El Proyecto de Delimitación del Suelo Urbano

Where do the perceived roles and expectations originate? How do academic library employees learn what middle manager means? Participants were asked how they gained an understanding of the middle manager role in their organizations; MMs were asked where they thought expectations

were coming from; and SMs were asked how they sent expectations to their MMs.

Several middle managers indicated members of their role set serve as role senders. Nine of the MMs reported their DRs were role senders. Interestingly, the two MMs with the least amount of experience as middle managers reported no expectations from their DRs. Eight of the 11 MMs reported their SMs as role senders. Two RuralULibrary MMs specifically mentioned modeling their SM’s behavior. Collaborators outside of their immediate role set were rarely indicated as role senders.

Five MMs reported that other middle managers, organizational documents, and their own perceptions were role senders. Finally, three DowntownULibrary MMs specifically mentioned their library director functioned as a role sender.

In order to communicate their expectations to their MMs, all of the SMs have regularly scheduled meetings with their MMs, including individual one-on-ones and group department heads meetings. Group and individual email and formal procedures such as evaluations and tenure processes also communicate expectations to the MMs. Informal interaction between the SMs and their MMs varies. Where SMs have offices located within the same general work area as most of their MMs, frequent informal, unplanned interactions were reported and observed. Two senior managers have MMs in multiple remote locations within the main library and another building; UrbanULibrary’s SM reported and was also observed managing by walking around, deliberately leaving the administrative suite to interact with others around the building. DowntownULibrary-SM1, who oversees three MMs who participated in the study, has an office located in the primary library administrative suite. This senior manager was never observed walking around those departments, and informal interactions between the SM and the other role set members were infrequently reported.

The DRs learned the middle manager role through a variety of organizational mechanisms: one previously held the MM’s position; two held middle manager positions themselves in other organizations or departments; two DRs learned the role through participation in search or tenure committees; however, most expressed that they learned the role through direct interaction and observation of middle managers in their current or previous organizations. More than half of the DRs indicated that organization documents such as strategic plans and organization charts help them understand the library’s structure and their middle manager’s place in the hierarchy; however, most DRs placed little value on the relationship between organizational documents and understanding the duties of the middle manager.

Job descriptions and department heads (DH) documents attempt to convey the organization’s view of the middle managers’ responsibilities. The existence of up-to-date job descriptions among study sites was variable, and in all cases except one they were the job advertisements published when candidates were being recruited. This suggests that job descriptions are not viable, useful documents in DowntownULibrary and RuralULibrary for describing current responsibilities as jobs change and develop over time. Instead, library faculty look to shared governance documents for indicators of their responsibilities.

The job descriptions/advertisements for RuralULibrary middle managers are relatively current because these positions were all recruited within the past four years. Department heads documents were available for DowntownULibrary and RuralULibrary, while only a job description was available for UrbanULibrary.

The following analysis takes into account the four available and viable job descriptions from UrbanULibrary and RuralULibrary, plus the DH documents from DowntownULibrary and Ru- ralULibrary. The Taxonomy dimensions that appear across the four job descriptions and two DH documents are Guiding, Directing & Motivating and Administration & Paperwork, giving some indication about what all of the study MMs are expected to do. Five out of six documents indicate the following dimensions: Planning & Organizing, Training, Coaching & Developing, Technical Proficiency,Staffing,Monitoring & Controlling, and Collecting & Interpreting Data.

The Taxonomy dimensions that do not appear in any of these documents include Persisting,

Handling Crises, Selling & Influencing, and “modeling behavior”. Dimensions that appear in only one document (noted in parentheses) include Representing the Organization (DH document),

Decision Making (job description), and “filling in” (job description). Two documents articulate

Communicating Effectively (both DH documents), Maintaining Relationships (both DH documents), and Organizational Commitment (one job description and one DH document). “Collaborating”,

Delegating, andCoordinating subordinates appeared in half of the documents examined, although “collaborating” did not appear in any DH documents.

Similar to the calendar activities, care must be taken in interpreting these data, as simply counting dimensions may not indicate the importance of a particular responsibility. However, this is where triangulation supports the research; if a particular dimension appears in all documents or none of the documents, one may draw some inferences and compare these to the expectations articulated

by the role senders who participated in this study. And, the articulation of a responsibility in a department heads document may have more weight than its appearance in a document that was essentially a job ad. For example, the dimension Planning & Organizing was found in all of the documents except for UrbanULibrary-MM1’s job description, in one way supporting the result that none of UrbanULibrary-MM1’s role senders reported Planning & Organizing as an expectation. Moreover, despite the articulation ofPlanning & Organizing in all but one of the documents, only 22% of all study participants reported it as an expectation of middle managers in their organizations.

Dimensions that appear in most of the documents but were not expressed frequently among the role set members include (role senders percentages in parentheses) Training, Coaching & Developing (22%),Administration & Paperwork (15%),Staffing (2%), Monitoring & Controlling

(15%), Delegating (7%), andCollecting & Interpreting Data (5%).

A dimension that was frequently expressed by role senders and also appeared to be important in the documents (because it appeared in the DH documents and UrbanULibrary-MM1’s job description) is Coordinating Subordinates (50%). Representing the Organization appears only in the RuralULibrary DH document and was reported by only 7% of participants;Technical Proficiency

appears in all documents except DowntownULibrary’s DH and 73% of role senders expect it; DowntownULibrary and RuralULibrary DH documents articulate Maintaining Relationships, and 39% of role senders expect this.

The relative absence of “collaborating” andRepresenting the Organization in these organizational documents and their frequent occurrence in the MMs’ calendar entries suggest a disconnect between the organizational objectives and how the middle managers actually spend their time. Or, it represents that middle managers recognize that they need to spend time on certain activities, even if they aren’t articulated in organizational documents, in order to accomplish organizational objectives. For example, middle managers may realize that they cannot successfully plan, organize, and coordinate the work of their units in a vacuum; they must collaborate across units to effectively and efficiently accomplish work projects, and they must represent and be present among a variety of different stakeholders. This includes sitting on committees, but it also means being an expert advisor as well as bringing relevant information back into the library and being an adequate conduit of information.