Zeitschrift für Sozialwissenschaften

Abstrakt

Ignorance-exposing Vulnerable Involvement, The Trust-creating Practice that Makes Executives Job-competent

Reuven Shapira

Executives’ acquisition of job competence suffers from power tempting its use to conceal their ignorance and associated incompetence as dark secrets and to survive in jobs by abuses and subterfuges. Such competence requires sensitivity to the unique contours of circumstances which inter alia require local know-how and phronesis (Greek for practical wisdom) unknown even to insider executives, as with promotion they take charge of unfamiliar units/functions. Ignorance-exposing vulnerable involvement in deliberations is required to gain employees’ trust, to learn through know-how and phronesis sharing, and to become job-competent, but this requires jeopardizing one’s authority until becoming job-competent. A multi-case study of five automatic processing plants by a management educated and experienced semi-native anthropologist untangles that only few of their outsider executives, 4 of 27 studied, chose such involvement and became job-competent. As the import of outsider executives is now common, this problem is worsening and calls for solutions that are suggested, besides recommendations for further study