Managers at a rail engineering company in the UK implicitly shaped social norms around smartphone use among employees. Managers modeled responsive behaviors by being constantly available on their own smartphones, implying an expectation that direct reports do the same. They also modeled doing work outside of regular hours and implied more work could get done if employees used smartphones for off-hours communication and tasks. As a result, a culture emerged where employees felt constant pressure to be responsive and available at all hours in order to perform their roles effectively and avoid appearing unprepared. However, managers did not explicitly set these expectations, creating tension between personal and professional smartphone use.

1. ‘Do as I say and not as I do’? The technological mediation of line management Gillian Symon And Katrina Pritchard Dept of Org Psychology, Birkbeck, University of London Research funded by British Academy [SG-54143]

2. Virtual management Focus of research to define the specific kind of management required that can overcome distance and lack of social cues in virtual interaction For example, requiring ‘inspirational’ leaders (Joshi et al, 2009) to employ more ‘contact management’ (Kirkman et al, 2002), and develop a ‘virtual (managerial) presence’ (Halford, 2005) Much of this research concerns geographically dispersed project teams or teleworkers

3. Smartphone Research Because of (alleged) ‘anytime, anywhere’ aspect of Smartphones, focus of research has been to understand the effect smartphones have on work-life balance and employee engagement. Work extension (Mazmanian et al, 2006) and over-engagement (Dery et al, 2010) often noted However these seen to be emergent social norms of behaviour Much of this research concerns office- based executive staff

5. Sampling Framework

6. Analysis Strategy and Themes Interviews transcribed and loaded into nVivo for data management Subject Coding (Richards, 2005). Initial coding framework developed by researchers and applied to dataset by research assistant Theme of focus here: Line Management Relationships/Managing Employees Analytical Coding (Richards, 2005). Iterative process of theoretical elaboration and refinement to extract specific sub-themes Sub-themes of focus here – Modelling Behaviours and Implicit Expectations

8. Implicitly encouraging responsiveness “The company has not set any expectation to look at e-mails ever really but .....you know, there is definitely a culture that the [Smartphone] has driven in terms of “you need to be on it”... So if the boss puts out an e-mail that says “something has just kicked off - who knows what’s happening here” there will almost be like a race to respond, to “reply to all” of course so that everyone can see that that person has responded, ... So there’s definitely a kind of, almost one-upmanship about it ..... I think that the company doesn’t dissuade that kind of culture because they probably .. perceive .. they get more for their money by not preventing that”. [Technical Specialist]

9. Implying responsiveness ”Yeah so I think people are less patient, if it’s an urgent response there’s very few managers higher up that will accept the fact that you’re in a meeting for you not responding..... If they send you a request urgently you can sit and do it silently in the meeting. So I think there’s less tolerance for timescales”. [Local Operations Manager]

10. Modelling out of hours work “..my guys get an awful lot of e-mails from me saying ‘can you pick this up tomorrow please?’…..the first time they ever reply of an evening ….. I’ll say ‘why are you replying?’, ‘well why are you e-mailing me?’. ‘Because I’m choosing actively to spend half an hour while Emmerdale’s [UK Soap Opera] on just going through some e-mails that are left in my [smartphone] so I want in my head to be clear and sorted, I don’t expect you - and don’t want you - to be replying’”. [Senior Operations Manager]

11. Implicitly encouraging out of hours work “The [mobile operations engineers] are shift workers and because of that....you know, management work 9 to 5, technically, they’re working say nights, you lose that contact for a week, whereas with one of these [Smartphone] ... you can actually ask them to do jobs over e-mail, and what you then find is that some of those jobs get done even when they’re not on duty. So you just generally get more out of the front line using one of these, not necessarily when they’re at work. So they’ve also improved productivity - how much work we get out of them”. [Senior Operations Manager]

12. Implying out of hours work “my other half doesn’t like it but [the smartphone] does sit on the coffee table [in the evening] because ... I like to know what’s going on ....basically we have a 9 o’clock [phone] conference every morning to discuss the previous day’s performance...... And .. my bosses will question incidents.... [my bosses] will say ‘well [name] what happened here?’. So I look a bit stupid in the morning conference if I go ‘well I don’t know’”. [Local Operations Manager]

13. ‘.....do as we all do’ “I suspect it’s a self-perpetuating situation .. the more we use it the more we expect people to be available and therefore they also feel the same. So yeah we’re probably ratcheting up naturally within the company without realising it”. [Senior Operations Manager]

14. Enacting Presence and Performance Within a context of organizational politics and identity management, managerial behaviours shape the social norms of smartphone use that emerge amongst employees Managers behaviours in turn are shaped by a need to manage personal workload/access information/elicit performance which implicitly encourages behaviours that might be explicitly discouraged Leading to a overall culture of being present, responsive and available

15. Conclusion Previous research largely apolitical, underplaying the importance of impression management and the need to work up an identity as effective manager/employee Onus on managers to manage effectively through virtual means, downplays their own needs (for closure, for information) which can come into conflict Generally too much of a personal choice discourse within political contexts?

16. ‘carry your friends in your pocket’ (Marketing message for Blackberry Pearl) ........but you have your boss in there too.