Pragmatism in Management by Objectives

Pragmatism in Management By Objectives, a new way of Responsible Management, Research intervention within an audit firmFor American pragmatist philosophy, organizational best practices are always experimental because action is continuously in movement (Lorino, 2020). More precisely, since Mary Parker Follett, we know that best human levers of performance are empowerment and inclusion. As Sociomateriality tells us that tools and actors are linked (Gherardi & Laasch, 2021), performance management system as it is put into practice influences people behaviors. Moving towards, a more responsible management is not limited to the deployment of a participative management (Mintzberg & Sager, 2003). Management of complexity shows us the need to take into account heterogeneous, interconnected and processual human and non-human elements. In this study, we explore how management control in its practice could be performed for a better management of temporality. The field of analysis is a Big 4 firm strongly affected by a high level of turnover and a significant difficulty in recruiting because people wok life balance and pressure are painful. We will see that time management is at the heart of the issue. How control could be a practice of responsible management to promote velocity? What could be performance objectives relying on complexity? This intervention research gives the opportunity to participate in several projects carried out for clients of the firm. This ethnographic qualitative analysis is a participative observation of people onboarded on projects. We observe that improving projects' framing quality enhance team working environment, this enriching literature on management control by demonstrating that innate intuition and experience stored by people seniority are under-exploited, which, by developing inquiry capabilities, could increase people velocity. We conclude that productivity could be improved by modifying management by objectives system currently in place, moving from a management control system based on quantitative data to a management control system based on cognitive qualitative capabilities. We propose a new way of responsible management, improving life balance while ensuring better customer satisfaction. This new responsible way of management is a shift referring to a major change in the concepts and practices of how something works or gets done. In this case study, it is a necessary break in the practices of management by objectives.