Abstract
The term ‘restriction of output’ is a basic category in research on resistance and organizational misbehaviour and it has many synonyms, but seems to lack antonyms. The term means, of course, that employees do less work than they are expected to by management. The opposite behaviour is in the management literature regarded as organization citizenship behaviour, a term with several synonyms as well as antonyms. This article argues that ‘expansion of output’ can be a form of organizational misbehaviour and an antonym to restriction of output. The study bases its argument on empirical findings from the public sector: workers doing more than they are expected to do in order to resist management control. A typology of different kinds of expansion of output is suggested.
Introduction
It seems that the term ‘restriction of output’ has no antonym. It is a central category in research on resistance and organizational misbehaviour and it has many synonyms, such as soldiering, work limitation, restrictive practice, shirking, free riding, social loafing and withdrawal of effort. They all mean, of course, that employees do less work than they are expected to by management or they could do. But it has proved hard to find a term for its opposite, i.e. when employees do more work than they are supposed to do in cases when this extra work can be regarded as resistance. In much of the resistance literature it appears a strange thought that performing extra work could be counted as resistance.
Management-oriented literature, on the other hand, is very interested in what is sometimes called the ‘propensity of employees to provide extra effort’ (Kidwell and Bennett, 1993: 451). Apart from there being many pseudonyms, such as pro-social rule-breaking, positive deviance, constructive deviance, responsible behaviour and organizational citizenship behaviour, there are several antonyms, summarized in the term ‘propensity of employees to withhold effort’ (Kidwell and Bennett, 1993: 451). Resistance literature has to a large extent ignored the propensity of employees to provide extra effort as it is often difficult to regard it as belonging to this research area; management literature has studied it intensely in a positive light, but has had trouble in regarding it as resistance. In both cases there are, of course, exceptions (e.g. Callahan and Thompson, 2002: 249–250; Wray-Bliss, 2001).
Expansion of output and responsible subversion
Our contribution in this article is to conceptualize the phenomenon ‘expansion of output’ in relation to restriction of output as a basic form of resistance and to define a number of types of this kind of organizational misbehaviour on empirical grounds. We suggest the term ‘expansion of output’ in order to relate it to the better-known ‘restriction of output’. It does not refer to cases in which social service workers are coerced or compelled by their employers to do unpaid extra work (Baines, 2004), but when service workers do more work or different kinds of work for the service recipients than the employers have prescribed. It is, then, cases of organizational misbehaviour, defined as ‘self-conscious rule-breaking’ (Collinson and Ackroyd, 2005: 306).
The empirical field is case studies of Norwegian health care workers, employer rules about which work tasks they are to perform, and the workers’ relations to clients. Service recipients – customers, patients, clients – and their relations to workers have seldom been objects of analysis in social science (Korczynski, 2009). When it has happened, there have mainly been two strands of analysis, namely service workers’ ways of trying to get tips from customers (Paules, 1991) and their manipulations of ‘difficult’ customers (Reynolds and Harris, 2006). In our cases service workers and their clients are allies against the employers, promoting the employees’ expansion of output. Thereby we also take into account the triangle employer–service worker–service recipient, not just the service worker’s relation to the employer or the service recipient.
The first steps to a theory in this field were presented by Sally A Hutchinson (1990) under the concept of ‘responsible subversion’. Based on a study of nurses, the concept was defined as rule-breaking for the sake of the patient. This is important, because it positions her outside the management-directed analyses of employee rule-breaking for the benefit of the organization. Instead, the formulation of the term is grounded in this pattern: Nurses’ behavior was responsible because they used their best nursing judgement to decide what rules to bend, and when and how to do it. They described themselves as acting responsible in consciously planning what was best for the patient. Their behavior, however, was subversive in that they violated rules made by hospital and nursing administrators or physicians. In some instances they violated the State Nurse Practice Act. (Hutchinson, 1990: 7)
There are certain conditions for responsible subversion to occur among the nurses. First, they must have knowledge about medical processes and illnesses in relation to existing rules. Second, they have to harbour an ideology which creates commitment to the patients, putting their needs first. As one of the interviewed nurses said (1990: 8): I have never felt that I couldn’t make independent decisions regarding patient care. I’ve never felt that rigid rules apply to everyone. I think you make individual decisions for patients and you use your own judgement if you’re a good nurse. I question each rule and ask why do they have it and why do we need it? Rules are often made for the sake of the staff or because it’s easy for the doctors. That’s not right.
Finally, the nurses must have adequate experience to guide them in their judgements on when they can get away with rule-breaking and when they are forced to follow the rules. When these conditions are in place, responsible subversion can occur, and when it does there are a number of interrelated and often overlapping phases involved. The process starts with the nurses evaluating the patient in context, the rules involved and their own motives for eventually breaking a rule. As a result thereof, the second phase consists of predicting the possible consequences for the patient, for themselves and for the rule maker. Often this takes the form of asking what the worst consequences could be of breaking the rule. If these seem acceptable, the process goes on to the third phase of actually breaking the rule in question. There are, however, certain circumstances that must be met if this is to take place: nurses have been unable to get the rule changed before, or they do not regard the breaking of the rule as being in accordance with good nursing judgement. The last phase of responsible subversion is covering, in which the nurses try to protect themselves from potential penalties for their rule-breaking.
These preconditions for breaking rules and the phases involved in the process of rule-breaking were in place also in our cases, although there were variations depending on occupation and work tasks (Kirchhoff and Karlsson, 2009). In the following, we supplement this theory with a typology of health care workers’ expansion of output, but we also suggest some modifications of it.
The study: Design and methods
The data presented are compiled through ethnographic studies in four public health care enterprises providing public services within two municipalities in Norway (Kirchhoff, 2010). All enterprises were selected on the basis of their introducing standardized contracts in order to coordinate public services. The services provided by the enterprises consisted of health care services, carried out by registered nurses, auxiliary nurses and care workers, and social services, assigned to home care assistants. Therefore, in order to cover all the services provided by these public enterprises, employees from within all of the occupational groups in each enterprise were selected (see Table 1). Employees were selected if they worked for at least 75% of a full-time position.
The informants included in the study.
Initially, participant observation was utilized to observe employees at work in order to understand the context, content and coordination of work. Hence the first author worked with one informant from each occupation in all four enterprises for one day, and compiled information about the services being provided and the employees’ interactions with their clients, management and the other employees. As a result, 16 field notes summed up the observations and were analysed in order to elaborate a semi-structured interview guide for the next phase of data compilation, i.e. focus group and individual in-depth interviews. Although the interview guide provided a starting point, new issues and topics were added during this phase when considered to be of relevance to the study. At the end of the study, the main content of an interview consisted of the following issues: the overall content of employee services provided to clients; employee attitudes to standardized service contracts; their relationships with clients, colleagues and other members of the organization; and employees’ arguments for providing other services than stated in a service contract.
Altogether, 12 focus group interviews and four individual in-depth interviews were carried out and encompassed employees from each occupation in each enterprise providing information about their work, their attitudes to service contracts and their grounds for breaking them. All the interviews were based on informed consent, digitally recorded and depersonalized during transcription.
Qualitative data analyses were carried out through pre-coding, open coding and displays. Pre-coding consisted of applying job demand, job autonomy and social support as codes to the text. Simultaneously, open coding was conducted through coding the transcribed text and constantly comparing codes in order to work out concepts. Finally codes and concepts were ordered to structure and relate concepts through causal network displays.
Management control through standardized contracts
In Norway, health and social services are public services, based on and regulated via legislation, and administered by municipal authorities. Hence, citizens of Norwegian municipals are privileged to receive public services when approved by local authorities and stated in administrative decisions, formulated in a public service contract. Service contracts are vital to clients and employees in different ways. To clients they serve as a legal confirmation to receive public services, whereas to employees service contracts are part of their work instructions by defining employees’ work, i.e. clients’ services. Hence, alterations in the content and form of a service contract influence both employees who provide public services and their clients.
As a result of reforms inspired by concepts related to New Public Management (NPM) (Rasmussen, 2004; Vabø, 2005), all public enterprises in our study introduced standardized service contracts to enhance cost-control and efficiency in their organizations. The reason was, of course, to reduce public expenditures, as these enterprises are financed through taxes. In contrast to earlier contracts, which consisted of an undefined job instruction and thereby provided employees with an amount of task discretion, standardized service contracts defined the type, regularity and content of services to clients. Consequently, service contracts became a work instruction determining the standard of services delivered by employees and a robust restriction on employees’ possibilities of controlling their work.
The introduction of standardized service contracts was strongly related to the concept of ‘new managerialism’ within NPM. This implies an increase in management’s accountability and a strong centralized control of employees’ work (Rasmussen, 2004). The main reason for this was to improve the efficiency of public services and to obtain an efficient utilization of public resources (Mørkved, 2001: 105). Thereby the introduction of NPM concepts accentuated an instrumental perspective on public enterprises, i.e. public organization as efficient tools to provide services on behalf of society (Christensen et al., 2009: 33). Consequently, the institutional aspects of Norwegian public enterprises were suppressed, i.e. social norms and values as a result of historical processes (Selznick, 1984: 16). In Norway these norms are related to the ‘logic of cultural appropriateness’ (Christensen et al., 2009: 54) emphasizing the historical traditions through which public services have evolved, e.g. a political accountability for services that take care of the citizens of Norway. Hence, emphasizing instrumental perspectives through standardized service contracts in public enterprises departed from the institutional understanding of public services among employees.
Standardized public service contracts were therefore instruments to obtain control, since these standards controlled employees’ time and content of work through management’s governance of details (Dahl, 2009). Hence, the reorganization of public enterprises in Norway, in the attempt to rationalize the public sector by separating the planning and execution of work, became associated with ‘neo-Taylorism’ (Liebst and Monrad, 2008). Management was authorized to plan and control, while the employees were assigned to carry out job tasks in accordance with management’s plan (Rasmussen, 2004). Standardized service contracts are therefore regarded as an operationalization of management’s planning and an explicit interference and instruction with regard to employees’ work.
In our cases two types of service contracts standardized employees’ work, and thereby defined what we call ‘basic work’ in this article, i.e. employees’ production of services in accordance with organizational standards (Mintzberg, 1983: 12). First, there were service contracts related to social services assigned to home care assistants, which encompassed job tasks related to the client’s home, e.g. cleaning the client’s windows or vacuuming the client’s flat. Second, there were contracts related to health care services, assigned to registered nurses, auxiliary nurses and care workers encompassing job tasks directly related to the client, e.g. dressing a client’s wound or administering a client’s medication. However, despite distinctive differences in the content of social and health care service contracts, standardized contracts were introduced as a means to restrict employees’ basic work; thereby they became management’s instrument to achieve an efficient utilization of employees’ time. Consequently, all other tasks carried out by employees than those defined in the service contract were regarded by management as deviant behaviour.
Findings
Although service contracts were intended to restrict employees’ activities in relation to clients to basic work, almost all employees within each occupation provided supplementary or alternative services to clients on a regular basis. Thereby employees performed job tasks through which they expanded their output, in spite of other services than those stated in the service contract being prohibited. The finding that employees provided other services, despite their rigid work instruction, emerged from day one during participant observation and became a major issue to investigate further: The service contract governed what to do and how much time you have to do it, and as an employee I have to regard the instructions given by contract, she says. However, she and many other colleagues do more and she tells me about an ongoing debate on whether to fix a client’s hair after a bath or not, since fixing clients’ hair was not allowed by management. (Extract from a field note with an auxiliary nurse)
In addition to illustrating that employees acknowledged the service contracts as a work instruction, the observation also captured that employees departed from instructions and provided job tasks not included in the contract. Furthermore, these job tasks were neither expected nor wanted by management and considered to be deviant behaviour, since they did not comply with basic work.
We analytically distinguish between five types of an ‘expansion of output’ which became evident through different types of job tasks: extended job tasks, additional job tasks, forbidden job tasks, collegial job tasks and inappropriate job tasks. All these job tasks imply, although they vary in their characteristics and in severity of deviant behaviour, a violation of the service contract or, in other words, employees’ refusal of management’s plan. Hence, as employees’ expansion of output was not regarded to be ‘basic work’, and therefore disapproved of by management, we consider it to be organizational misbehaviour.
Extended job tasks
‘Extended job tasks’ are characterized as being identical with job tasks within the basic work, but become an expansion of output through workers providing more of it than stated in the service contract. Hence, when employees provided a greater amount of services, e.g. when home care assistants washed a client’s windows more frequently than laid down by the service contract, extended job tasks were provided; in other words, extended job tasks increase employees’ basic work. In our study, only home care assistants performed extended job tasks. The following quotation provides an illustration of extended job tasks provided to clients receiving social services:
What kind of extra work do you perform for clients?
Cleaning windows.
Is that extra?
Could be, yes and sometimes I sweep more floors than I’m supposed to.
Although extended job tasks resulted in deviation from the service contract, the employees barely recognized performing these tasks as breaking the contract, since they were similar to basic work and therefore more of an extension of the contract. Furthermore, employees had the opportunity to adjust service contracts and thereby to transform extended job tasks into basic work by reporting clients’ enhanced need for public services to the municipal authorities, e.g. in situations when clients appeared to have a constant need for extended job tasks. Employees, however, seldom used the opportunity to report clients’ needs for extended social services; they found it easier to just do some extra job tasks for them and to ignore the paperwork related to the adjustment of service contracts. Home care assistants were, then, conscious that providing extended job tasks implied breaking management rules, but regarded this violation as a trivial one.
Additional job tasks
Although ‘additional job tasks’ also result in an extension of employees’ job tasks, they are characterized by not being part of the basic work. These job tasks were not regarded to be part of social or health care services by municipal authorities, and therefore not included in any public service contract. Additional job tasks include favours or services given to the clients beyond basic work. For example, when a client was unable to go outside the house because of poor health, job tasks like taking out the rubbish or shopping for the client became additional job tasks. The following quotations are a sample of numerous types of additional job tasks provided by different occupations:
One weekend I visited an old lady and her reading lamp was broken, so I went down to the shop to buy a light bulb for her so she could read her books.
Although I’m not supposed to do the washing up, I sometimes do it anyway, or tidy up a little bit.
Sometimes I do their [clients’] shopping, buy groceries or cigarettes, when they’re out of fags.
If a client asks: ‘Could you please carry out the rubbish for me?’, then, although it’s not in the service contract, I’ll just do it anyway.
Apart from illustrating several types of additional job tasks, the quotations also demonstrate that employees, in contrast to what was the case with extended job tasks, recognized these tasks as a more conscious violation of the service contract, but ‘did it anyway’. However, employees justified additional job tasks by regarding them as basic work, since both types of work were assigned for similar reasons, i.e. the personal needs of clients:
When clients ask for more, like some kind of extra service, how do you reply to these requests?
Well, then I make a judgement, and when I conclude that my client needs something to read I’ll bring in his newspaper.
‘Making a judgement’ illustrates employees’ willingness to consciously overrule the restrictions given by the standardized service contract. Therefore, additional job tasks were carried out to supplement clients’ services when required to meet clients’ needs. Employees’ understanding of basic work, i.e. to provide services in accordance with the contract and clients’ needs, resulted consequently in an intensified workload through an expansion of output.
Forbidden job tasks
‘Forbidden job tasks’ are characterized as directly breaking management rules, which encompasses explicit rules related to how to carry out basic work and specific job tasks that were explicitly ruled out by management. Hence, when employees provided services unambiguously prohibited by management rules, they expanded output through forbidden job tasks.
There were two categories of management rules. First, as a result of being public services based on and regulated by legislation, management rules consisted of governmental directives. These were expressed in laws and judicial instructions relating to the legal conditions for public services, job qualification requirements and interactions between employees and clients. In addition, management rules consisted of organizational rules for interpreting governmental directives in an organizational context, including rules on how to organize, coordinate, distribute and execute basic work. Consequently, when employees provided additional services that implied a conscious violation of an explicit rule, they carried out forbidden job tasks:
For example, doing their hair while bathing a client is prohibited by our manager, but I have to admit that I’ve done it a couple of times.
Me too.
I think it’s awful that they [management] don’t let us do that after a bath. The client’s hair would look terrible. I think it’s cruel.
We are not allowed to do it, and I’ve been strictly ordered not to do it.
To do a client’s hair while bathing them in spite of an explicit rule not to do so, as shown in the quotation above, appeared to be a common example of a forbidden job task among employees who provided health care services. Management’s argument against employees providing this type of service was that a public enterprise was not responsible for hairdressing, and that clients should go to a hairdresser to get their hair done. Employees were therefore explicitly prohibited from doing hair styling for clients. However, employees carried out and justified forbidden job tasks for the same reasons as for extended and additional job tasks, i.e. clients’ needs for services other than those stated in the service contract.
Collegial job tasks
From time to time, employees were unable to provide basic work to clients on their shift because they were running out of time. This happened sometimes because of unforeseen incidents, e.g. an acute medical deterioration of a client’s health, but more frequently as a result of the expansion of output to other clients on their shift. In these situations other employees provided basic work on behalf of their colleagues and thereby produced the expansion of output through ‘collegial job tasks’. There were, then, no differences in the characteristics of the job content between basic work and collegial job tasks. In our study collegial job tasks were only carried out by employees providing health care services, that is, registered nurses, auxiliary nurses and care workers, since they were frequently in contact with each other and evolved a common understanding to help one another out. This common understanding was observed during participant observation, when witnessing that employees started to phone colleagues before lunch in order to ask whether there was need for any help, a phenomenon that occurred in all enterprises:
I’ve observed that you phone each other before lunch. Why is that?
We’ve had a discussion and reached the conclusion that nobody should feel, ‘Oh, there is so much work left and nobody even thought of helping me’. Therefore, everybody on the shift is obliged to make sure that everybody is okay and able to make it for lunch.
The rule of helping each other out was a collective agreement among employees in the enterprises. Management disapproved of this routine, as they found it disturbing and inappropriate; they therefore tried to put an end to it:
I don’t like it [the routine]. It existed before my time and it’s incredibly hard to get rid of.
You don’t like it?
No! First, it makes employees distracted when they’re working with clients. I don’t think work should be interrupted by a mobile phone all the time. Next, I distribute work among employees in such a way that they should have plenty of time for each client, so it shouldn’t be necessary to be short of time every day.
The manager’s argument about providing enough time span to do their work indicates that she suspected that employees provided extra services and that she disapproved thereof. To follow up on this manager’s argument, employees were asked in a focus group interview whether there was enough time for basic work. Some employees answered as follows:
This might be a bit provocative, but when you are short of time, that could be a result of doing more than you’re required to in the contract?
What I do at work depends on the clients’ need. You can’t just go in and do your stuff; you’ve got to be human as well.
At nursing college, we learned that there’s a connection between mental issues and physical illness. Sure, I can do my job faster, just running in and out, giving them their medication, and writing my reports and so on. But that would result in depressed clients – you see, everything’s connected.
The answers from these registered nurses show that the manager’s argument was correct, i.e. there was time enough for employees to provide basic work within existing organizational terms. However, employees occasionally disagreed with the content or amount of basic work and so decided to expand their work, which lead to a stressful situation at the end of the day. Collegial work, therefore, became an asset to overcome the unintended consequences of expanded output to clients.
Inappropriate job tasks
‘Inappropriate job tasks’ occur when an occupation provides job tasks which are designated to another occupation in a service contract. This type of expanded output only occurred in relation to service contracts that concerned social services, i.e. job tasks related to the client’s home. Social service contracts restricted home care assistants in the public enterprises to domestic work, focusing on clients’ homes and excluding job tasks that concerned clients’ personal needs, since the latter were assigned to employees providing health care services. However, home care assistants frequently provided services assigned to the other occupations in the enterprise, and thereby were beyond their appropriate basic work. Inappropriate job tasks mostly involved listening to clients in critical situations in order to relieve emotional pressure, which was part of basic work for employees providing health care services:
It means a lot to them [clients], to talk with us.
They talk about illnesses, family, their children or grandchildren. For example, one day a client told me, ‘my daughter is ill’ and I thought her daughter might have caught a cold, but this lady then groaned, moved close to me and then she said ‘she’s got cancer’, and started to cry.
There’s a lot of that at work.
I simply had to comfort her, give her a hug. You can’t just push this aside or say that’s not my job.
That won’t work.
Although organizational rules restricted home care assistants’ basic work to domestic job tasks, employees opposed to these job rules, and therefore frequently expanded their work in order to comply with clients’ needs. However, the execution of inappropriate job tasks did not always result in an expansion of home care assistants’ output. Sometimes the need for a therapeutic listener, as shown above, only led to an exchange of job tasks, e.g. when clients asked home care assistants to listen to and comfort them in their sorrow instead of vacuuming the flat. One home care assistant, for example, told about a situation when a client unplugged the vacuum cleaner to catch her attention. In these situations the accomplishment of inappropriate job tasks did not result in an expansion of home care assistants’ output, since they only altered their domestic job tasks into inappropriate job tasks, although these tasks were disapproved of by management. Consequently, inappropriate job tasks sometimes resulted in an expansion of output and sometimes not, but were always regarded as deviations from the service contract.
Management assessment of employees’ expansion of output
Our data show that employees’ expansion of output encompasses a variety of job tasks which were carried out in order to meet clients’ needs, which also was a main principle when services were approved by local authorities. Furthermore, these job tasks rarely altered social or health care services, since they in general were given in addition to clients’ contractual services. Commonly, management literature approves of and supports when employees enhance their job capacity and meet a client’s need by providing extra effort. In our study, however, management disapproved of and constantly tried to delimit employees’ expansion of output. To management, any service assigned to clients that deviated from the service contract was a violation of management’s incontestable principle to restrict all public services to the content and amount of services stated in the service contract:
Frequently, I tell my employees that the service contract is their instruction, and not to do anything else.
Why not?
Let me give an example. If you own a garage and a car owner asks you to exchange the oil – you wouldn’t polish the car or repaint it in addition to fixing the oil? You would be broke after a short time. I have economic considerations to make.
In addition to illustrating management’s principle, the quotation above also shows that management’s main reason for prohibiting employees’ expansion of output was related to the economic situation of the enterprise. Management’s argument is that public services should solely consist of basic work, defined in a service contract, since the economic resources of the enterprise are given on the basis of these services and thereby also define the obligations of the public enterprise. Management’s view on employees’ expansion of output can therefore be divided into the two categories: job tasks with a capacity to be included in a service contract and job tasks beyond basic work.
Extended job tasks were therefore regarded to be a minor violation of the service contract by management. And, as a result of having the capacity to become basic work, management frequently requested that employees report clients’ needs of extended job tasks to the local authorities in order to adjust clients’ service contracts. An adjustment would then result in the enhancement of organizational resources to carry out basic work and thereby avoid an expansion of output.
On the other hand, management strongly disapproved of any job tasks beyond basic work without capacity to become such work. Job tasks beyond basic work, e.g. additional or forbidden job tasks, were regarded to be a more significant violation of the service contract than extended job tasks, since these tasks were not part of any basic work in the enterprise. Further, management frequently brought up the issue of job tasks beyond basic work in formal and informal meetings in order to avoid this type of expansion of output. Employees, however, disagreed with this, and overruled the service contract consciously as a result of their evaluation of the client’s needs and assigned other job tasks when necessary. In other words, management and employees upheld a different understanding of basic work, resulting in employees expanding their output.
Discussion
Our findings of employees’ expansion of output coincide with previous research, showing that up to 98% of the employees within local health care enterprises in Norway provide what in this literature is called ‘additional services’ to clients (Næss, 2003: 46; Vabø, 2007: 112). However, these studies neither investigated the substantial content of additional services nor discussed employees’ expansion of output in a theoretical context of organizational misbehaviour. After a summary of employees’ expansion of output across occupational groups and management’s disapproval of these job tasks, we therefore discuss the concept of expansion of output within the theoretical framework of organizational misbehaviour. Finally, we end our discussion by relating the expansion of output to Hutchinson’s (1990) concept of ‘responsible subversion’ in order to improve the understanding of this phenomenon.
Table 2 summarizes our findings and displays the content of employees’ basic work in the enterprises, the various categories of expansion of output across occupational groups and illustrates that employees assigned to the same type of basic work provided similar types of expansion of output. For example, all employees assigned to health care services provided additional, forbidden and collegial tasks, while all employees assigned to social services provided extended, additional, forbidden and inappropriate job tasks. Furthermore, the table displays that there was a lack of expansion of output among certain categories in relation to employees’ basic work. Employees assigned to health care services, for example, rarely provided any extended or inappropriate job tasks, and employees assigned to social services seldom carried out any collegial tasks. It appears, therefore, to be a relationship between employees’ basic work and the content of their expansion of output.
Basic work and categories of employees’ expansion of output across occupational groups in the enterprises.
There seem to be two reasons for this relationship. The first is related to a distinctive content of basic work, constituted by restrictive service contracts. A service contract established a profound distinction between two types of basic work, namely basic work related to clients as persons, i.e. health care services, and basic work related to clients’ home, i.e. social services. Hence, job tasks related to a client’s personal needs became appropriate job tasks (or basic work) within health care services, while they became inappropriate job tasks within social services since these services only concerned job tasks related to a client’s home. Consequently, home care assistants’ efforts to relieve a client’s emotional pressure became a breach with their content of basic work and thereby an inappropriate job task.
The second reason appears to be related to differences in the coordination of basic work. The work of home care assistants, for example, was coordinated through weekly meetings with an assistant manager, while employees assigned to health care services met on a regular daily basis and were organized in teams. Consequently, employees assigned to health care services gained several opportunities to help each other out through collegiate job tasks, while home care assistants worked alone and thereby had small possibilities to get help from colleagues. Therefore, in absence of mutual adjustment, e.g. through frequent formal and informal encounters with colleagues, in order to coordinate basic work, home care assistants rarely provided an expansion of output through collegial job tasks.
In addition to revealing a variety of job tasks related to employees’ expansion of output, our study reaffirms earlier findings of management’s disapproval of employees’ additional services (Dahl, 2009; Liebst and Monrad, 2008; Rasmussen, 2004). In conformity with our study they find that the introduction of standardized service contracts resulted in management’s disapproval of any job task not in accordance with the contract. Hence, we argue that employee expansion of output should be included as a theoretical concept in future analyses of organizational misbehaviour.
There are two principal criteria in the literature for characterizing employees’ actions at the workplace as organizational misbehaviour. First, a set of rules or expectations constituted by management defines a framework of actions regarded to be unwanted or undesired in the work organization (Ackroyd and Thompson, 1999). Next, employees consciously act contrary to management’s expressed expectations or rules (Ackroyd and Thompson, 1999: 9; Collinson and Ackroyd, 2005; Vardi and Weitz, 2004: 28). In our study, employees’ expansion of output meet both criteria, since the expansion of output was neither wanted nor approved by management and the employees’ behaviour was a conscious violation of the standards laid down by the service contract. However, the implicit effect of organizational misbehaviour in the resistance literature in general is restriction of output, whereas our concept relates to an opposite effect of expansion of output, i.e. the performance of enhanced services. Therefore the question arises whether employees’ expansion of output can be classified as organizational misbehaviour.
Our answer relates to the second criterion within organizational misbehaviour, i.e. management’s concern about control over the labour process, which in our cases was attempted through standardized service contracts in order to increase the efficiency of the public enterprises. In order to achieve control, management constructed a division of labour through a separation of the planning and execution of work (Braverman, 1998: 69). Consequently, management considered any other behaviour to be organizational misbehaviour as it deviated from management’s plan. The introduction of ‘New Managerialism’ separated management from the provision of services and established means of control through standardized service contracts (Dahl, 2009; Rasmussen, 2004). Employees, however, partly rejected the standards and provided services in accordance with their own standards (Kirchhoff and Karlsson, 2009). Employees thereby obstructed much of management’s control of employees’ work and circumscribed management’s attempts to increase efficiency. The expansion of output thereby became employees’ expression of organizational misbehaviour within the context of ‘New Managerialism’ in public enterprises. We argue, therefore, that organizational misbehaviour must be analysed in relation to management’s attempts to control the labour process and not the consequences or output of employees’ behaviour. Consequently, employees’ expansion of output, in contrast to service work in private enterprises where management approve of or even anticipate extended services to clients (Baines, 2004; Hochschild, 2003), was regarded as deviant behaviour by management in public services.
Finally, by discussing employees’ expansion of output in relation to Hutchinson’s (1990) concept of responsible subversion we would like to complement the conceptualization and origin of this phenomenon. Hutchinson argued that rule-breaking, or in her specific case, registered nurses’ resistance to organizational rules, took place for the sake of the patient. The nurses justified their behaviour through their notions of knowledge, ideology and experience, and thereby provided a professional rationale for breaking management rules. However, in our study, all employees within all occupational groups provided expanded output, including those without academic knowledge, e.g. registered nurses and home care assistants, respectively. Hence, knowledge provides a precondition for those with a body of knowledge to overrule organizational rules, but this characteristic can hardly be applied to employees without formal skill, e.g. home care assistants.
However, all employees, independent of their educational background or content of work, referred to norms in order to justify an expansion of output. Hence, this indicates that ideology constitutes a common precondition for employees for bending organizational rules and to provide expanded output, although the content of employees’ ideology varies. In a previous discussion we have argued that different rationales among employees legitimate resistance and provide rules which can be drawn on for overruling management rules (Kirchhoff and Karlsson, 2009). These rationales are characterized by different sets of norms and comparable with Hutchinson’s (1990) concept of ideology, in particular the similarity between the ideology of registered nurses in Hutchinson’s (1990) analysis and the rationale of professional rules in our analysis. In order to comprehend employees’ expansion of output, ideology or norms that justify resistance should therefore provide a starting point for further studies.
Conclusion
The aim of this article was to complement the body of knowledge on resistance and organizational misbehaviour by presenting and discussing the concept of expansion of output, based on empirical findings in four public enterprises in Norway.
Our findings provide evidence that resistance and organizational misbehaviour not only become visible through ‘restriction of output’, i.e. employees’ withdrawal of their capacity to work, but can also be expressed through ‘expansion of output’, i.e. employees providing additional services. Expansion of output has similar characteristics as other forms of organizational misbehaviour through being undesired and unwanted by management, and a result of management’s lack of control of parts of the labour process. We therefore emphasize that in order to comprehend and analyse resistance and organizational misbehaviour in work organizations, the concept of expansion of output should be added in forthcoming studies. This would be especially relevant in studies of public enterprises where employees’ expansion of output indicates management’s loss of some of its control over the labour process.
This study, as a result of its qualitative approach, contributes with a theoretical generalization (Danermark et al., 2002: Ch. 4) by introducing a typology of expanded output, which includes extended job tasks, additional job tasks, forbidden job tasks, collegial job tasks and inappropriate job tasks. This typology is based on management’s conception of basic work and to what degree employees’ services are in accordance with basic work. Basic work therefore provides a recommendable point of departure of the analysis of expansion of output also in other organizational contexts.
Footnotes
Funding
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.
Author biographies
Jörg W Kirchhoff is associate professor at the Faculty of Health and Social Studies, Østfold University College, Norway. His research interests are studies of public health care services. He wrote his PhD thesis on employees’ resistance in public organizations.
Jan C Karlsson is professor at the Faculty of Business, Languages, and Social Sciences, Østfold University College, Norway. Among his research interests are flexibility, stability and resistance in working life. His latest books are Organizational Misbehaviour in the Workplace: Narratives of Dignity and Resistance and Commitment to Work and Job Satisfaction: Studies of Work Orientations (with Furåker B and K Håkansson).