Title: Going thin on top: work intensification and the neglect of personal support of senior managers

Authors: David Meacheam

Addresses: University of New South Wales at The Australian Defence Force Academy (ADFA), P.O. Box 7916, Canberra ACT 2610, Australia

Abstract: As organisations from the early 1990s flattened, senior managers have to a large degree been asked to cope with much less by way of personal support for the execution of their duties. Personal assistants are increasingly rare, senior managers are commonly expected to perform quite menial tasks (typing and filing) that have little overall impact on their work effectiveness, and the private lives of these senior managers becomes impoverished as a result. A series of organisational failures arising from this refusal by many organisations (government, private sector and church-based) are critically assessed. The moral implications of the failure by many organisations to support senior managers are examined, and an effort is made to generate a debate in support of this often well paid, but poorly supported part of the modern workforce.

Keywords: work addiction; wage packaging; senior managers; work hours; work-life balance; work intensification; personal support; managerial support; organisational failure; moral implications.

DOI: 10.1504/IJWI.2012.047976

International Journal of Work Innovation, 2012 Vol.1 No.1, pp.94 - 99

Published online: 17 Sep 2014 *

Full-text access for editors Full-text access for subscribers Purchase this article Comment on this article