to such requests had to be weighed against the need to keep up with one’s own work schedule. In Production the tasks did not vary. Except for a few roles that involved specialist equipment and therefore required the operator to monitor outputs and alter settings when necessary, workers were distributed along conveyor belts that carried produce at various stages of processing. Their task was to extract substandard produce and detritus from the endless stream of produce as it passed their section of the belt. Such work did not make it easy for workers to exercise more agency in the workplace by participating in strategic discussions. Engaging in such discussion strongly challenged these workers’ expectations about the legitimate role of workers and the nature of leader-member exchanges and mixed-status relationships. Strategy was considered the exclusive province of managers.

Liberation Models: Frameworks for Fostering Dialogic Spaces?

This chapter began by exploring different types of leadership. This exploration drew attention to types of leadership that move the focus from heroic leaders to distributed forms of leadership that encourage worker engagement and foster genuine dialogue across the workplace. In doing this, it provided a platform for asserting that dialogic spaces are the key to creating meaningful work because of the way they introduce and sustain respectful and empathetic engagement. This sort of engagement fosters quality relationships, built on trust and understanding, which support multivocality, diversity, and the expression of the authentic self.

Two liberation projects were explored in order to establish whether empowering frontline workers to become more actively engaged in strategic practice could provide a means to create meaningful dialogic spaces. Both cases were instances where the most senior manager in the respective organizations, inspired by principles of frontline empowerment, set out to introduce a new culture that supported a more collaborative and transparent way of working that valued worker engagement. Both the LMP and WCM projects introduced post-bureaucratic ways of working that gave workers greater agency to craft their own ways of working and contribute to their organizations’ strategic objectives in the hope that competitiveness and financial performance would be enhanced. Both models of management required workers and their line managers to engage in new conversations that challenged them to reflect upon and adjust their respective positions and responsibilities in the workplace. This was potentially destabilizing and did not necessarily create a communication environment characterized by inclusive and meaningful engagement that translated into meaningful work.

Certainly, while some workers in both organizations seized the opportunity to work in new ways with enthusiasm, others did not. Both cases, but particularly the study of the French call center project, highlight the need to take into account the circumstances into which a change in management is introduced and how the new style of operating articulates with these circumstances. This is because new systems don’t instantly become operational. Organizational changes that require workers to work differently usually roll out over time and at different rates across different groups and individuals so old and new will coexist, sometimes generating tensions and encouraging dissent that can constrain or distort the implementation process. Arnaud et al. (2016) reveal that this occurred at TELTEK. They show how counter-narratives emerge that compromised the innovative process and make it less likely that constructive dialogic spaces were created.

Workers can retreat and assume oppositional positions that are not conducive to an open and authentic behavior. The result can be that all workers can feel more rather than less vulnerable. In fact, it could be argued that the emergence of counter-narratives is a very good indication that workers are finding that work is not aligned with their values and beliefs.

The second case in the food-processing factory supports this proposition. In Containers, the work center where collaborative, inclusive behavior was necessary for work to be completed under the old system of management, the introduction of a more empowering way of working was experienced as a positive change and was enthusiastically embraced. The result was workers who felt validated and celebrated their way of working. At the same time, when instances of less equitable behavior were suspected (e.g., overtime seemed to be given to one worker more often than others), workers became a little more cynical and less inclined to endorse the changes.

When the findings of the two cases are considered together, there is cause to conclude that initiatives like LM and WCM, which seek to enhance worker engagement and sense of belonging and identification with the workplace, must take into account the prevailing communication climate and workers’ expectations about what constitutes legitimate workplace interaction. When workers find empowerment confronts well-established patterns of workplace engagement, particularly ones supported by their worker habitus, then a shift toward a collaborative or servant leadership model can be experienced as destabilizing. Those promoting liberation initiatives would be wise to look at the gap between current and new ways of working and strategize how the transition from one to the other can be achieved without causing destabilizing effects or generating counter-narratives that confront the official liberation narrative.

In this chapter, dialogue and spaces where this can occur are presented as a means to enact positive relationships that provide the basis for understanding and crafting meaningful work. According to Kersten (2006 in Heath et al. 2006), for dialogue to be effective and achieve such outcomes, there is an assumption:

  1. (a)

    That participants have the capacity to understand and acknowledge their own worldview and express it competently

  2. (b)

    That participants are able to understand the worldview of the other

  3. (c)

    That through discourse, participants develop common language and common ground (p. 362).

While appearing straightforward, these three assumptions can be problematic in practice (Kersten 2006). Individuals and the social or occupational groups they identify with can have very different experiences from others in the workplace. Each person’s experiences nurture expectations about work that are supported by their work habitus (Bourdieu 1990a). For Bourdieu, habitus refers to the way society is reproduced by shaping an individual’s lasting set of dispositions to operate in certain ways. These dispositions are created through practice and then shape the way the individual perceives, feels, and acts in their world by creating a repertoire of possibilities in their area of practice.

Workers’ habitus can present obstacles to understanding the worldview of the other even when there is a genuine intention to do so. For instance, just the notion of what constitutes respectful listening between workers and managers or co-workers can vary, particularly across different cultural groups, generations, genders, and spiritual belief systems. Furthermore, there is a strong chance that the form of workplace dialogue that takes in a particular workplace will favor the members of the dominant or most powerful group. Thus, dialogue during implementation of liberation projects like the two described earlier is likely to embody the values and beliefs of the managers instigating these projects rather than those of workers, either individually or as a group. This fact alone highlights the difficulties organizations face when seeking to establish a way of working that embraces legitimate dialogue. Underpinning this problem is the challenge of deciding exactly what constitutes legitimate dialogue (Zorn et al. (2006) in Heath et al. 2006). Zorn et al. (2006) suggest dialogue is “more a commitment to a set of values than a coherent set of concrete practices” (p. 365). Furthermore, it is sometimes only possible to appreciate what dialogue entails when participants reflect on what is achieved by their engagement (i.e., dialogue as product).

Zorn et al. (2006) also point out that achieving dialogue in practice is problematic because of the presence, or suspicion of the presence, of hidden agendas. This was certainly the experience at TELTEK where some “liberated” workers began suspecting that the dialogue occurring in the strategic team discussions was being shaped by the executive team’s desire to get frontline workers to assume the responsibilities of managers without remunerating them as managers. This suspicion contributed to counter-narratives that workers constructed to oppose the official liberation narrative (Arnaud et al. 2016).

Summary

This chapter has explored the interface between different types of leadership and an organization’s ability to provide meaningful work for its workers. It has argued that authentic dialogic spaces are needed to ensure innovative managerial approaches that empower workers to exercise more agency at work, like “liberation management” (Peters 1992; Peters and Bogner 2002; Terry 2005), create conditions that foster meaningful work and, in doing so, support workplace spirituality. It uses two illustrative “liberation” projects to draw attention to the way the prevailing communication climate and workers’ expectations about legitimate workplace interaction shape the process of implementing post-bureaucratic management systems that are designed to enhance workers’ engagement and agency at work. It has sought to advance the view that when employees have authentic opportunities to engage in meaningful dialogue with peers and managers, a plurality of values, beliefs, and the spiritual frameworks that sustain them can be respectfully acknowledged and integrated constructively into work life. Workers can then achieve a sense of legitimacy that allows them to be their whole selves at work. The dialogic spaces created between people as they engage in meaningful dialogue are not only a key determinant of meaningful work experiences; they provide a safe space where individual existential meaning can be performed and appreciated.

Models of leadership like Liberation Management (Peters 1992; Terry 2005) and Work Center Management, which aim to empower workers to exercise agency in the workplace and contribute to strategic practice, do not necessary provide safe places where relationships, built on trust and understanding, can support multivocality, diversity, and the expression of the authentic self. This is because the empowerment objectives of liberation models like LM and WCM are unashamedly indexed to the achievement of strategic advantage and quality management – both conceive worker empowerment as the mechanism for achieving market-based corporate objectives. However, integrating a dialogic perspective into the way these models operate would allow them to also be indexed to the achievement of meaningful work and the sources and processes that constitute it (Rosso et al. 2010). In doing so, the organization would move closer to ensuring that each worker’s values, beliefs, and spirituality are appreciated as an integral part of their employment and strategic practice. Thus, meaningful dialogue, and the positive dialogic spaces this creates, can provide a conceptual bridge that allows meaningful work, spirituality, and emancipatory models of leadership like LM and WCM to be combined in practice. So, in answer to the questions posed at the start of this chapter, liberation models can create a sense of belonging and foster meaningful work, and, yes, mobilizing the workers’ creativity, enthusiasm, and inventiveness can help to address the crisis of meaning and foster meaningful work but only to the extent that meaningful dialogue occurs and creates dialogic spaces that allow each worker to safely be their authentic self at work.