Managerial Control In Management

We live in a society that has changed significantly throughout the last centuries and wherein new organizational forms and cultures have emerged (Kärreman & Alvesson, 2004). It might be a reflection of developments in contemporary organizations, but these changes are definitely all related to all organizational activity and is a topic of much research lately (i.e. Deetz, 1992; Dutton et al., 1994; Fournier, 1998). Our current (organizational) society has shifted towards a situation that consists of a lot of knowledge intensive work, and it includes an expansion of the service sector. This has created new operational forms in organizations (Kärreman and Alvesson, 2004). A specific example of these new forms of organizations is the Professional

Therefore, different types of managerial control have been researched and compared to the traditional control mechanisms. These researchers state that, next to standardized control, some unstandardized control mechanisms are necessary within knowledge intensive organizations. Therefore, managers of PSFs often use some sort of indirect method of controlling and organizing their employees, both knowingly and unknowingly. According to Etzioni (1964), among others, management also targets behavior indirectly through norms and values. This is accomplished through managerial practices that Etzioni labels as normative control: “the attempt to elicit and direct the required efforts of members by controlling the underlying experience, thoughts, and feelings that guide their actions” (cited in Kunda, 2006, p.11). Often this normative control is hard to define and mostly only noticeable in subtle ways. Often both managers and employees are not aware of this control, which makes it difficult to fully understand it. However, throughout group activities, educational sessions, presentations and company outings, this form of control sometimes becomes more

within PSFs, is logically harder to supervise and control. Alvesson (2004) also concludes this and he states in his article “senior managers frequently do not understand what actually goes on and cannot rely on simple direct, quantified performance indicators to manage the process” (p.122). This shows that the complexity of the tasks involved is considerably higher compared to the more traditional industrial organizations. Furthermore, as will be extended further on, PSFs often deal with conscious and deliberate willfulness of its employees to leave the organization. This is of high concern for many PSFs and this also stresses the importance of trying to influence employees indirectly. To continue, in a preliminary research about the relation between normative control mechanisms and job satisfaction one interviewee, a partner of a large Dutch law firm, responded to a question and summarized one of the difficulties working with professionals as follows: “in my organization, all our employees are professionals (a definition which will be explained further on) and they do not easily let managers or partners to guide or control themselves.” This means that if controlled explicitly, employees often find it difficult to accept that control. This is a very interesting statement and this example shows the importance of implicit or normative control, because this might be the only way to keep track of your employees. Additionally, the preliminary