Blog #4: Critical Approaches to Organizations

The Critical Approach very much involves the connections of power between employees. For example, perhaps the power and control that a manager may have over an assistant manager, or the power an assistant manager has over entry-level employees.

Critical approaches strive to identify and liberate "...workers from unnecessary restrictive traditions, ideologies, assumptions, power relations, identity formations... that inhibit or distort opportuntiies for autonomy, clarification of genuine needs and wants, and... greater and lasting satisfaction." This is the definition of emancipation from our Organizational Communication text, and is the main focus of the critical approach to organizational communication that we've discussed this last week in class.

I performed an interview with a close friend of mine who has worked for a very well-known pharmaceutical/grocery/cosmetics corporation for roughly 8 months. He asked that his name and the name of the organization be left out for this interview.

I asked him general questions pertaining to the structure of the organization as well as the structure of the store he works at. His title is a "service clerk", which is an entry-level position that works the floor restocking/restructuring shelves, performs janitorial work, participates in sales with customers, and effectively runs the cash registers at the front end of the store. There are several other entry-level employees in different departments of the store (cosmetics, photo, etc.) that are not technically his "subordinates", but there is such thing as "seniority". Seniority is used to rank equally-titled employees based on the duration of time the employee has worked at the store and the amount of training he/she has received. Since my friend has worked at this organization for almost 8 months, he feels that he has seniority over those that have just started in the last month or so, but ultimately under everyone else. His superiors include the inventory coordinator, the shift lead (someone given some managerial like powers such as overriding transactions, but not effectively a manager in title), the various assistant store managers, the executive assistant manager (EXA, or the assistant manager of assistant managers) and finally the store manager - all of which essentially have the ability to ask his help if needed.

Having gained this knowledge I asked him more in depth about the relationships he has with his coworkers, starting with his superiors. He told me that his relationships professionally are all strong, save for one assistant manager who consistently uses what he called "power trips" to get under the skin of employees. In his words, this particular assistant manager can be "particularly condescending, both directly aggressive and passive agressive to subordinates, and 'is an a**hole'". 

In one example, he said that the assistant manager has consistently used a condescending and annoyed tone over the store PA system to tell employees that he was not happy with something. In a separate example, the assistant manager asked him to press a button on his phone, which was the button for an automated message that asked for employees to come to the front to open another register. Technically if there are three or more customers in line, my friend is required to call for assistance, but as soon as the third person showed up in his line, the assistant manager in question immediately opened up another checkstand. When my friend pressed the button, the automated call for checkstand backup played over the intercom, and the assistant manager said "Good, I just wanted to make sure that it still worked" in a very nasty tone. He then proceeded to lecture my friend about how he needed to use the automated call more often, no matter what. My friend felt verbally abused by this particular assistant manager's tactics. 

As far as his subordinates and other coworkers, he said that their relationships are relatively strong but that he felt frustrated that there was a lack of communication surrounding when workers could leave at night. Commonly, he is asked to work a closing shift from 4:00 PM to 12:30 AM. The store closes at 12:00 and then the remainder of the time is spent closing the store down and making sure it is ready to be opened in the morning. He states that often, his coworkers will leave early - some due to understandable circumstances such as having to catch the bus (he has to catch a bus that leaves at 12:35AM to get home), so he understands that. That being said, there are some coworkers that are leaving early, to his knowledge, without a legitimate excuse. This generally leaves him short handed towards the end of the night and gives him more work to do, causing frustration because he isn't able to leave until that work gets finished.

I asked him then if he felt like he had a voice in the matter, and whether he felt able to approach a superior about this situation. He said that he felt like he could, but that he didn't want to disrupt the "harmony" or to instigate complaints towards his coworkers because getting what he wants ultimately wouldn't be worth getting several employees upset over it, in his mind. Despite having good professional relationships with the EXA and the store manager, he feels that their time is important and that it shouldn't "be wasted on such trivial matters".

I then asked about whether he has been able to contribute positively via communication to make his workplace more successful. He said that there was one instance where he learned how to get around a very annoying interaction with the checkout computer where customers are prompted to receive cash back with their debit or credit card purchase. Instead of having to back out of the entire transaction and have the customer swipe his/her card over again, he found a shortcut through the interface that resulted in a quicker checkout without having to have the customer reswipe the card. After this, he noticed that the store manager that he doesn't have a very good relationship with was dealing with a customer with that issue, and tried to explain the shortcut to him by showing it to him. The assistant manager scoffed and told him that his way wasn't any faster than the way they were instructed to complete the transaction - worse in fact. This made my friend frustrated and made him feel that he couldn't positively contribute to the workplace.

Ultimately this boils down to several factors relating to Critical Approaches that I read about in the text as well as saw in class. Firstly - the idea of hegemony plays a big role in my friend's relationship with his coworkers and the organization - in that he accepts his own frustrations for the good of "harmony" in his workplace. His superior, an assistant manager, controls him via outlandish uses of power that he has by means of being his superior (bureaucratic control), through means of simple control - explicit, direct exertion of authority in a condescending way.

When I asked if there were ways to improve the imbalance of power in his workplace between him and the assistant manager, he said essentially the same as he did before about his coworkers leaving early - that the store manager views her time as "valuable" and would likely listen to him but not carry out any kind of a foreseeable change. I feel that the relationship between the communicators here is disturbed because my friend does not feel able to tell his superiors about his frustrations, documenting a repeated violation of the ideal speech situation as described in lecture. This is an example of systematically distorted communication, and unfortunately will not likely yield any changes in the near future for my friend.

This organization does not sound quite like one that would be a joy to work for, and is synonymous with my experience working for a large corporate grocery chain whose name I've stated in a previous blog. I personally feel that the general trend is: the closer an organization is to being a part of the corporate world, the less malleable the organization is to change and ultimately the more difficult the emancipation of employees is going to be, simply on the basis that the rules and protocol are so strict that it doesn't allow for much change or innovation within the system. A Critical Approach is no doubt an important one to have when looking at organizational communication, but in some cases it may be lost on certain organizations.