A major role for followers is to collaborate with leaders in achieving organizational goals

3.4.2.3 Conclusions About Management by Objectives

MBO is a management theory that has had a great impact up until the present day. However, many libraries that tried to apply this management theory in the past faced difficulties in implementing it; in particular, the many hours needed and the high costs posed a great barrier.

The author presumes that the underlying factors that prevented MBO from being properly introduced were due to the staff members’ inadequate management skills and insufficient understanding of MBO. This situation could be understood from the way the Houston Academy of Medicine–Texas Medical Center Library diligently referenced Drucker’s works (according to their report), and the statement (in the same report) that it would be better to hire a management consultant with many years of experience in MBO. Even the Pennsylvania State University Libraries obtained help from a management consultant.

The purpose of introducing MBO was to have librarians learn to set objectives to comply with the organisation’s objectives. In addition, by voluntarily taking on the implementation, regulation and evaluation of MBO as their own responsibility, the librarians’ work motivation was enhanced and the organisation was revitalised. However, this led to the exhaustion of the librarians, such that achieving the goals of MBO itself became difficult.

The number of articles concerning MBO increased from the late 1960s to the 1970s. Ever since it was advocated by Drucker in the 1950s, it has been widely employed in the private sector in areas such as long-range planning and management strategies since the 1960s. It has also been applied in the area of personnel evaluation. MBO could be seen in libraries starting around the 1970s, indicating that this theory began to penetrate the library world 10 years later than it did in the private sector.

Strengths and Weaknesses

Participative leadership involves followers in the decision making process which has many benefits for both followers and the leader. The style often receives a great deal of praise for its ability to create a more engaged workforce. Follower feedback is actively sought out and applied by participative leaders. This creates a strong sense of value and job satisfaction for followers who believe that their opinions and efforts matter to the leader. Active participation by followers also creates a greater sense of community as the group becomes invested in achieving organizational objectives and works toward the common goal of achieving them.

Followers are also more likely to accept changes to policies and procedures that they had a hand in crafting. This is particularly beneficial when major changes need to be made in order to keep the organization moving forward. Resistance from front-line staff can effectively kill organizational evolution and it is important to create a sense of inclusion to ensure a successful transition. Providing an opportunity for followers to help shape the future creates a strong sense of buy-in and helps cut down on future issues as individuals have an opportunity to help choose their fate.

Allowing followers to be involved in the decision making process is also beneficial in the diversity of ideas that are presented. Instead of having their own points of reference, experiences, or abilities to draw from, participative leaders have the advantage of receiving input from their followers who can use their own abilities, skills, frame of references, and strengths to help create more creative and effective solutions to issues. Leaders may also benefit from having followers play devil’s advocate by having them theorize potential outcomes of decisions before they are enacted. This can help prevent issues down the road as potential obstacles are identified ahead of time and strategies for navigating these roadblocks can be planned.

Another strength of the participative leadership style is the effect it has on employee retention and growth. Followers, because of their engagement in the decision-making process, take ownership of the organizational objectives and view themselves as playing a key role in obtaining them. This encourages followers to stay with the organization to ensure that objectives are accomplished. Additionally, the style allows every member of the group to contribute and provides an opportunity for individual followers to exhibit their own leadership ability by taking the lead and guiding discussions. Wise participative leaders will encourage followers to pursue opportunities for leadership and assist them in obtaining their goals.

While the participative leadership style has many strengths, especially as it relates to improving follower morale, creating a strong sense of organizational identity and establishing a trusting relationship between supervisor and subordinate, it is not flawless. The human-oriented approach of the style and specifically its focus on seeking input from followers can present challenges.

First, the process of involving followers in the decision-making process is time intensive. Leaders must also spend time clearly communicating the issue being addressed or explaining the possible options so that followers have the necessary information to make informed decisions. Ample time must also be allotted for followers to process the information, formulate suggestions, and present options to the leader. Lastly, a leader must spend time analyzing the information and suggestions provided by followers before making a decision. The time required to successfully enact participative leadership therefore impairs leaders from making quick decisions which could potentially delay action or result in missed deadlines. In this way, the biggest strength of the style is also its greatest weakness.

Participative leadership also does not work well in situations where followers lack the skills, knowledge, or information to contribute in meaningful ways. Leaders might need to devote extensive time to evaluating, and if needed, training followers to ensure they are capable of contributing. Furthermore, there might be instances where a leader is unable to share all the pertinent information with a group of followers. In situations like this the group is operating at a disadvantage because they don’t have all the details. Any suggestions they offer will suffer from the lack of a complete picture.

Keeping a team focused and working harmoniously toward a common goal can also present a challenge. Group work can sometimes involve contention as individuals share and discuss various ideas. Additionally, certain personalities can dominate others. Leaders must therefore ensure that they set the example for respectful dialog, are proactive in identifying potential conflicts within the group, and act swiftly to correct issues before they get out of hand. Participative leaders must also be aware of the power of group-think and work to ensure that different points of view are encouraged and have an outlet for expression. It is also critical that participative leaders keep the group focused and on task. They must therefore become skilled at setting and enforcing deadlines and leading meetings or discussions.

Participative leaders may also find themselves too dependent on followers to make decisions. This can manifest itself in a couple of different ways. First, since participative leaders recognize that they don’t know everything and are comfortable in this acknowledgment, they therefore may become complacent in their technical knowledge and allow their skills to become obsolete. This can create a dependency issue for the leader as they have no choice but to rely on the expertise of others to make a decision. In situations like this the leader can quickly find themselves in trouble if a follower’s skill level is inadequate to contribute in a meaningful way or a follower exits the organization and the leader is unable to fill the new knowledge gap. Leaders also run the risk of becoming too comfortable with the abilities of their followers. This can cause them to replace their participative style with a delegative style in which the leader ceases to play any role in the decision-making process at all. Both of these circumstances have the potential to not only hurt the leader’s future employment but also prevent the organization from achieving its objectives. Participative leaders must therefore commit themselves to obtaining additional technical knowledge and staying actively engaged in the operations of their organizational unit.

Management by Objectives

The business concept of management by objectives (MBO), pioneered in the 1960s, has become a common theme in health management. MBO is a process whereby managers of an enterprise jointly identify its goals, define each individual’s areas of responsibility in terms of the results expected, and use these measures as guides for operating the unit and assessing the contributions of its members.

The common goals and then the individual unit goals must be established, as well as the organizational structure developed to help achieve these goals. The goals may be established in terms of outcome variables, such as defined targets for reduction of infant or maternal mortality rates. Goals may also be set in terms of intervening or process variables, such as achieving 95 percent immunization coverage, prenatal care attendance, or screening for breast cancer and mammography. Achievements are measured in terms of relevancy, efficiency, impact, and effectiveness.

The MBO approach has been subject to criticism in the field of business management because of its stress on mechanical application of quantitative outcome measures and because it ignores the issue of quality. This approach had great influence on the adoption of the objective of “Health for All” by the WHO, and on the US Department of Health and Human Services’ 1979 health targets for the year 2000, later as Healthy People 2010, and now, based on these experiences and new evidence, renewed as Healthy People 2020. Targeting diseases for eradication may contribute to institution building by developing experience and technical competence to broaden the organizational capacity.

However, categorical programs or target-oriented programs can detract from the development of more comprehensive systems approaches. Addressing the MDGs of reducing child and maternal mortality is at odds to some extent with targeting poliomyelitis for eradication and reliance on national immunization days, which distract planning and resource allocation for the buildup of the essential public health infrastructure for the basic immunization system so fundamental to child health. Immunization and human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) control draw the major part of donor resources in developing countries, while education for strengthening human resources and infrastructure draw less donor attention. A balance between comprehensive and categorical approaches requires very skilled management. The MDGs agreed to by the UN in 2001 as targets for the year 2015 provide a set of measurable objectives and a formula for international aid and for national development planning to help the poorest nations, with the wealthy nations providing aid, education, debt relief, and economic development through fairer trade practices. They are now being reviewed for extension to 2020 based on experience to date, with successes and failures, and recognizing the vital importance of non-communicable diseases as central to the health burden of low- and middle-income countries.

Decentralized Centralism – A New Dynamic in Educational Governance

The NPM ideology and the MbO governance strategy involved a new governance dynamic and changed use of political tools. The relation between the market and the political system changed in favor of the market, however, at the same time, we can observe variation. States do not always passively adapt to the external, international constraints (Sassen, 1998). The earlier works have used the term decentralized centralism trying to catch the governance dynamic between centralization and decentralization processes (Karlsen, 2000).

As a governance strategy, the MbO combined centralization and decentralization in dynamic interplay at the same time. Setting central goals and standards for outcomes were tasks for the macro-level and therefore assigned to centralization, while choice of tools and the responsibility for implementation were duties at the microlevel and seen as decentralization. The MbO strategy was goal and outcome oriented, in which decentralization was fitted into a centralized strategy. The model gave local freedom and probably more acceptance to work under harder pressure. In fact, this was management by results, and the rise of what Fägerlind and Strömquist (2004) have called the evaluative state.

In teacher education, the trend to decentralize responsibility and deregulate state schooling was tied to a rhetoric of enhancing teacher autonomy and professionalism and stressed the importance of the teachers' expert knowledge (Karlsen and Kvalbein, 2003). An opposite centralized trend was the state's intensification of instruments for output control. Thus, increased output control might instead restrict teacher autonomy and contribute to deprofessionalization of teachers' work (Helgøy and Homme, 2004). Delandshere and Arens (2001) interpret new teacher education reforms in the US as decreasing teachers' degree of freedom to shape their own role as teachers. Teachers and teacher educators are perceived more as the object of policy rather than professional participants. However, good teacher education and good teachers have been politically seen as the backbone in any national education system (OECD, 2005). From the state perspective, teacher education is under double governance at the same time. Teacher education is perceived as a governance instrument for desirable educational change in the compulsory school system (Garm and Karlsen, 2004). At the same time, the authorities can use policy tools as governmental instruments for regulation of teacher education.

Additional Safety Measures

Other safety measures are to display safety posters, create a safety-by-objectives program, and recognize employees with excellent safety records. Those employees with multiple accidents in their records should be reassigned or retrained.

Safety posters or signs are effective if certain guidelines are used. Research indicates that if the safety message is in negative terms (e.g., “Don’t let this happen to you,” followed by a picture of a person with a physical injury), it causes fear, resentment, and sometimes anger. Posters with positive messages (e.g., “Let’s all pitch in for safety”) produce better results. Posters and signs (see Figure 14-4) are more potent when they reflect the diversity of employees (e.g., multiple languages), are located in appropriate places, are not too numerous, and have attractive colors.

A safety-by-objectives program is a derivative of management by objectives. In a manufacturing plant, department heads formulate safety objectives for their departments. Management makes sure that objectives are neither too high nor too low. Incentives are used to motivate employees. After a year, the objectives are studied to see if they were reached.

Evaluation framework

The basic structure for evaluating NUCs is identical to that of IAIs. Both adopt the principle of management by objectives. The focus is on to what extent the actual performance at the end of medium-term achieves the goals and plans. In other words, the evaluation is in essence a comparison between actual and planned figures within the organisation. It is neither a relative evaluation nor a ranking system for universities. However, the NUC system is intended to link the evaluation to funding which in practice requires an evaluation system to compare the organisational performance with each other, or to other standard measures like RAE in the United Kingdom or Valuazione triennale della ricerca (VTR) in Italy (Minelli et al., 2007). How this can be done remains problematic, and perhaps highly subjective and discretionary.

As Johnes and Taylor (1990) argue, research ratings of university and research performance vary significantly with the quality of staff, research resources, priority for teaching, and university type. A funding regime may not produce good results for a higher education system as a whole if it allocates the bulk of funds into a few outstanding universities, which may result in an unbalanced system. However, depending on how performance is measured, this outstanding performer might not be efficient in terms of the ratio of inputs to outputs, or research outcomes per expenditures. Universities rated less well in research performance on this basis could be more efficient (in technical efficiency terms) than those rated higher, as the rating or performance might be measured in simply the number of excellent articles in international refereed journals or by citations without considering the resources (time, money, and staff etc) inputted into the process. As such, some measures of research performance may not be a good indication of productivity.

From this perspective at least, the evaluation methods for NUCs are an innovative way to take into account the differences among universities. NIAD-UE assesses the level of research by comparing the research activities and outcomes with the expected level from the point of expectations of the stakeholders, including academics, government, local communities, industries and international society. Actual and expected levels might differ from those of self-evaluations, because the evaluation criteria and expectations by NIAD-UE are not always identical to those of respective departments. Actual in this case means ex post performance on activities and outcomes; expected levels are the projected performance on these indicators. In addition, NIAD-UE examines the achievement of research in the midterm comparing it with the mid-term goals in IAIs.

The evaluation and funding link is an attempt to balance pressure from some aspects of the Japanese bureaucracy (in this case the Ministry of Finance (MOF)) for greater competition and more directed and selective funding, with the countervailing pressure from MEXT and the NUCs themselves for balance across the NUC system as a whole. Comparing performance with expectations or goals has some merit in giving some information for improving performance within the unit, as it relates to the perceived demands of stakeholders, however without allowing comparison between universities.

Such a model is the preference, by and large, of both MEXT and the NUCs. They insist all national universities remain research intensive universities, even if located in rural areas, and that the national system needs to be sustained as a whole. If funding is directly linked to research performance, it is feared resources will be highly concentrated within a few prestigious universities such as the University of Tokyo, while less prestigious NUC will suffer financially in comparison. In contrast many private universities differ significantly in type and research focus, with the majority teaching-focussed.

On the other hand, the MOF prefers greater competition in higher education institutions, including the use of performance-based funding on a national level. MOF insists there is need for comparable and standardised data on research activities. Therefore, the hybrid evaluation system of research level and achievement against targets might be an attempt to harmonise the conflicting needs of sustainability and competitiveness, and to find a middle path between the policy preferences of two powerful state agencies.

3 Objectives

An outline of the process of setting objectives and business plans is shown in Figure 4. This is a form of management by objectives (MBO) closely allied to the authors business-centered maintenance approach.

The Fertec A senior management group (to include the group Reliability Manager) establish a ‘works objectives and performance statement’. Objectives at this level are concerned with manufacturing performance. Maintenance objectives are set for those areas that directly affect manufacturing. For example, an objective is set to improve the availability of the ammonia plant from its current level of 88% to match the world best at 96%. Objectives are also set to improve energy efficiency.

Leadership and management

In most cases, leadership and management models across libraries and technology organizations are notably different at their core. Libraries, particularly academic libraries, have generally evolved a highly collaborative leadership and management model that builds on consensus and group consultation. This is closely aligned with faculty governance models commonly found in higher education. This model is often strong both internally within libraries, and within external governance or collaboration models. Librarians have long-standing professional jokes about the role of committees in the profession. Undoubtedly, this model derives partially from the communal nature of building a library and a library collection. There are many overlapping functions and parts to library service, and a system that can enable the sharing of responsibilities across individuals toward a broad complex goal (a balanced and complete library collection) is beneficial if not critical. Independent judgment and ownership are also very important, lending themselves well to collaborative leadership and management models.

Technology organizations, on the other hand, have tended to evolve from the administrative side of organizations and are inclined to have much more hierarchical leadership and management control. Even starting with the common title of IT Department Heads, e.g. Chief Information Officer, implies a strong hierarchy. Technology organizations are often broken down into functional teams … administrative and academic computing are common sub-groups, but even within these teams it is more common to find substructures of leaders and staff positions.

There are, of course, exceptions to these general structures and blends unique to individual institutions. Ultimately it is the leaders themselves who are most responsible for setting the tone for how their individual organizations will function. It is important to note the influence that leadership will have over many other areas where differences may be found: communication, collaboration, resource allocation, strategy, operational outlooks, and more. Leadership is discussed in more detail in Chapter 6.

A Recent History of School Collaboration in England

It is estimated that nearly all schools in England are now involved in some form of networking (Hill, 2006). This would have been hard to anticipate during the late 1990s. A New Labour government came to power in England in 1997 having coined the now famous slogan ‘Education, Education, Education’. The promise was for educational renewal aimed at improving school standards and social equity simultaneously. In reality, at the systemic level, New Labour’s main approach was to evolve the more radical reforms introduced in the 1980s under Margaret Thatcher, albeit in a context of significantly higher public spending. Thatcherism had introduced an educational market to unleash competition-driven improvements. New Labour sought to advance market effectiveness through greater parental choice and institutional differentiation by curriculum specialisms. Similarly, where the Conservatives had introduced the National Curriculum and national tests, New Labour developed accompanying National Strategies that summarized a range of pedagogic approaches and promoted a minimum set that schools were strongly encouraged to implement.

It was at the more specific level of schools facing challenging circumstances that New Labour initially developed a range of funded initiatives aimed at school collaboration. The Excellence in Cities program, for instance, sought to share capacity for teaching, learning, and community engagement across urban schools. The Leadership Incentive Grant aimed to strengthen leadership in schools through collaborative professional development and mentoring. A growing number of specialist schools were expected to work with other schools to spread good practice and raise standards. This might have appeared contradictory to the broader approach of market-led competition. But this was New Labour and its third-way philosophy that prioritized eclectic pragmatism over ideological chastity. The forces of market competition were to be combined with collaboration and the sharing of best practice.

By 2003, the government felt sufficiently confident to argue that there were now system-wide benefits to schools working in partnership (DfES, 2003: 12). A range of reasons exist for this. First, faced with the limits of command-and-control policies, as well as the system inequalities that can result from competition, networks held the appeal of greater professional engagement, lateral working, and system coherence (Glatter, 2003). Second, there was an existing need for joint working in practice to resolve interconnected challenges in, for example, student welfare (Connolly and James, 2006). Third, this was to some extent a rediscovery of the professional collaborations that had been facilitated by local education authorities in the 1970s and 1980s (Glatter, 1995; Stevenson, 2007).

A decade or so on from 1997, there is a growing sense of the potential benefits of collaboration between schools as well as with other agencies. Different outcomes relate to local aims, activities, and ways of working. However, a range of studies and evaluations have found a relatively high degree of similarity in the benefits that can be achieved where partnerships are effective. These are summarized in Table 1.

Table 1. Commonly quoted benefits of collaboration

Another common message is that achieving these benefits is far from easy. As Vangen and Huxham (2003: 62) found, reports of unmitigated success are not common. Instead, partnerships can develop collaborative inertia in which only hard-fought or negligible progress is made. In part, this results from the continuing coexistence of collaboration and competition. At the extreme, for instance, there remains “a spirit of intense competition and mutual suspicion” (Arnold, 2006: 6). This inevitably has an impact on the ability and desire of schools to overcome other common obstacles to collaboration. These include, as set out in Table 2, time, resource constraints, and distance. It also becomes more difficult to develop practices commonly associated with effective partnerships, including building trust, a willingness to compromise, and bearing the costs of partnership work usually before benefits occur.

Table 2. Commonly quoted factors supporting effective collaboration and obstacles to it.

What is significant is that, in many places in England, obstacles to collaboration appear to be being surmounted and a new interconnectedness developed. In research with urban schools, Ainscow and West (2006: 137) found headteachers were beginning to identify shared principles around which their staff could be drawn together. This was generating a new impetus for change across schools, wider ownership of the improvement agenda, and reduced polarization. They concluded that, despite the longer-term deepening of socioeconomic inequalities by market reforms, there are reasons for optimism as “the system has considerable untapped potential to improve itself” (Ainscow and West, 2006: 131). This exists in the accumulated skills, knowledge, and creativity within and between schools and their local communities.

How these skills and resources might be mobilized to support innovation and improvement beyond the individual school remains, however, a challenge. Indeed it is unclear what ways of working and collaborative leadership might best enable such work (Glatter and Harvey, 2006). This article seeks to consider these issues with reference to the LEPP. After introducing LEPP, it goes on to consider what:

collaborative advantage is actually achieved in a sample of partnerships;

methodologies these schools developed and deploy to work together; and

other key factors related to a partnership’s effectiveness.