It is not easy to get to the bottom of an organization’s culture. Culture cannot be decided and is therefore not easy to discuss. Fortunately, organizational sociology provides a heuristic that helps to investigate the relevant phenomena. We call them the searchlights of organizational culture.
In this series, we present these searchlights. This article discusses informal roles.
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We understand informal roles to be those that are not envisaged in the formal role of a member of an organization. But they are still necessary and often become informally established.
While formal roles, for example, are defined by official documents, such as job descriptions, or-ganization charts, and employment contracts, and cover predefined tasks, responsibilities, and expectations, informal roles arise from the de facto interaction patterns and expectations about conduct shared by the members of an organization. These roles are not officially defined, but rather reflect the behavior patterns, relationships, and influence structures that (also) structure everyday actions.
Take, for example, the figure of the “secret ruler”, a person who exerts influence and makes deci-sions like an executive without being formally assigned these tasks or being mandated for them.
Informal role: A role that is not intended in a member’s formal role, but performs important functions in the system.
Informal rules of this kind are created as a reaction to the formal structure, e.g., if no management level formally exists below the founding team in a young, fast-growing organization, but critical situations for which there is no guidance constantly arise in the daily work.
This happens because it has been impossible to keep pace with updates to the structures, or because faith in the magic of self-organization has meant there was no desire to do so. Some questions may well arise: Should the key customer who is making such a fuss receive the discount they want or not? Would it be better to expand the product portfolio in this or that way? How would the team budget be the most effectively invested – in sales training or online ads? How-ever, if the same person always takes the lead at such times, makes suggestions, and also mobi-lizes support for them, an informal management role will gradually emerge for that person. This may have major advantages because the team receives guidance and is relieved of pressure, but it also harbors risks, which takes us to the related functions and consequences.
What function do informal roles perform for an organization?
The function of formal roles is to establish the formal structure an organization has chosen to adopt and provide orientation toward it. Clearly formulated formal roles facilitate coordination and control within an organization because they provide employees with a framework for what can and will or will not be expected of them. This framework is set by the formal conditions of membership, which may be formulated in the employment contract, for example, and which have to be fulfilled so employees do not jeopardize their membership.
The more formalized an organization becomes, in other words the more rigid the framework in which each individual operates, the more differentiated informal roles are. And this becomes all the more important because the informal roles also perform an important function in an organi-zation in that they maintain or increase the elasticity of the system as a whole and the flexibility of the individual employees’ conduct – within the formal structures but without directly challeng-ing or undermining them. For example, an assistant to the CEO can, at a suitable moment, include a bold paper on the organization’s future and thereby influence the agenda of the next Board meeting, although corporate strategy is formally located in an entirely different department – and the path for new strategic ideas is actually very much more convoluted. If the person in question does this regularly and successfully, others will take their ideas to them and an informal role is born – let’s call it the “strategy whisperer”.
When informal roles arise, it is often a sign of gaps in the formal structures. For example, addresses are created where accountabilities are not clear because someone fills in as a carer or jack of all trades. Or an informal division of work is established – “you manage customer expectations, I’ll do the internal stakeholder management” – to enable greater efficiency or improved speciali-zation, although joint responsibility was actually the intention.
What consequential problems does this entail?
Formal and informal roles are constantly interacting dynamically and may create tension or even lead to conflicts if not sufficiently well understood and/or managed. Conflicts arise, for example, if there is too sharp a contrast between the roles and expectations laid down by the formal structures and the commonly practiced divergent roles. This may happen when a new formal manager in a department encounters a long-established informal manager; when someone makes a flip-pant remark in a situation that might be tolerable in an informal setting with colleagues in the pub, but not in public in the formal organization; or when power resources that run counter to the formally intended distribution of management resources develop for individuals and groups as a result of informal responsibilities and access – and this becomes obvious in work-related in-teractions.
To make this field of tension productive, it is worthwhile tracing the specific functions of informal roles or behaviors in certain situations and contexts: What are they a solution to, or what specific requirement do they satisfy? Depending on how well or badly people can live with the conse-quences, a different equivalent solution then has to be found – or not, as the case may be.
These questions should be considered:
- Which “informal rulers” are there?
- Who exercises leadership beyond their own accountability?
- Which “hierarchy whisperers” can trigger decisions?
- Who is consulted on subjects outside their field of accountability?
This article is an excerpt from the white paper “Nail the pudding to the wall! How to analyse, discuss – and successfully influence – your organization’s culture”. The full whitepaper is available to download free of charge here.