Out on a limb: the role of context impression management in selling gender-equity issues

Administrative Science Quarterly,  March, 1998  by Susan J. Ashford,  Nancy P. Rothbard,  Sandy Kristin Piderit,  Jane E. Dutton

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Managerial time and attention are scarce resources in organizations (Pfeffer, 1992). Both managers and non-managers compete to gain the attention of top policy makers for issues that they believe are important to the organization. To do so, they engage in what Dutton and Ashford (1993: 398) labeled issue selling, calling the organization's attention to key trends, developments, and events that have implications for organizational performance. Through issue selling, people's concerns become part of the organization's collective awareness (Narayanan and Fahey, 1982; Ocasio, 1997). While relevant to all organizational members, issue selling is an activity that is typically associated with those who have managerial responsibility.

The actions of issue sellers can create an adaptive advantage for an organization. From an evolutionary perspective, issue selling is one process by which people create variety in the pool of strategic ideas and initiatives within an organization. From this set of initiatives, some subset is selected and retained, contributing to patterns of strategic behaviors (Burgelman, 1990; Ghoshal and Bartlett, 1994). In this way, efforts that call attention to problematic conditions or emerging opportunities are the seed corn for organizational renewal and adaptation. Previous studies by Floyd and Wooldridge (1996) suggest that managers' choices to sell issues are consequential for an organization's strategic adaptation.

Despite the value of issue selling for organizations, potential issue sellers often feel tensions around whether to sell issues to managers above them. Selling the "right" issue at the "right" time can generate favorable career benefits. But selling an issue that is controversial or costly for the organization can potentially damage a seller's reputation. Furthermore, issue selling is effortful and takes time, creating another barrier to people's willingness to sell. Thus, the costs and benefits associated with issue selling often leave managers ambivalent about this type of discretionary action. This feeling of ambivalence is central to Meyerson and Scully's (1995) characterization of tempered radicals in organizations. They argued that there is an intrapsychic wrestling that governs whether managers will offer ideas, concerns, and input to those above them or remain silent. If organizations value this input, then understanding the psychology underlying the choice to sell is critical. Our research question focuses on the heart of this dilemma: What personal and contextual factors make managers more or less willing to initiate issue selling in an organization?

Issue Selling Differentiated

Issue selling is a voluntary, discretionary set of behaviors by which organizational members attempt to influence the organizational agenda by getting those above them to pay attention to issues of particular importance to them (Dutton and Ashford, 1993). The types of issues that are sold range from changes in an organization's environment (e.g., technological or demographic changes) to more internally generated conditions, such as increasing employee dissatisfaction or changed goal levels. Trends and developments become issues when people construct them as real and make claims about their importance (Kitsuse and Spector, 1981). These discretionary upwardly directed behaviors differ from other similar individual-level behaviors, including whistle blowing, voice, principled organizational dissent, and product or innovation championing. They also differ from more general forms of employee participation and involvement.

Whistle blowing, voice, and principled organizational dissent all involve speaking out and often in an upward direction within the organization. Whistle blowing involves bringing illegal behavior or some clear wrong doing to the attention of those higher up in the organization or even to those outside of the organization (Near and Miceli, 1986). Voice is one means for expressing dissatisfaction (Withey and Cooper, 1989). Principled organizational dissent involves speaking out about violations of a sense of justice, honesty, or economy (Graham, 1986). The motivation implied by issue selling is broader than the motivation for these other behaviors. Potential issue sellers make choices to come forward about an issue based on the belief that it appropriately belongs on the organization's agenda or out of a personal desire to have an issue heard (Dutton and Ashford, 1993). With issue selling, the motivation to raise an issue doesn't imply an observation of illegality, a feeling of dissatisfaction, or a sense that justice or honesty has been violated. A person might raise an issue out of a sense that it represents an important organizational or personal opportunity. Thus, issue selling is similar (in that it involves speaking out and upward) to voice, whistle blowing, and dissent, but it includes a broader range of prompts to action than are typically considered by these other research domains.