FLUX CAPACITY

Efficiencies and responsible staffstewardship: a library manager’s

critical self-reflectionColleen S. Harris

University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, Lupton Library Department,Chattanooga, Tennessee, USA

Abstract

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to explore the myriad non-financial ways in which librarymanagers can motivate employees and address performance issues, reducing attrition and increasingproductivity and satisfaction without increasing salaries.

Design/methodology/approach – A critical self-reflection summarizing the author’s experientiallearning as a new assistant department head tackling a library department’s productivity and costissues with staff processing of course reserves. After an initial description of the situation, the paperexplores the theories that apply to the experience, and includes analysis of the experience in light ofthose theories. The article includes how application by one library manager of findings frommotivation, trust, and leadership theory literature was able to reduce staff attrition, increase staffsatisfaction, and reduce costs.

Findings – The literature from a number of fields demonstrates that there are areas aside fromfinancial compensation that library managers can harness to increase the motivation and satisfactionof staff members. An awareness of the factors cited in these literatures can help library leadership andmanagers improve unit performance. As budgets continue to shrink and open positions remainunfilled, it is imperative library managers find creative, non-remunerative, and effective ways toaddress staffing needs.

Research limitations/implications – The continued economic and budget limitations facinglibraries create implications for library leaders and managers in terms of replacing and rewarding staffmembers, and creating workflow efficiencies in necessary library services.

Practical implications – This paper brings the issue of responsible staff stewardship and practicalmanagement to the forefront in an effort to engage library leaders and managers in a discussion aboutengaging with other discipline literatures for suggestions on how to maintain productive, satisfiedstaff while faced with fewer resources for rewarding good work.

Social implications – The culture of library management practice could (and should) be affected bythis issue, and the work in other disciplines may have wider application in terms of human resourcesmanagement, distributions of managers’ effort, and performance management issues in libraries.

Originality/value – The paper outlines one library manager’s approach to an under-performinglibrary department, relating those approaches to factors identified in the broader literature asimportant to managers and leaders, and addresses the issue of how to address library service needs asbudgets are stripped and staff attrition without replacement becomes regular practice.

Keywords Library management, Leadership, Library staff, Efficiency

Paper type Viewpoint

Human resource and management practices have a significant impact on staff turnoverand productivity, and there is evidence that staff turnover lower among good

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Accepted May 2011

The Bottom Line: Managing LibraryFinances

Vol. 24 No. 2, 2011pp. 129-137

q Emerald Group Publishing Limited0888-045X

DOI 10.1108/08880451111169197

performers (Huselid, 1995; McEvoy and Cascio, 1987). It has also been demonstratedthat increased trust in both immediate managers and in higher-level administrativemanagement correlates with increased staff ability to focus on productivity (Mayer andGavin, 2005). In addition to work overload and insufficient funding and resources, poormanagement practices have been cited as a staff stressor, resulting in lost productivityand lower morale (Gillespie et al., 2001). If poor management has an economic andsocial impact on libraries in terms of lower productivity and staff satisfaction, itfollows that improved management leads to greater efficiencies and increased staffsatisfaction.

Library managers are currently faced with a dilemma that is financial in origin andsocial in impact. As library budgets decline and staff are laid off, or not replaced if theyleave the library, managers are left with fewer hands, increased workloads, andoverworked staff members. The literature in leadership, behavior and motivation, andpower reveal a number of non-financial factors that have been demonstrated to have apositive impact on staff satisfaction. In cases where a library leader manager has little(or no) direct control over staff pay rates, staff members’ job satisfaction and efficientwork distribution become crucial elements in good human resources management, andit behooves managers to pay close attention to those additional factors.

The new managerIn my first mid-level library management position, I was hired as an assistantdepartment head at a large research library with clear instruction from administrationto assist the department head in improving the performance and morale of an accessservices department. The department was responsible for running two circulationdesks (where users checked in and out materials including books, media, study roomkeys, and portable technology items); reconciling user billing and library finances;generating and altering user records and permissions; interlibrary loan and documentdelivery services; and print and electronic course reserves services. The departmentconsisted of 33 people: the department head, myself, the media services and reserveslibrarian, the interlibrary loan librarian, a day supervisor, evening supervisor,overnight supervisor, 8 interlibrary loan staff, 15 circulation staff and three off-siteshelving facility staff.

The first thing I did upon my arrival was to meet with every staff member in thedepartment individually, to learn more about what they did in the course of their work,whether their job description and assessment tool actually matched their dailyresponsibilities, and to ask what they saw as their biggest challenges facing thempersonally and facing the department as a whole. Staff, who felt their concerns andideas had been ignored by previous administrators, were happy to talk about theirwork and their concerns. Reflecting on the situation, those meetings may be seen as anexercise in transformational leadership as defined by Bass (1990), as I offeredindividualized consideration, personal attention, and communication of the importanceof employees’ work in the context of the larger organization.

I quickly learned that there were a few hard divides within the staff group, andthough there were multiple issues, one of the most impactful had to do with thedepartment’s responsibility for processing course reserves for faculty. My experienceswith regards to the skill and skill-development divide related to course reserves, thedivide between those staff favored by department supervisors and those less-favored,

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my manner of handling the issue, and the interrelationship of these factors withleadership theory are detailed below.

The great divide: course reservesCourse reserves is a library service offering faculty the opportunity to request thatcertain materials related to their courses (varying from books, to articles, to boxes ofrocks or skeletons) be made available to students through the library. Hard copyreserves, or physical items such as books, have item records created and are processedso they are available for checkout at the library service desk. Many libraries also offerelectronic reserve services, meaning that records created for those items differ in thatthey are designed to be accessible through the library catalog remotely by computer(largely articles and book chapters).

I learned quickly that the entire circulation staff had recently been reclassified in thestate job system. In order to move the staff into a higher pay grade and reflect thecurrent, more technology-oriented work of the library department, the (shared) jobdescription of all the circulation staff members was rewritten, with the result that allstaff members now had responsibilities related to processing course reserves in theirjob description, along with standard desk and customer service responsibilities.Behavioral theorists note that conscious goal-making and intent by people have moreof an effect on both motivation and behavior than monetary incentives (Locke, 1968).Other reviews of motivation theory note that motivation is largely psychological andthat goal-setting, cognitive, and organizational justice factors are more important thansimple physical rewards like salary (Latham and Pinder, 2005). This body ofmotivation knowledge appears not to have been taken into great consideration byadministration or management, as it was expected that the large pay raise alone wouldresult in transformed performance and increased job satisfaction, which neveremerged.

Through my meetings with staff and going over the job descriptions and evaluationtool we would be using at the end of the year to assess performance, I discovered thatthough every person’s job description stated that they would be processing coursereserves, only those staff members who already possessed strong technology skills, orwho the supervisors had felt would be fast learners, were trained and performing thatduty. No consideration had been given to the organizational behavior researchdemonstrating that ability to learn effectively is related to motivational andenvironmental influences (Noe, 1986), which were patently ignored by the departmentrelying only on those already possessing the needed skills. Older staff and those staffwho had demonstrated problems with detailed work in other areas had not beentrained in reserves processing. The situation was exacerbated by the supervisorsassuming staff future performance would reflect past performance, and given theteam’s past poor performance, that it would remain that way. Because of this attitudeon the part of the supervisors, the unskilled staff members assumed they would remainunskilled, and did not believe that the supervisors had any interest in helping themimprove. This directly reflected Dirks’s (2000) assertion that “(p)erceiving lowperformance may cause the team to expect low performance in the future and thenunwilling to trust the leader” (p. 1006). As a result of this situation, of the 15 circulationstaff, only four were able to process course reserves.

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I viewed this situation from the perspective of my supervisory and managementexperience and in the light of the human resources training I had, which had been veryclear on the point that you cannot punish someone for failing to perform a jobresponsibility if you have not offered them training in that area and coaching toimprove their performance. With the approval of my department head, I immediatelyembarked on work to ensure that all of the circulation staff were cross-trained, so thatevery person could process course reserves and fulfill their position duties asdescribed.

Department reserves supervisors were asked to design such a training program,utilizing the most skilled staff as mentors to those learning the process. A flurry ofcomplaints, particularly that such training would be time-intensive, that many of theless-skilled staff were older and would retire in the next few years anyway, and thatpersonality differences between the skilled and under-skilled would make trainingproblematic, were offered. The issue was also raised that skilled staff preferred not towork with the less skilled staff, since it required much more work and attention. Aftermuch discussion, the management team considered it our responsibility to ensure thatour staff had the tools and development options to perform all of their job functions,not just those they were best at. The department head and I pointed out that we couldhardly tackle performance problems if the staff could truthfully respond that they hadnever been properly trained for their duties.

Leader-member exchange theory in practiceMy individual meetings with each of the staff members prompted my examination ofthe underlying causes of the tensions in the department. Though I did not realize it atthe time, these meetings were a reflection of my latent belief in leader-memberexchange (LMX) theory, which posits that the importance of a dyadic relationshipbetween the leader and each individual follower (Pierce and Newstrom, 2011). Inessence, each staff member must be understood as an individual with individual needsand concerns, and not simply as part of the behemoth of “access services.” Particularlyentering such a large department, I felt it essential to take the opportunity to speakwith every person, since it was made clear that once I was in the full swing of everydaywork such interactions would be a luxury. Those individual conversationsaccomplished a number of things – in particular, they established an initialfoundation between myself and each staff member, and allowed me to discover some ofthe issues challenging staff.

In particular, as a result of the skill and training differential I discovered duringthose initial conversations, the less technology-savvy and detail-oriented staff wererequired to work longer hours on the service desk (which was considered less-skilledwork by supervisors and less desirable work by staff) than their colleagues whoprocessed reserves. Desk work was much less valued (though it comprised a great dealof the department’s work) and the staff members were more easily replaceable on shortnotice. This stratification of work was reflected in language use around thedepartment: whereas “Bob and Gina” were needed to handle a reserves issue,supervisors arranging desk schedules referred to needing “warm bodies on the desk”or “a breather for desk hours.”

This situation is representative of the in-group/out-group phenomenon posited byLMX theory, in which relationships between in-group members and the leader are

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qualitatively different from relationships between out-group members and the leader(Pierce and Newstrom, 2011). The authors state:

[i]n group members may be given more interesting and desirable task assignments, they arelikely to be communicated with more frequently and therefore exercise more influence orcontrol over group activities and receive more support and recognition, and their tangiblerewards are often greater than that received by out-group members (p. 28).

Among staff, this manifested in the in-group of reserves processors and the out-groupof the under-skilled staff members.

In addition to the skill-development difference caused by relying solely on in-groupmembers to do complex tasks, the staff who processed reserves received benefits suchas overtime pay and comp time at the beginning and end of semesters, when reservetraffic from faculty was heaviest. Because reserves processing also involved moredirect contact with faculty (which was considered higher-level service) and liaisingwith other library departments, staff members performing the processing were moreoften nominated for library and campus service awards. This created a great deal ofresentment from those not receiving these benefits, and created a general divisionwithin the department in terms of not only skill, but attitude among staff, reflectingexactly the situation described by Pierce and Newstrom (2011).

In group out-group dynamics created divisions not only among the staff, but alsobetween supervisors and staff. Pierce and Newstrom (2011) note that:

Selection of those who will come to be a part of the leader’s in-group is based, in large part, onpersonal compatibility, perceptions of subordinate competence, and dependability (p. 27).

Supervisors interacted more often and at deeper levels with those staff given theirgreater responsibilities. Reserves processing staff were seen as the most competent anddependable staff members and department supervisors had developed the habit ofturning to those members and offering them additional assignments. Essentially, oncea staff member was thought of as under-skilled, they were never given the opportunityto prove themselves again. Scandura (in Pierce and Newstrom, 2011) stated that“out-group members should be re-tested periodically by the leader making offers ofin-group roles” and that “[t]he assumption should be made that all members canbecome in-group members if given the opportunity to contribute to the work-group[. . .]” (p. 39). Upon my arrival in the department, this occasional reassessment of roles,and offering of opportunities, was not happening. In the situation with course reserves,this openness to out-group members was not practiced, and served to reinforce thedivide between staff members, and between staff and supervisors.

With the department head and reserves supervisors, we initiated cross-training ofall the staff to lay the groundwork for more fair distribution of work, and thecross-training was largely successful, expanding staff skill sets and opportunities forparticipation both within the department and in larger organizational initiatives(Harris, 2010). While occasionally there was still an opportunity for overtime or comptime accrual during particularly heavy processing times, the fact that all staff with thatresponsibility were properly trained to do it meant the benefit was more broadlyoffered on a volunteer basis. Those who chose not to take advantage of the offerappeared not to begrudge their fellow staff receiving the benefit. This appears toreinforce the organizational justice factor of LMX theory, which posits that if

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distribution of benefits by a leader appears to be procedurally fair, reward decisionswill be accepted by both in- and out-group members (Tyler and Caine, 1981).

Interestingly, once a number of the under-skilled staff were trained in processingcourse reserves, some found the processing so onerous and different from the workthey expected that they refused to do it. Essentially, they were allowed to chooseout-group status as opposed to being relegated to that status through lack ofopportunity. At that point, once all staff were held to the same standard for their workduties, after determining that it was not a skill but a performance issue, I was able toaddress these issues with performance management and disciplinary action measures.

Strategic contingencies and powerIn addition to the obvious connections to LMX and trust theories in leadership, myexperience (and consequent study of leadership theory) also encouraged me to explorethe issues of strategic contingencies and power relationships in the context of thelibrary department.

Salancik and Pfeffer (in Pierce and Newstrom, 2011) note that “power revolvesaround scarce and critical activities”, and that even “trivial resources can become thebases for power if one can organize and control their allocation and the definition ofwhat is critical” (p. 123). While course reserves are a library service, that service is notoften considered a seat of power in many libraries. In fact, processing reserves, while atechnology-heavy and detail-oriented task, is a service provided at many libraries withlittle fanfare, other than trying to make it more efficient (Pilston and Hart, 2002;Reichardt, 1999). Record manipulation and information organization is at the heart ofwhat libraries do (Taylor, 2003); in this particular case, however, record manipulationskills within the department were restricted to a select few, making those skillsparticularly critical, since they were involved in providing an essential service for thelarger university.

In terms of this experience with staff and course reserves processing, the situationhad gotten to the point where staff involved in the processing held an inordinateamount of power over their peers and even over supervisors. The power over theirpeers came from being more skilled and being more likely to be given assignments andtraining that continued to augment their skills, creating dependencies. For instance,when a staff member had a question about reserves as they were helping a user at theservice desk, they often had to defer to the reserves staff knowledge and informationinstead of being able to make decisions or answer questions on their own. In terms ofpower over supervisors (and indeed the department), reserves-processing staff wereintegral to an essential service to faculty to keep their course materials updated andavailable because of their rare skill set and specific knowledge (expert power). Becauseof this, reserves staff garnered greater consideration for requests for overtime, comptime, and to work on other plum projects; they also created the credible threat ofstopping the essential service in its tracks if too many of them called in sick or tookvacation. Because of this, supervisors deferred to the wishes of reserves staff to agreater extent than compared to demands and requests of the under-skilled staff, whichwere more easily replaced or substituted.

The criticality of the service itself had not changed, but the scarcity of staffmembers to handle the service did change. Salancik and Pfeffer (in Pierce andNewstrom, 2011) noted that when critical contingencies change, “the power of

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individuals and subgroups will change in turn” (p. 125). In fact, cross-trainingadditional staff members altered reward structures (no overtime or comp time hadto be awarded since additional staff offered the additional hours necessary fortimely processing, even during peak periods), and reduced the power of thepreviously rare skilled staff member to coerce imbalanced benefits from supervisors.This resulted in both financial improvements and social improvements in thedepartmental culture.

At this point, the power and leadership in course reserves became based not onbasic ability to process, but based in skill – the strategic-contingency power nowrested with the department as a whole, but expert power merely shifted forms. Thosestaff members who had been trainers (a small subset of the previously few skilledprocessors) became mentors to the larger team for detailed issues and non-routinequestions having to do with course reserves. These staff members largely lost benefitssuch as comp time and overtime pay which had earned them the enmity of theircolleagues, but now garnered respect from those same colleagues due to their broaderand deeper knowledge of complex processes.

The department atmosphere grew much healthier once differences in staff powerwere based on expertise, tempered by the fact that everyone was properly trained fortheir responsibilities.

The trust issueAt the point that the staff were cross-trained, the management team began to addressperformance issues with disciplinary action. The department head and I hadestablished credibility and trustworthiness with staff in terms of being honest andtransparent about our intent. When I expressed slight concern that disciplinary actionmight create a culture of fear, one of the staff members who had moved fromunder-skilled into successful reserve processing noted that he was not afraid, becausethe management team had established that we would talk to staff who wereunder-performing and try to help them improve before moving into official action.Dirks and Ferrin (2011) note that:Q Trust-related concerns about a leader’s characterare important because the leader may have authority to make decisions that have asignificant impact on a follower and the follower’s ability to achieve his or her goals (inPierce and Newstrom, 2011, p. 43).The same holds true for trust-related concerns aboutmanagers.

Coming into that position, I had the good fortune to be an essential unknown to thestaff members. As opposed to the entrenched management team who had been theresome years, supervisors and department head, who had established norms ofdifferential treatment and allowing the skill and attitude divide to fester, I was verytransparent about my displeasure with the situation and the measures I intended totake to change it. Because of my actions, in my discussions with staff individually andas a group, and my efforts to ensure cross-training, I established a basis of trust that Iwould follow through on promises, in a hope that establishing my character andfollowing intent with action would create an atmosphere where my staff were moresatisfied (Dirks and Ferrin, in Pierce and Newstrom, 2011).

However, it is important to note that any successes occurred on a dyadic basis,between myself and certain individuals, and was not universal.

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ConclusionsLibrary managers asking staff to take on additional responsibilities as a result of staffattrition, service point mergers, or other factors should take into account theorganizational behavior research demonstrating that ability to learn effectively isrelated to motivational and environmental influences, and not necessarily finances(Noe, 1986). Library units that redistribute work and rely only on those staff whopossess demonstrated competencies, without training the entire body of staff whoshare the same job description may well see the motivation and productivity of theirstaff members decline. In addition to behavior research factors, library managersshould also take heed of the leadership literature (particularly the work addressingleader-follower interaction) and note that assigning additional work only to the mostcapable (and perhaps least likely to complain) staff members not only rewards otherstaff with less work, but structurally disenfranchises those other staff who are nottapped for new assignments and places an undue burden on the “in-group” staffmembers amenable to taking on those extra roles. Once available resources (especiallystaff) are optimized, both in terms of assignment and skill development opportunities,issues created by critical contingencies may be alleviated.

References

Bass, B.M. (1990), “From transactional to transformational leadership: learning to share thevision”, Organizational Dynamics, Vol. 18 No. 3, pp. 19-31.

Dirks, K.T. (2000), “Trust in leadership and team performance: evidence from NCAA basketball”,Journal of Applied Psychology, Vol. 85 No. 6, pp. 1004-12.

Dirks, K.T. and Ferrin, D.L. (2011), “Trust in leadership: meta-analytic findings and implicationsfor research and practice”, in Pierce, J.L. and Newstrom, J.W. (Eds), Leaders and theLeadership Process: Readings, Self-assessments and Applications, 6th ed., McGraw-Hill,New York, NY, pp. 35-42.

Gillespie, N.A., Walsh, M.A., Winefield, A.H., Dua, J. and Stough, C. (2001), “Occupational stressin universities: staff perceptions of the causes, consequences, and moderators of stress”,Work and Stress, Vol. 15 No. 1, pp. 53-72.

Harris, C.S. (2010), “Matrix management in practice in access services at the NCSU Libraries”,Journal of Access Services, Vol. 7 No. 4, pp. 203-11.

Huselid, M.A. (1995), “The impact of human resource management practices on turnover,productivity, and corporate financial performance”, Academy of Management Journal,Vol. 38 No. 3, pp. 635-72.

Latham, G.P. and Pinder, C.C. (2005), “Work motivation theory and research at the dawn of thetwenty-first century”, Annual Review of Psychology, Vol. 56, pp. 485-516.

Locke, E.A. (1968), “Toward a theory of task motivation and incentives”, OrganizationalBehavior and Human Performance, Vol. 3, pp. 157-89.

McEvoy, G.M. and Cascio, W.F. (1987), “Do good or poor performers leave? A meta-analysis ofthe relationship between performance and turnover”, Academy of Management Journal,Vol. 30 No. 4, pp. 744-62.

Mayer, R.C. and Gavin, M.B. (2005), “Trust in management and performance: who minds theshop while the employees watch the boss?”, Academy of Management Journal, Vol. 48No. 5, pp. 874-88.

Noe, R.A. (1986), “Trainees’ attributes and attitudes: neglected influences on trainingeffectiveness”, The Academy of Management Review, Vol. 11 No. 4, pp. 736-49.

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Pierce, J.L. and Newstrom, J.W. (2011), Leaders and the Leadership Process: Readings,Self-Assessments and Applications, 6th ed., McGraw-Hill, New York, NY.

Pilston, A.K. and Hart, R.L. (2002), “Student response to a new electronic reserves system”,Journal of Academic Librarianship, Vol. 28 No. 3, pp. 147-51.

Reichardt, K. (1999), “Electronic reserves at a small college library: from research to reality”,Technical Services Quarterly, Vol. 17 No. 1, pp. 1-12.

Taylor, A.G. (2003), The Organization of Information, 2nd ed., Libraries Unlimited, Englewood,CO.

Tyler, T.R. and Caine, A. (1981), “The role of distributive and procedural fairness in theendorsement of formal leaders”, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Vol. 41,pp. 642-55.

Further reading

Salancik, G.R. and Pfeffer, J. (2011), “Who gets power – and how they hold on to it:a strategic-contingency model of power”, in Pierce, J.L. and Newstrom, J.W. (Eds),Leadership Process: Readings, Self-assessments and Applications, 6th ed., McGraw-Hill,New York, NY, pp. 122-6.

Scandura, T.A. (2011), “Rethinking leader-member exchange: an organizational justiceperspective”, in Pierce, J.L. and Newstrom, J.W. (Eds), Leaders and the LeadershipProcess: Readings, Self-assessments and Applications, 6th ed., McGraw-Hill, New York,NY, pp. 42-62.

About the authorColleen S. Harris is Head of Access Services and Assistant Professor at the University ofTennessee at Chattanooga. Her interests include academic library management, libraryinstruction for graduate students, and library staff development. Her work has appeared inJournal of Access Services, Library Review, Library Journal, InfoCareerTrends, LISCareer, andher book chapters have appeared in Teaching Generation M: A Handbook for Librarians andEducators (Neal-Schuman, 2009), Writing and Publishing: The Librarian’s Handbook (AmericanLibrary Association, 2010) and The Frugal Librarian: Thriving in Tough Economic Times(American Library Association, 2011). In addition to her MLS, she holds an MFA in Writing andis pursuing an Ed.D. in Learning and Leadership. Colleen S. Harris can be contacted at:colleen-harris@utc.edu

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