Reuven Shapira

Dysfunctional Executives: âÂÂJumpersâ Practicing Covertly ConcealingManagerial Ignorance and Immoral Careerism

Scholars who found trust to be the most important moderator of transformational leaders’ effects did not allude to trust spiral creation. Others found that managers’ vulnerable involvement in subordinates’ problem-solving generated trust, shaped high-trust innovation-prone local cultures and led to successful organizational change as change leaders were grasped as high-moral trustworthy. These findings suggest that the common ‘jumping’ careers tend to nurture immoral executives. Albeit, immoral mismanagement was infrequent among mid-levellers, only a minority of some 25% opted for CCMI; the majority opted for contrary high-moral trust, creating ignorance-exposing vulnerable involvement in their jurisdictions but many of them remained detached and ignorant of ginning. This article deals with the managerial immorality and has become a major topic of organizational research but this is not true of careerism, hence few remedies were offered for Im-C.

Ignorance-Concealing Use of Low-Moral Means by Outsider Managers, A Covert Corrupting Practice that Nurtures Amoral Executives

Executives’ morality and ethics became major research topics after recent business scandals, but research missed a major explanation of executives’ amorality: career advancement by ‘jumping’ between firms that causes ignorance of job-pertinent tacit know-how and phronesis (Greek for practical wisdom), tempting ‘jumpers’ to conceal managerial ignorance (hereafter: CoMI) by detachment and/or autocratic seduction-coercion. CoMI causes a distrust and ignorance cycle, which engenders mismanagement that bars performance-based career advancement and encourages low-moral careerism (L-MC), advancing by bluffs, power abuse, scapegoating and other self-serving subterfuges. Though L-MC is a known malady of large organizations, its explanation missed ‘jumpers’ choice of CoMI, probably because the latter remained on organizations’ dark side through secrecy and conspiracies of silence. A 5-year semi-native anthropological study of five ‘jumper’-managed automatic processing plants and their parent inter-kibbutz co-operatives found common CoMI-induced L-MC among executives, 80% of CEOs and 72% of plant managers, versus only among some 25% of mid-levellers. This gradation of morality accorded power, authority and status ranking that made practicing CoMI-L-MC easier the higher one’s position; it is consistent with findings that show lower morality the higher one’s status (Piff et al., 2012) and supports the hypothesis that ‘jumping’ careers tend to nurture amoral executives. Ideas for remedies for this corporate malady are suggested, and further study of ‘jumpers’ coping with ignorance is called for.

The Terra Incognita of Outsider Executives Rule by Systematic Managerial Ignorance

Systematic managerial ignorance (SMI) is concealed as a dark secret especially to protect the rule of outsider executives. SMI is terra incognita, an unknown land that evades usual research methods. A longitudinal semi-native anthropological study of automatic processing plants by a management educated and experienced insider-outsider ex-manager found that SMI characterized outsider managers who concealed it by detachment from knowledgeable employees. Detachment retained ignorance and engendered distrust, secrecy, mistakes and failure cycles, while a few knowledgeable outsiders prevented total failure by the opposite practice of involvement that created virtuous trust and knowledge cycles. These brought successes and empowered them, but then were suppressed by power-losing SMI superiors and left. They were replaced by outsiders who chose detached SMI as superiors’ loyalists and failed. New knowledgeable outsiders were called to the rescue, but their success just repeated the empowerment-suppression-succession-failure cycle. SMI exposure is explicable by phronetic research (Flyvbjerg, 2001); it calls for remedial action such as preferring Bower’s (2007) inside-outsider successor CEOs and using new yardsticks for assessing outsider and insider executives’ candidates. Further study of SMI and other concealed supportive negative practices of outsider executives is suggested.

High-Trust Culture, the Elusive Context of Shared Leadership in Highly Specialized Organizations

A major interest and prime right of talented, educated and expert employees of highly specialized organizations is having fair opportunities to contribute their faculties to problem-solving, decision-making and innovation beyond their specific roles. However, managers’ authority is legitimized by their presumed superior capability for such contributions; if employee contributions surpass managers’ this may undermine managers’ authority. Though managers are supposed to encourage employee contributions, structurally they are hindered. High-trust cultures mitigate this problem by encouraging cooperative learning, problem-solving, and innovation, but they are elusive, often transient and under-studied, depend on managers’ choosing vulnerable involvement and shared servant transformational leadership. However, leadership research missed this dependency which was found by a managerially educated, insider-outsider ex-manager ethnographer in outsider-managed, mostly low-trust factories in which a few involved managers created high-trust cultures and encouraged informal democracy for some years. Further study of high-trust cultures and the decisive managerial choice of either involvement or detachment is proposed.

Leaders’ Involvement, an Essential Practice for Trust, Learning, Effectiveness and Innovation in Highly Specialized Firms

High-trust relationships are essential for effective management of highly specialized organizations. Executives who choose involvement in problem-solving with employees and who become vulnerable by exposing their ignorance of employees’ unique knowledge, especially tacit know-how acquired by experience, problem-solving and innovating in communities of practice, endanger personal authority but they gain trust, learn, make better decisions, and regain authority provided they have primary source knowledge and interactional expertise for such learning (Collins and Evens, 2007). New executives without such knowledge and expertise, and/or with habitus of detachment and/or personalized leadership, especially outsiders, use detachment to avoid vulnerability, often causing vicious distrust circles that keep them ignorant and fail them in jobs although perhaps not in careers. Others whose knowledge and habitus encourage involvement tend to cause virtuous trust circles, achieving effectiveness and innovativeness. A semi-native ethnography of an outsider-managed automatic plant exposed the decisiveness of vulnerable involvement even more than having insider knowledge. By involvement outsiders gained trust, knowledge sharing, learned, and succeeded like inside-outsiders (Bower, 2007). The findings explain the prime advantage of insider successors differently from Bower (2007): their relevant knowledge encourages vulnerable involvement, engendering trust and learning. These findings offer new yardsticks for decision-making concerning succession.

Institutional Combination for Cooperative Financing: Trustful Cultures and Transformational Mid-Levelers Overcame Old-Guard Conservatism

Proper financing is often critical for cooperative development, but banks usually avoid providing it. A federation/consorzi of cooperatives that creates a guarantee fund may help to obtain financing in normal periods, but not in turbulent times which require radical, costly changes. Israeli kibbutzim faced this problem in the 1950s-1960s when they sought industrialization and agricultural change to export crops. Conservative old-guard leaders did not use their ample power to obtain financing for the turnaround. A mid-level official, who had been a transformational leader, created solutions without compromising cooperative principles. Ideas for practices enhancing high-trust cultures, which encourage the emergence of such leaders, are offered.

The Trust/Culture Conundrum: Leaders' and Managers' Intangible Capitals, Phronesis, Involvement, and Control Strategy

Organizational cultures affect trust levels but findings are contradictory. Fox’s theory of high- and low-discretion syndromes and Bourdieu’s field, practice, habitus, and capital concepts help explain contradictions by different or changing strategies of superiors, who either trust employees or seduce/coerce them. Conservative transactional leaders usually prefer seduction/coercion, but transformational leaders who have succeeded by trusting employees, also turn to seduction/coercion when entering dysfunction phases. Such a leader may preside for decades over a large firm/organizational field where innovative managers with practical wisdom, phronesis, and habituses of involvement in subordinates problem-solving that enhances high-trust cultures preserve such cultures in their units, innovate, and achieve successes. They advance less than the leaders conservative loyalists with political acumen who use seduction/coercion, while their successes help continue the mix of high- and low-trust unit cultures for decades that helps explain the contradictory findings. Longitudinal ethnography of a large organizational field in Israel supports this analysis.

Effective and Valuable Relationships of Involved Managers: The Prime Contextual Factor of High-Trust Relations in Highly Specialized Organizations

High-trust relationships are both effective and valuable for managing highly specialized organizations, but their creation requires involved managers who expose ignorance, become vulnerable, and endanger personal authority in order to gain trust, learn by cooperative problem-solving, and innovate for efficiency, effectiveness, and adaptability. Successors without enough relevant knowledge and expertise and/or with detachment habitus, especially outsiders, tend to avoid involvement and vulnerability, causing vicious distrust circles that keep them ignorant and fail them. Outsiders whose relevant knowledge and involvement habitus encourage involved vulnerability engender virtuous trust circles, valuable relations, effectiveness, and innovativeness. Ethnography of outsiders-managed automatic processing plant proved decisiveness of choosing vulnerable involvement more than having insider knowledge when taking charge (Bower, 2007): By this choice outsiders gained trust, acquired knowledge, and succeeded, while an inside successor’s detachment that minimizes trust with employees who just became his subordinates retains knowledge gaps that would cause failures.