Kate Kellogg, MIT Sloan School of Management

Triadic Staging Tactics for Upward Influence in Professional Organizations: Enlisting Unexpected Actors to Implement Patient-Centered Medical Home Reform in a US Hospital
Kate Kellogg, MIT Sloan School of Management

Description

Semester: 
Winter 2016
Lecture Time: 
Friday, April 8, 2016 - 1:30pm to 3:00pm
Lecture Location: 

Room R1240, Ross School of Business

Abstract

Organization theory’s existing model of upward influence is outdated. The paradigmatic subordinate working in the paradigmatic industrial organization on which this existing model is built does not fit the current organizational landscape in which a proliferation of multiple, different kinds of subordinate professionals are working inside organizations with superordinate professionals. I draw on a two-year ethnographic study of Patient-Centered Medical Home reform implementation in a large primary care department of a U.S. Hospital to elaborate a new set of upward influence tactics that may be used in professional organizations—triadic staging tactics. I find that subordinates who pose a jurisdictional threat to their superordinates can provide subordinates in a third-party group with material props, symbolic scripts, supporting actors, and audience guidance techniques to upwardly influence the superordinate professionals with whom they work. By engaging in such triadic staging tactics, initiator subordinates can accomplish through triadic means the upward influence that they may fail to accomplish through dyadic means alone. These findings have implications for research on upward influence, institutional change, reform implementation, sociology of work and occupations, and medical sociology.

Recording & Additional Notes

Katherine C. Kellogg is a Professor of Work and Organization Studies at MIT. She is the author of Challenging Operations: Medical Reform and Resistance in Surgery (University of Chicago Press, 2011, Winner of the Max Weber Award from the Organizations, Occupations, and Work section and the Sociology of Law Biannual Distinguished Book Award from the Law section of the American Sociological Association). Her papers have been published in the Administrative Science Quarterly, the American Journal of Sociology, the American Sociological Review, and Organization Science. Kellogg using comparative ethnographic methods to study social change inside of organizations in response to social movements or legal regulation.