executive behavior and interaction

R O B E R T D U B I N A N D S . L E E S P R A Y *

Executive Behavior and Interaction

THE LITERATURE is rich in general discussions of the executive’s functions in the firm. These writings are heavily polemical in character and rest upon a very meager empirical foundation of systematically recorded data. Such simple facts as the kinds of activities executives engage in and how they distribute their time among these activities have only been touched on in a few studies.l

The utility of existing theoretical discussions of executive action awaits empirical evidence of what executives doV2 We have systematically collected evidence describing how eight executives in five different organizations spent two weeks of their working time. Generalizations can be drawn from these data to provide a limited but empirically grounded framework within which to view executive behavior.

Research Methodology To obtain data on the actual behavior of executives while

working we adopted a modified version of Burns’ r n e t h ~ d . ~ Using a self- recording form the executives described their behavior for each episode in which they participated during the day, showing its content, the time it ~ ~~

* Robert Dubin is Research Professor of Sociology, University of Oregon, and S . Lee Spray is Assistant Professor of Sociology, Louisiana State University.

1 For a summary of these works see Robert Dubin, “‘Business Behavior Behaororally Viewed,” in Chris A r e and others, So& S d m Approaches to Buriness Behuvior (Homewood, Ill.: Dorsey-Mn, 1962), p 11 20. The classic study was done by S u e Carlson over a decade ago. See his Executive Be%v& A Study of the Work Load a d Working Methods of Manuging Directors (Stockholm: Stromberg Aktiebolag, 1951). Almost no one, save Tom Burns, the English researcher, has followed up the work on executives pioneered by Carlson.

2Mason Haire has called attention to this fact by writing recently that in the study of business organizations: “Attention still falls largely on the behavior and motives of hourly paid and clerical workers in the organization. When mana ement is studied at all it is almost exclusively in terms of decision-making. Surprisingly, there has fee, relatively little interest in either motives or behavior of management outside this area. . , . We have virtually no studies of what management actually does.” See “General Issues,” in Mason Haire, editor, M o d e m Organization Theory (New York: Wiley, 1959), p. 15.

3 See Tom Burns, “The Direction of Activity and Communication in a Departmental Execu- tive Group,” Human RezaEions, VII (February, 1954), 73-97.

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100 / ROBERT DUBIN AND S. LEE SPRAY

began and ended, with whom it was, who initiated interaction, and how each interaction was conducted. As each episode was completed the executive ticked off its characteristics on a data sheet and tore it off. The data sheets were collected daily.

The definition of an episode was left to the discretion of the executives. In prior discussions the executives were told that any situation with an integrity of its own was to be considered a single working episode. The categories describing an episode were found to be familiar and largely self- explanatory. *

The study was conducted over a period of two consecutive workweeks and yielded a substantial body of data on each executive for the time spent at work. We have excluded from this analysis all nonwork episodes. Variations in total time reported in Table 1 may be accounted for partly by this exclu- sion and partly by the differences in the amount of time spent working nights and weekends during the period studied.

Our executives5 came from three different types of business. The three financial executives were employed in the savings and loan industry, with A and C being branch-office heads of large associations and B comanager of a one-office association. The Manufacturing Senior Executive was co-owner- manager of a lumber manufacturing firm having over one hundred employees, while the Manufacturing Junior Executive was his immediate subordinate and was officially Market Manager. The Senior Accounting Executive was comptroller in a major regional division of a large manufacturing firm, while Junior Accounting Executives A and B were his subordinates, A being Chief Accountant and B being Division Office Manager in charge of a major sub- division of the region. These executives were employed and lived in the same western metropolitan area and each had been in his current position for at least two years prior to the study. Clearly, we do not have a representative sample of business executives, and the data should be interpreted in light of this. Our conclusions do not rest on any claims that the sample is representative.

Executive Functions

shows the distribution of total working time among various activities. What functions did our eight executives perform? Table 1

* The actual categories used were selected from the list used by Burns, fbtd., and from the studies conducted b the Bureau of Business Research at the Ohio State University, as reported in Ralph M. Stogdifand Carrol L. Shartle, Methods in the Study of Adrntaistrdloe Leadership, Research Monograph No. 80 (Columbus: Bureau of Business Research, Ohio State University, 1955), .5053.

5 &p, use the term “executive” very loosely since the three junior executives included in the study fall into this category only by courtesy.

Executive Behavior and Interaction / 101

TABLE 1 PERCENTAGE DISTRIBUTTON OF Ex~crrrrv~s’ TIME,‘ BY TYPE OF ACTIVITY

Financial Manufacturinn Arrnuntinn

Type of activity

Juni? Junior Executive Executive Executive Senior Junior Senior Executive Executive

A B C Executive Executive Executive A B

Mailb .-._ ._.. ..._ 7 5 3 2 2 Finance

Production’ 47 42 22 12 14 0 0 91 Sales 6 0 7 4 14 0 0 0 Personnel 2 0 0 4 1 15 0 0 Public relations 13 1 5 15 0 2 0 0 Customer relations 4 7 3 0 0 0 0 0 Research and

Accounting-legal 3 5 9 11 1 66 95 4

development 11 0 8 6 1 0 0 0 Organization planning 8 0 3 14 5 13 0 0 Personal 2 18 2 3 7 1 3 2

1 Complexd Total 100 100 100 99’ 100 100 100 100 Total minutes 4980 3411 5925 5740 5890 8608 4800 4431

- 0 - 0 _.

52 - 23 - 43 - 27 - 4 -

a The total number of minutes over the entire recorded period. b Not recorded by the Financial Executives. Most activihes that would have been recorded under Mail were included

under Production overstating that category in relation to the other executives. =The Finankal Executives were instructed to check the category Production for general activities involved in

“getting the work done.” For the executives in the manufacturing organization and in accounting this category refers to activities directly involved in making the.prcduct sold by the firm.

*Any combination of two or more functions. 0 Column does not equal 100 because the figures were rounded off.

The most obvious feature of the table is the apparent lack of a single pattern for the group as a whole. No two executive patterns are alike, nor is there any characteristic behavior for an industry. Since these data are based upon a two-week period of recording, it seems unlikely that the variations among the executives can be attributed to unique and/or unduly short periods of time covered by the recorded data.

Why so little uniformity? The most economical explanation is that the executive’s job does not consist of a “standard bundle of things to do and that each managerial position has a unique action dimension of its own.

One relationship does emerge : lower-level executives are more likely than upper-level executives in the same organization to concentrate their time on a single activity. This is evident when we compare: (1) the two Junior Accounting Executives with their superior and (2) the Manufacturing Junior Executive with his boss.“

It is also notable that the Manufacturing Senior Executive spent the highest proportion of his time handling two or more activities simultaneously. When we contrast this with the very small amount of time spent by the accountant in handling such “complex” activities, we have a clue to the -

6 In the latter case, the Junior Executive shows the heaviest concentration of time in handling two or more activities simultaneously, so that while action is concentrated in one category, it is a complex category.

102 / ROBERT DUBIN AND S. LEE SPRAY

meaning of functional specialization. Presumably, when the executive’s position is specialized there is a tendency to handle things one at a time. Among manufacturing executives, on the other hand, activities tend to come in complex bundles.‘ For those in specialized fields, problems are more readily separated and handled singly. Another consequence of specialization is re- vealed when the two Junior Accounting Executives are contrasted. They both spent more than nine-tenths of their time in single activities, but their individual activities were different. Clearly, the Junior Executives were not only functionally specialized in terms of department but also specialized according to the activities they performed inside the department. This we might have inferred from their job titles, but it is most comforting to have empirical confirmation in terms of their actual behavior.

The Executive’s Workday How is the executive’s work distributed over the course

of the day? Junior Executives had a great flurry of activity early in the morning, while the Finance Executives were particularly busy servicing clients from 9 to 11 a.m. Other than this, the level of work activity was pretty constant throughout the day, with slightly over half the behavior episodes occurring before 2 p.m.

Forms of Communication Elton Mayo, one of the fathers of the human relations school

stated that, “. . . social study should begin with careful observation of what may be described as communication. . . .”8 Similarly, Barnard constructed a model of business organizations in which he viewed the firm as a series of communication network^.^ Given this auspicious beginning, and the contin- uing emphasis placed on communication by those writing in the human relations tradition, it is surprising to find very little hard data describing how much time executives spend in verbal as opposed to other kinds of communication, and little evidence (virtually none for top management) on whom executives contact and how much time they spend in communication.10

7 Executive level, of course, exercises an influence over which areas of action are combined in a single episode. For the Manufacturing Junior Executive the two areas most often combined in one episode were Sales and production. His boss, on the other hand, most often combined Production with “future-oriented” activities of Research and Development and Organization- Plannin .

8Etton Mayo, So& Problems of an Industdd CtulUdon (Boston: Graduate School of Business Administration, Harvard University, 1945), p. 22.

9 Chester I. Barnard, The Functions of the Executive (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard, 1948). 10 For a summary of studies providing evidence on the verbal activities engaged in by execu-

tives, see Dubin, op. dt., pp. 12-17.


We shall first examine forms of communication: face to face, telephone, and written. Table 2 shows the distribution of time spent communicating and time spent alone.

Two striking features of this table are that face-to-face discussion ap- peared to be the dominant mode of interaction among the executives and that in the three exceptions (Finance Executive B and the two Junior Accounting Executives) the substitute for face-to-face interaction was to work alone.

TABLE 2 PERCENTAGE DISTIUBUTION OF EXECUTIVES’ TIME,’ BY FORM OF CONTACT^

Financial Manufacturing Accounting

Juniot Junior Executive Executive Executive Senior Junior Senior Executive Executive

Rank of Contact A B C Executive Executive Executive A B

Discussion 07 35 83 72 74 52 27 21

Letter or memorandum 12 2 8 2 4 4 4 0

Alone 8 51 0 20 18 35 03 74 0 N.A.*

Total 100 100 100 100 100 100 100 100

Total minutes 4980 3411 5925 5740 5890 8806 4800 4431

Telephone 6 4 8 3 3 9 6 5

Complex‘ 5 3 1 3 1 0 0 0

- - - - - - - 2 5 0 0 0 0 0 -

The total number of minutes over the entire recorded period. b Time spent in nonwak activities have been excluded. c Any combination of two or more forms of interaction used to conduct a single episode. d Eptdodes where the executive fai!+ to record whom he was contacting. Almost all these were situations where the

executive was reading his mail or recelvlng or sending general memoranda.

When we divide the data of Table 2 into interactions which involve and do not involve verbal contact, two sharply opposing patterns emerge: the ‘‘verbalists’’ spent from six-tenths to nine-tenths of their working time on the telephone or in discussion; the “loners,” on the other hand, were either by themselves or communicated through written material 60 to 75 per cent of the time.

The executive’s social environment seems to be verbal, as Roethlisberger so ably pointed out many years ago.’l When we look at the form of interaction, we note that in addition to being verbal, it is also face to face. This makes a substantial difference in the skills required to communicate effec- tively. In face-to-face communication, gestures and intonation aid in communicating intent and meaning. Even beyond this, the cues secured from the responses of the other person will tend to modify communication. The importance of face-to-face communications in the executive’s job may help

11 Fritz J. Roethlisberger, Management and Morale (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard, 1941), especially pp. 88-92.

104 / ROBERT DUBIN AND s. LEE SPRAY

justify the inclusion of communications, group dynamics, and sensitivity training courses in executive development courses.1a Contained in our data then, is a suggestion that both industry characteristics and executive rank may influence the forms of executive communication.

Patterns of interaction. Table 3 shows data on the proportion of time executives spend with various groups of individuals. It is frequently observed that top executives tend to be involved in external relations more often than their subordinates.” Accordingly, it should not surprise us that the Manufacturing Senior Executive, who owned his own company, also spent a high percentage of his time with persons outside the organization-consid- erably more than did his subordinate, the Manufacturing Junior Executive, or the three accountants.

TABLE 3 PERCENTAGE DISTRIBUTTON OF E x ~ c m ~ s ’ TIME,* BY RANK OF CONTACT

Finance Manufacturing Accountinn - ~~

Junior Junior Executive Executive Executive Senior Junior Senior Executive Executive


Superiors Associates Subordinates Complex’ Outsiders Alone N.A.“

Total

Total minutes

14 5 9 3 58 8 3

100

4980

.._. 4

7 36 51 2

100

341 1

_.._

-

5 29 27

1 36 0 2

100

5925

-

.._. 23 15 14 28 20 0

100 -

8 12 33 15 10 18 4

100 -

15 9 31 5 4 35 1

100 -

7 9 21 0 1 63 0

101 -

5740 5890 6606 4800

4 14 8 0 0

74 0

100

4431 ~ ~~ ~

8 The total number of minutes over the entire recorded period. b Any combination of two or more categories of persons. f Episodes where the exmtive failed to record whom he was contacting. Almost all these were situations where

the executive was reading his mail or receiving or sending general memoranda.

12 The work of Fred E. Fiedler, Nathan Gage, and Lee Cronbach on sensitivity to others represents attempts to sort out the characteristics of individua L that enhance such sensitivity. See Fred E. Fiedler, Lead@ Attitudes and Group Eflectioeness (Urbana, Ill. : University Press, 1958); N. L. Gage and L. J. Cronbach, “Conceptual and Methodological Problems in Interpersonal Per- ception,’’ Psychological Reoiew, LXII (November, 1955), 411422. The group dynamics concern with the development of sensitivity to other oup members is well known. A particularly strong emphasis on this has been develo d by ROE& Tannenbaum and his associates under the title

and others, Leadership and Organization (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1961). 13 Seymour Melman, in Deckion Making and Productivity (Oxford: Blackwell, 1958), pointed

out that one of the significant consequences of the decentralization of the automobile manufacturing company was that top management turned its attention in greater proportion than before to the external problems of the firm. Morris R. Janowitz and William Delany, “The Bureaucrat and the Public: A Study of Informational Perspectives,” Administratbe Science Quarterly, I1 (Septem- ber, 1957), 141-162, pointed to this same phenomenon in a public bureaucracy where top management spent a significantly larger proportion of total workin time in public relations activities

of ‘ sensitivity training.” For a goo 8“ summary and critique of their work, see: Robert Tannenbaum

and maintaining contacts with other agencies than did lower- P eve1 officials.


In addition, our three Financial Executives from savings and loan associations spent a substantial proportion of their time with clients.

The data, then, suggest that top executives and those employed in client- centered industries will be engaged more frequently in contacts with people outside the organization than will their subordinates. Obviously this finding has implications for executive training.

According to Table 3, the accountants spent more of their time “alone” than did the other executives. This suggests that functional specialization, like accounting, may permit the individual executive to spend long periods of time doing his specialized tasks without need for contact or coordination with others. Drucker long ago pointed out that the executives of General Motors suffered considerable isolation in their positions; this, he concluded, led to provincialism in out100k.l~ What he did not note was the fact that functional specialists (or perhaps only staff functional specialists) seem to be especially isolated from contact with others in the organization. If substantiated in future studies, this finding could provide us with a major insight regarding one basis for what Veblen called the “trained incapacity” of the specialists-he is literally isolated from his working associates.

The first three lines of Table 3 concern executive contacts within the organization.ls In order to make our findings comparable with those of Burns and Landsberger, we present Table 4, which deals solely with the percentage distribution of time spent on internal contacts.

TABLE 4 PERCENTAGE DISTRIBUTION OF EXECUTIVES’ TIME, BY RANK OF CONTACT-

INTRAORGANIZATIONAL COMMUNICATION ONLY*

Finance Manufacturing Accounting

Executive Executive Executive Senior Junior Rank of Contact A B C Executive Executive

b Superiors 50 _._. 8 .... 15 Associates 18 100 48 61 23

39 62 Subordinates 32 ._._ 44

Total 100 100 100 100 100

Total minutes 1395 137 3614 2181 3121

- - - - -

Junior Junior Senior Executive Executive

Executive A B

28 19 15 18 24 54 56 57 31

100 100 100

3634 1776 1151

- - -

Over entire recorded period. b This man is comanager of his firm and bas no superior. c This man is a co-owner and has no superior.

~~

14 Peter F. Drucker, The Concept of the Corporation (New York: Harper, 1946), passim. 15 Oddly enough, Finance Executive B reported no contacts with subordinates. However,

this man seemed to have unique work habits; he spent a much higher pro on of his time alone

classes of people. He did his dictating and correspondence for electronic transcription, so that he was not inclined to report contacts with subordinates on that score. Furthermore, he had the lowest total recorded working time, which probably reflects his failure to record what he thought were very minor contacts with others.

than did the other two finance executives and a much greater amount o p““ bme with two or more

106 / ROBERT DUBIN AND s . LEE SPRAY

With the exception of Finance Executive B, these executives devoted from a third to almost two-thirds of their time to subordinates. In addition, between a 6fth and three-fifths of their internal time interaction was spent with associates or peers. The greatest variation appears in amount of time spent in the presence of superiors.

It is difficult to infer patterns from Table 4 which may relate to type of industry, degree of functional specialization, or level of organization. When the senior author had only the Burns data available, he reached two conclusions: “First, as we go downward in rank, the proportion of time spent with superiors markedly increases, and correspondingly, the proportion of time spent with subordinates decreases. . . . Second, we observed that there is a very substantial increase in the proportion of time spent in interaction that is devoted to peers as we move downward in the rank system.”l6 Neither generalization is confirmed by our own study. Indeed, there seem to be con- trary indications in the present data, a point which highlights the need for further empirical research to provide an anchor for our generalizations.

The horizontal dimension of interaction, as measured by the proportion of contacts which occurred with peers, was substantial in the Bums study, ranging from 29 per cent for the departmental manager to 50 per cent for his immediate managerial subordinate.” Landsberger found in his study of two British engineering firms that the proportion of horizontal interactions among three department heads in each of two plants ranged from 17 per cent to 64 per cent.’* Our findings are consistent with these (excepting, of course, Finance Executive B ) .

We now have substantial evidence from three different studies that executives spend a great deal of time with their peers. When we add data summarized elsewhere on peer relations of first-line supervisors, which again show substantial proportions of time devoted to horizontal relations, there can be absolutely no question of the need for substantial revision of extant organization the01-y.l~

18 Dubin, op. cit., p. 15. 17 Burns, op. clt., p. 90. An early discussion of horizontal relations in business organization

will be found in Robert Dubin, World of Work (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1958); the empirical data on this direction of interaction among managers is summarized in Dubin, “Business Behavior . . . ,” pp. 15-16 and 22; see also George Strauss, “Tactics of Lateral Relationship,” Administrative Science Quarterly, VII (September, 1962), 161-186.

18 Henry Landsberger, “The Horizontal Dimension in Bureaucracy,” Administrative Science Quartedy, I11 (December, 196l), 315.

10 The studies of first-line supervisors are summarized in Dubin, World of Work, pp. 21-22. This article is not the place to suggest the nature of such revision, but it is clear, for example, that we need an immediate reanalysis of our theories of authority in formal organization to take into account the nature of horizontal authority relations. Dubin’s concept of “nonformal behavior systems” may also have relevance here.


Initiation of contacts. How often were the executives able to initiate contacts with someone else? For this data we turn to Table 5 which shows the proportion of contacts each executive initiated. For example, Finance Executive A initiated three of the six contacts he had with superiors, or 50 per cent of them. The basis of measurement has been shifted from the amount of time spent, as in Tables 2, 3, and 4, to the number of contacts made with other people.

TABLE 5 PERCENTAGE DISTFUBUTION OF SELF-INITIATED EXECUTIVE INTESACTIONS, BY RANK OF CONTACT

Finance Manufactdng Accounting

Junior Junior Executive Executive Executive Senior Junior Senior Executive Executive


superiors 50 _ _ _ _ a 70 _.._ a 33 49 43 33

Complex 80 0 0 100 80 100 100 0

Associates 67 100 65 56 74 48 47 73 Subordinates 68 0 78 48 54 51 54 43 Outsiders 07 50 30 41 36 37 50 0

All Interactions 06 54 51 51 51 51 51 62 a This man bas no superior.

Examining the proportions of all contacts initiated, we find that our executives initiated contacts more often than they received them. While these proportions do not show overwhelming self-initiation, they do show that the executive may have to do a good deal of initiation. This finding con- firms that of Burns, who reported that his one departmental manager originated 57 per cent of all contacts madeem

In all instances, executives were more likely to initiate contacts with subordinates than with superiors. Although the differences are not statistically significant in every instance, the order of magnitude is consistent. Our conclusion here accords with that of

Executives initiated contacts with associates between 47 and 74 per cent of the time (excepting again Finance Executive B). When Landsberger’s data on six department managers in two plants is added, the range of origination of horizontal contacts was from 17 per cent to almost 62 per cent.= The fascinating thing about this range of figures on origination of contacts is that they must indicate an inequality among peers of some characteristic sort.

What sense can be made of this unequal origination of interaction among

2O Burns, op. dt., p. 90. 21 Ibid. 22 Landsberger, op. dt., p. 315.

108 / ROBERT DUBIN AND s. LEE S P R A Y

men who are organizational equals? If these men are peers, with all that this implies about the sociological conditions of equality among them, then we might expect contacts to be originated and received in equal proportions. Obviously this is not substantiated by the two studies cited. An obvious clue as to the reasons for such inequality lies in the possibility that working associates not only are linked by the sociological bonds of a peer relationship but also are involved in a technological division of labor, because of their linked jobs, which requires an inequality of initiated interactions. Indirect support for this idea comes from Jasinski’s research on 11 foremen in an automobile assembly plant, where he found that in a single eight-hour day, three-quarters of all contacts for the average foreman were either with the foreman immediately preceding or immediately succeeding him on the line.= Jasinski‘s data at least suggest something about the ecology of contacts between organizational equals at the supervisory level.

Insofar as the flow of work may give direction to the initiation of contacts, it probably takes precedence over other motives for interaction. We are thus arguing a technological determinism of working behavior which has previously been set forth in considerable detail.” We now feel some confi- dence in extending this kind of determinism to interactions among organizational peers.

Conclusion We have hewed close to an inductive procedure. Given our

desire to describe executive action accurately, we sought to let the descriptive materials speak loudly to the theory. We think this is fundamentally neces- sary if organization theory is to be grounded in the study of organizational behauior. The result has been that we have called into question several theoretical notions and have also indicated where others need to be created in order to capture the reality of executive action. Obviously, with a small, un- representative sample our conclusions can only be suggestive.

23 F. J. Jasinski, “Foremen Relations Outside the Work Group,” Personnel, XXXII (Septem-

24 See Dubin, World of Work, especially Chaps. 10 and 11. ber, 1956), 315.

executive behavior and interaction

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