Abstract
This paper discusses manoeuvring space and demonstrates how autonomy, power and discretion need to be understood as constructed and integrated behaviours where managers manoeuvre between dilemmas in their own management practices. Twenty-seven Norwegian police managers were shadowed and interviewed. We found that constructions of manoeuvring space presupposed that managers balanced dilemmas. We identified three different strategies through which managers constructed manoeuvring space by navigating between dilemmas and actively constructing demands and constraints. These strategies were (1) decoupling, (2) sensegiving and (3) strategic positioning. Our findings add to the managerial discretion literature, arguing that constructions of manoeuvring space are central to managers’ development and to how they create opportunities and possibilities to make choices that balance conflicting dilemmas in contradictory contexts.
Highlights
In this paper, we explore the intentional influence of managers and their responsibilities for deciding what actions to undertake and how to implement them, as described in the leadership literature (Hemphill & Coons,1957; House et al.,1999; Katz & Kahn,1978; Rauch & Behling, 1984; Yukl, 2013)
We address two research questions in this paper: How do managers describe their range of possible choices, and how do they construct manoeuvring space in contradictory contexts? In exploring these questions, we contribute to the discretion literature by discussing the term manoeuvring space and showing that it captures the dynamic and constructive practices of managers, and we identify three ways in which managers construct manoeuvring space
The findings demonstrate that constructions of manoeuvring space were more than just a question of controlling resources and budgets, they were strongly influenced by how the managers influenced their employees’ sensemaking, which is argued to be essential in the role of managers in implementing change (Filstad, 2014)
Summary
We explore the intentional influence of managers and their responsibilities for deciding what actions to undertake and how to implement them, as described in the leadership literature (Hemphill & Coons,1957; House et al.,1999; Katz & Kahn,1978; Rauch & Behling, 1984; Yukl, 2013). Recent studies of managerial practice have mapped managers’ everyday work tasks and interactions (Tengblad, 2012), but fall short of explaining managers’ autonomy in making choices about which activities to engage in. We argue that this represents a gap in our understanding of managerial practice that is important to address. Managerial discretion is treated as a given. This is unfortunate because it does not capture the fact that managers can understand discretion differently and it does not explain that some managers passively react to discretion, and actively construct it
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