K Gillette, Herding Cats: Strokes, Pats and Lures,
Abstract
The role of university administrators is often humorously described as ‘herding cats’; cats of course being notoriously independent and hard to ‘train’. This imagery refers to another figure of speech personifying the administrative-academic relationship as ‘us and them’, us being the administrators who are expected to follow the rules in their own work, but to bend them to meet the needs of individual academics, or clusters of academics. Generally speaking academics have a high degree of intrinsic motivation to pursue their own academic goals for research and teaching. However, they often express a complete lack of such motivation, even disdain, for administrative duties. An administrator can never change this disposition as an act of will, but can only provide motivation for changing. This paper looks at motivators for academic behaviour. The session presents the personal ‘herding’ tactics of an academic psychologist turned faculty manager. Many are based on principles of extrinsic motivation, including rewards, incentives, recognition, security, attention and acknowledgement (strokes, pats and lures).
Clay Williams, Elena Karahanna, Dennis Calbos, How cats are herded: Sequencing CIO influence tactics for various coordination mechanisms, 10th AMCIS, New York, pp 3659-3663
Abstract
Large organizations often utilize independent sub-units to pursue specific strategic and business objectives. These organizations have compelling reasons for independent sub-units to act in consistent, coordinated ways including costs, regulation, and customer priorities. Coordination is particularly important in the implementation of enterprise information technology (IT) and information systems (IS). As such, the Chief Information Officer plays a critical role in establishing effective coordination between organizational sub-units. Framed by information processing theory and influence tactics research, this theory building study proposes using event sequence analysis (ESA) to identify the portfolio of influence tactics that are most effective in achieving support for various coordination mechanisms in a federated IS governance structure.