Managing Responsibly Together: How an Obligation is Made to Matter in Top Management Team Work

ABSTRACT

The aim of this article is to contribute to research on responsible management by developing knowledge on how managing responsibly together in a Top Management Team (TMT) may be accomplished, thus complementing research in the area that focuses on the work of individual managers. To this end, we mobilize the concept of obligation to characterize what emerges as what a TMT needs to respond to. Having followed the TMT for a municipal company working together in meetings over time, we propose that three accomplishments (making the obligation present, making the obligation enable action and accounting for the obligation) shape how an obligation is made to matter. This is no linear process, but rather it unfolds in a series of materializations of the obligation in text and talk, as the TMT goes about its work. The article thus provides a contribution to research on responsible management but also has practical consequences for developing how a TMT works in order to address the urgent demands for change related to sustainable development.

MAD statement

In this article, we develop knowledge on how managing responsibly together may be accomplished in a Top Management Team (TMT). Besides adding to the responsible management literature, we also provide theoretical tools that may be mobilized in order to develop the work practices of TMTs that want to contribute to sustainable development.

KEYWORDS:

• Top management team (TMT)
• responsibility
• obligation
• sustainable development

Introduction

The work of Top Management Teams (TMTs) and the issue of responsibility when managing an organization are two areas of research, practice and discourse that are seldom combined. This may sound strange, as we would normally assume that the TMT ‘has’ or ‘takes’ responsibility for the organization it is assigned to lead, but both in research and in business practice we find little attention being paid to how a TMT actually works in practice towards taking responsibility. Research on the work practices of TMTs is in fact still quite rare, given the attention often paid to the personal characteristics of TMT members (Hambrick, 2007; Priem et al., 1999 for a critique) and given that the TMT is a difficult context to access in order to open the ‘black box’ of how strategic action emerges (Jarzabkowski et al., 2022). When it comes to responsibility, on the other hand, discourses and practices of corporate social responsibility (CSR) have become integral to managing companies, providing principles, procedures, and routines that an organization may adopt (cf. Carroll, 1991; Smith, 2003). Efforts are therefore made to embed responsibility in organizational processes, but how this relates to the work practices of TMTs is still rather unexplored, even though, as Brunsson et al. (2022) claim, it is often those at the top of the hierarchy who are retrospectively assigned responsibility for how the company performs. We argue that it is important to amend this lack of knowledge since nowadays we are reminded of the urgency of taking action in relation to sustainable development and of the little progress made so far in this regard (Moses et al., 2022). A TMT cannot of course take all the actions needed to address sustainable development by itself, given that sustainable development is dependent on change at societal level (Bryson et al., 2021), but it is still expected to take responsibility as the members work together (Brunsson et al., 2022). So, what does it mean for the members of a TMT to manage responsibly together?

To contribute to answering this question, we lean on the responsible management literature. Although the expression ‘responsible management’ can already be found in older classics such as Drucker (1974), it is only in recent years that a field of research has started to emerge (Laasch et al., 2020a) which places the focus on the management process itself, on the work of managers in relation to responsibility (Gherardi & Laasch, 2022; Hibbert & Cunliffe, 2015; Laasch et al., 2020a). An issue that has received scarce attention, though, is how managers work together responsibly. In particular, how the top management team works together responsibly is largely unexplored. Given that the TMT brings together the managers with the largest formal mandate to take action in organizations, while they are also the ones that are tasked with setting the direction for developing the organization (Hambrick, 1987), we would argue that it is urgent to pay attention to TMT work practices in order to further advance knowledge on responsible management, and to support TMT in working for sustainable development. Practice and process theories in organization studies, already at the core of the responsible management field (Laasch et al., 2020b), provide a theoretical lens to do this, by conceptualizing responsibility as accomplished in practice, not as something that an individual or an organization owns. This means treating responsible management as emergent in situ, not as a set of principles that can be formulated in an ostensive way and then applied when working.

The aim of this paper is therefore to contribute to the responsible management field by developing knowledge on how managing responsibly together in a TMT may be accomplished. To study managing responsibly together, we mobilize the concept of obligation in order to characterize that which emerges as what a top management team is made to respond to. The question we explore is thus how an obligation is made to matter in situ in the work of a TMT. To do this, we followed closely a TMT working together, making one particular obligation matter during an 18 month period. We observed the TMT’s meetings and performed interviews with the TMT members as well as other members of the organization. The organization studied is a specific kind of organization, namely, a municipal company that is formally required to contribute to sustainable development by its owner, the municipality, which puts pressure on the company to transform. With our analysis, we identify three accomplishments (making the obligation present, making the obligation enable action, and accounting for the obligation) that shape how an obligation is made to matter. The article thus makes a contribution to research on responsible management by providing a vocabulary for understanding managing responsibly together. The article also has practical relevance for developing how a TMT may work in order to address the urgent demands for change related to sustainable development. It is also to be noted that a TMT offers a particularly interesting case in which to explore managing responsibly together since according to research on TMTs, they face specific challenges. Such challenges are related both to the nature of the work the TMT is supposed to do and to its ways of working as a team – both aspects making it more difficult to manage together, due to fragmentation, uncertainty, and a lack of a clear shared purpose, among other factors (Hambrick, 1995; Katzenbach, 1997; Shrivastava, 1989).

The article is structured as follows: we start by reviewing the literature on responsible management; then we position our article in relation to this literature and present the research approach we mobilize, building on practice and process perspectives in organization studies; a description of the organizations studied and methodological considerations based on the approach delineated follows; after that we present our reading of the empirical material focusing on some specific events described in detail; a discussion on how managing responsibly together unfolds follows and we end by summarizing the contributions of this article.

Responsible Management

The concept of ‘responsibility’ in relation to business and management has long been debated. The classic divide between Friedman (1970), claiming that the sole obligation of a company is towards shareholders, and Freeman (1984), claiming that obligations are towards multiple stakeholders, is partly still reproduced in contemporary discussions, but most organizations have acknowledged that they have obligations and are expected to work for sustainable development – see, for instance, the widespread reach of Agenda 2030¹ and Global Compact.² The need to lead by acting on obligations towards others is acknowledged (Waldman & Galvin, 2008; Wood, 1991) and CSR, as an area of both research and practice, provides concepts, tools, and routines to be implemented to this end. CSR scholars thus treat responsibility as an abstract, ostensive notion to be implemented in operational procedures in relation to a variety of stakeholders (Carroll, 1991; Smith, 2003). Following the UN-initiated PRME initiative (Godemann et al., 2014), research on responsibility in the management of an organization has gained traction, mostly with a focus on the organizational level (Laasch et al., 2020b; Hibbert & Cunliffe, 2015). The more recent concept of responsible management shifts the focus from the abstract, organizational-level knowledge to managerial responsibility as being an integral element of managerial work (Gherardi & Laasch, 2022; Laasch et al., 2020b), moving the focus onto how managers may enact responsibility, or not, in their work practices, i.e. in the process of managing itself. To this end, one central goal is to better understand what people actually do. In this sense, the field builds on the tradition coming from classic studies of what managers do (see for instance Mintzberg, 1973) and on more recent developments in social sciences and organization theory concerning practice theories, that is, theories foregrounding social practices as constituting organizing (Gherardi, 2019; Nicolini, 2012), and process theories, that is, theories foregrounding the emergent nature of organizing (Helin et al., 2014).

In this literature, however, we do not find studies of TMTs managing responsibly. Whereas groups such as communities of practice or departments, and occupations such as marketers or controllers have been investigated (Laasch et al., 2020b), the literature still largely lacks knowledge on a group of managers working together (Adler & Laasch, 2020), and in particular on the group of managers that is placed at the top of the organizational chart. We have, therefore, knowledge about practices and processes in which managers are involved as individuals, or as managers of a group, but still largely lack knowledge about managers working together responsibly, even though such collective work is crucial for organizational development (Adler & Laasch, 2020). Moreover, the TMT faces specific challenges in managing together that make its study theoretically interesting on more general level. Research shows that the nature of TMT work implies, as for all managerial work, not only high pace and fragmentation of time, but also greater uncertainty, the combination of partisan agendas with an overall direction for the organization leading to prolonged political negotiations, as well as decision making that impacts the whole organization (Finkelstein, 1992; Shrivastava, 1989). TMTs often suffer from fragmentation due to individuals pursuing their own agendas and not working together (Hambrick, 1995). In a TMT, some of the elements that facilitate working together as a team are in fact missing or weaker than in other teams, for instance, a concrete meaningful purpose (since strategic goals are generally quite abstract), mutual accountability, tangible performance goals, and a large amount of time put into working together (Katzenbach, 1997).

We therefore argue for the need to develop knowledge on managing responsibly together that focuses on the work of TMTs as both practically relevant for progressing towards sustainable development and theoretically interesting for better understanding responsible management given that it can be considered particularly challenging to work together in this setting. We propose to address this need by further building on practice and process theories in organization studies, as we articulate in the next section.

Studying Managing Responsibly Together as Making Obligations Matter

As stated above, in this article we aim to contribute to the responsible management field by building on practice and process theories in organization studies, which have moved the researchers’ focus to processes of organizing and brought to the fore the emergent and mundane character of such processes (Nicolini, 2012). Attention thus moves from entities (individuals and organizations) to the practice of work and what such practice accomplishes (Gherardi, 2019). Communication is central to the practice of work; in communication, meaning is continuously produced and materialized, that is, it is made to matter (Ashcraft et al., 2009). Or, in other words, it is made to make a difference in the unfolding of the interaction. Communication is therefore considered as constituting reality and organizing efforts rather than describing them (Ashcraft et al., 2009). In particular, each time someone talks it is an opportunity for an idea to materialize, be reshaped, and be used in other utterances (Bencherki et al., 2021). Talk is thus not a vehicle for ideas, but it is how something is made to matter. If this ‘something’ is articulated into a collective concern, and in particular if it is materialized in some artefact (for instance a document), it can then travel and affect later conversations, becoming a co-author of actions by enabling and animating actions (Vasquez et al., 2018).

In relation to responsible management, this means moving the focus of inquiry from responsibility as an abstract notion of obligations towards stakeholders to managing responsibly as situated action (Gherardi & Laasch, 2022). Researchers have thus argued for the need to study responsibility in situ (Price et al., 2020). Since managerial work may be considered as a craft that is practiced and kept alive in practice (Korica et al., 2017), as a form of situated knowing-in-practice (Gherardi, 2019), the focus of inquiry becomes how managing responsibly is accomplished (Gherardi & Laasch, 2022), thus foregrounding actions rather than nouns when it comes to responsibility (By, 2020). Moreover, managing responsibly is about actions taken by managers as they manage, not by managers having a specific role formally dedicated to responsibility, such as a CSR manager (Laasch et al., 2020a).

But what does managing responsibly mean? To answer this question, we mobilize the concept of obligation which is used more or less explicitly in many definitions of responsibility (cf. Bexell & Jönsson, 2017; Waldman & Galvin, 2008; Wood, 1991). An obligation may be defined as a duty linked to organizational roles to ensure that something is done (Bexell & Jönsson, 2017). In other words, an obligation is a way of framing reality that makes some aspect of it into something one or more actors make a promise to act on (van Nistelrooij & Visse, 2019) – in the context of managing responsibly, such a promise is made in regard to specific stakeholders or society at large. Having made a promise also means being asked to account for actions taken in relation to the promise – if this develops into a reflexive practice it may also affect the way in which the obligation is made sense of and reproduced, as well as which actions are taken (Hibbert & Cunliffe, 2015).

We will thus study how managing responsibly together is accomplished by analysing how an obligation is worked with together in communication. Since we build on the perspective described above, we will not consider an obligation as existing outside communication, but rather we will follow how it is made to matter in communication. According to our theoretical perspective, in communication not only is an obligation produced, but this obligation may also animate humans and co-author their talk and actions (Vasquez et al., 2018). Whenever we communicate, certain concerns in fact express themselves through what we say, and in that sense animate us and we become spokespeople for them (Cooren, 2016) – this also happens with obligations.

In the following section, we will therefore focus on the work that a TMT performs together and analyse how an obligation is made to matter while managing together is practised.

Method

The aim of this paper is to develop knowledge on how managing responsibly together in a TMT may be accomplished. The first author therefore performed fieldwork with an ethnographic sensibility in a municipal company, Alfa, mainly focusing on how the TMT worked over a period of 18 months (May 2019 to October 2020) in order to come close to the practice of managing responsibly (Gherardi, 2019) by being anchored in the terra firma of interaction (Cooren et al., 2008). Alfa presents an interesting case to observe with regard to managing responsibly since it plays a major role in the efforts toward sustainable development of a rather prosperous middle-sized town in Sweden. The company owner, the municipality, has issued an owner directive that refers to Agenda 2030 and requires the company to act as a tool for the municipality in the development of a sustainable region. This is expected to be done while at the same time maintaining high levels of service and profit. To describe how the company is responding to the owner´s directive, a strategic plan is to be presented to the Board once a year, accompanied by the sustainability reporting required by law for companies of a certain size.

The company has delivered its services without any major disruptions for many years and shown positive financial results. Things are changing, however, given different kinds of ongoing transitions in society such as climate change, changed legislation relating to the environment and security, reformation of the energy system, and digitalization.

The CEO has appointed a TMT. The TMT has 12 members (see Figure 1): the CEO, two people belonging to the CEO’s staff (the vice-CEO, and the Secretary), four people leading shared support functions (Strategy, Finance, HR, and Communication), and five managers representing the business units and subsidiaries. The way the TMT works together is by holding regular, four-hour-long, monthly meetings in which they monitor operations, organize work, and strategize. This is a common way of organizing TMT work (Katzenbach, 1997) in which meetings are one central work practice used to work together by means of situated communication (Schwartzman, 1989). Of course, TMT members also engage in interactions with each other outside these meetings, and such interactions are significative of what happens in the organization, but the meetings are the only occasions in which they all work together.

Figure 1. The top management team of the municipal company studied.

This paper is mainly based on the observation of eight of these TMT meetings. These observations enable us to come close to the knowable, but not necessarily conscious, doings studied (Langley & Abdallah, 2011). To better understand what has occurred in and between the observed meetings from different actors’ points of view, we have also elicited and captured narratives produced by knowledgeable actors (Ospina et al., 2012) through one-hour-long semi-structured interviews (28 in total with TMT members and 19 with other involved employees). Furthermore, strategic plans and other relevant documents have been collected. All observations and interviews are recorded and transcribed verbatim.

As is typical of qualitative process studies, our analysis went through several stages of refinement (Langley et al., 2013). First the empirical material was organized according to a general categorization of what the TMT works with, showing that the TMT spend time together on strategic as well as operational issues. They also work on issues related to the organization as a whole as well as the respective units (Business units and subsidiaries). Then we focused on responsible management, and we looked into what the TMT is constructed to be responsible for by assemblages of actors, documents, and discourses (Gherardi & Laasch, 2022). Considering formal documents, such as the owner directive, a strategic plan or formal agreements concerning the TMT’s work, as well as what was said in the observed meetings and in the interviews, we were able to identify one important obligation towards the owner concerning the organization’s relation with society that the TMT is in different ways constructed as needing to respond to and spent time working on: to act as a tool for the municipality in the development of a sustainable region. By focusing on this obligation, we are able to develop knowledge on how managing responsibly may unfold in practice, going beyond abstract notions of responsibility (in this case contributing to the sustainable development of the region), thus contributing to filling the need for knowledge described in the introduction of this article. There are of course also other obligations produced in terms of what the TMT should respond to, towards stakeholders other than the owner, but in relation to the owner there is a written agreement and there are work practices and formal occasions on which the TMT is supposed to work with the obligation. We thus decided to focus on this obligation for the scope of this article.

Having identified such an obligation, we organized the material chronologically and zoomed in on those communicational events (Cooren et al., 2011) in which the owner’s demand becomes an obligation that is then made to matter as the TMT engages in negotiations, arguments, and agreements on issues related to this obligation. This happened in communicational events in which issues such as strategic planning, TMT collaboration, strategic objectives, securing profit were on the agenda (see Table 1).

Table 1. Overview of the selected communicational events.

	Documents	Observation TMT meetings Issues on the agenda	Interviews (TMT members + Others)
May 2019	Strat. plan 2020	Strategic planning
Aug. 2019	List of duties	TMT collabortion	(10 + 6)
Dec. 2019	Budget 2020 Proj. Spec.	Strategic objective
Feb. 2020		Securing profit, Strategic planning	(10 + 8)
Jun. 2020	Strat. plan 2021	Strategic objective	(8 + 5)
Sep. 2020		Securing profit, Strategic planning

This means that we had a situational focus, combining a broader understanding of what was going on in the organization with the selection of specific situations to be analysed in detail based on what emerges in the situation itself, not on assumptions about individuals’ intentions or morality (Alvesson, 1996).

Finally, we analysed these communicational events in detail and categorized how the obligation is made to matter in communication (Cooren et al., 2011). We thus produced a first coding of doings related to how the obligation is made to matter. This resulted in six recurrent doings being identified: articulating; negotiating and co-authoring; defining objectives and tasks for others; defining objectives and tasks for the team; providing and accepting accounts; and answering. We then considered what the identified doings achieve, and thus identified three accomplishments in which the obligation is made to matter: making the obligation present, making the obligation enable action, and accounting for the obligation.

In the next section we present this analysis in detail with rather long excerpts from dialogues which took place during the meetings in order to provide the reader with the possibility to evaluate the trustworthiness of our analysis (Alvesson, 1996). In order to anonymize participants, we use TMT and then either a number or a letter to distinguish between different TMT members. At times, when necessary for understanding the interaction, we show which of the participants is the CEO.

The Work of the TMT at Alfa – an Obligation is Made to Matter

In the following section, we will provide an analysis of how an obligation is made to matter while managing together is practised by the TMT we studied. We have chosen to reproduce communicational events representative of how the TMT works, with similar dynamics emerging in the remaining events that, due to space constraints, we cannot present in the same detail. We reproduce selected excerpts from such events, not the whole events, due to space limitations.

From the Owner’s Directive to the Strategic Plan

As stated above there are demands placed upon the TMT by different actors. One of these actors, the owner (the municipality), has a particularly close relationship with the company and has expressed an ambition to work for sustainable development, which is also motivated by public expectations as well as national directives. The owner’s demands are made present in several ways as documents are produced and board meetings held, and so forth. One of these documents is particularly important given that it makes present, in a formal way, a number of demands on the company: the owner’s directive. As an artefact, the owner’s directive can travel in space and time (Vasquez et al., 2018), making the demands present in different contexts.

As explained above, we focus here on one of the demands set by the owner that directly refers to issues of sustainable development and thus concerns the organization’s relationship with society. Referring to Agenda 2030, the owner requires that the company acts as a tool for the municipality in the development of a sustainable region, particularly contributing to the reduction of energy consumption and carbon emissions, and to the transition to renewable fuels. This is expected to be done while at the same time maintaining high levels of service and profit. A strategic plan is expected to be presented to the board once a year, detailing specified objectives, in order to articulate how to respond to the owner´s demands. The strategic plan thus both makes this owner’s demand present and articulates how the company will respond to the owner’s demand. This is a document in which the quite abstract notion of contributing to sustainable development is translated and articulated into concrete objectives for the company.

The first event we analyse in which the demand is made to matter is from the TMT meeting in May 2019 and concerns a discussion about the strategic plan. The planner, to whom the CEO has delegated the task of producing the strategic plan, has distributed a preliminary version of the document in advance, so that the TMT members could prepare for the discussion. The plan emphasizes sustainability based on the needs of customers and the vision of the municipality: ‘The customer should feel safe to be offered the best possible alternative from a sustainability perspective. We take responsibility for our customers’ ability to live sustainably where we can’. Furthermore, five measurable objectives are stated in the plan. Two of them regard keeping the level of profit and employee engagement and two concern operational performance. One objective regard renewing the product portfolio, changing to a more environmentally friendly one in a substantial way by 2023, thus more directly relating to the demand studied.

In this first event, time is allocated for discussing the strategic plan, thus articulating its content. The plan has been written by one member of the TMT, the planner. She has made the owner’s directive animate her actions and has thus articulated demands in the form of objectives – in particular, the owner’s demand for them to act as a tool for the municipality in the development of a sustainable region is translated into one specific objective that is made present in the plan: the renewal of the product portfolio (to a more environmentally friendly portfolio). We therefore see here how the demand in the owner’s directive is made present in the work of the TMT through one member of the TMT and the document she has produced, both of which are present at the TMT meeting above. Taking the demand from the owner seriously, the TMT member has let it co-author the document resulting in defining a concrete objective to be worked towards. Discussing the document, the TMT engages in a conversation showing concern for the plan as well as how sustainability is treated (‘the plan lacks objectives for sustainable development’). The demand is thus made present by re-articulating it in relation to this specific document and how to make it present there (Cooren et al., 2008) as the TMT members give voice to different aspects to be considered and to different issues to be included in the plan.

The emerging tensions are not resolved since negotiation on different suggestions is interrupted, and the task of authoring the document is delegated to one person (‘it is better that one person is the writer’), despite that person asking for co-authoring of the document (‘Shouldn´t we work on this together?’). We can also note that the articulation of how to achieve the specific and challenging objective related to product portfolio renewal is postponed as the TMT accepts the plan as it is.

In this first event, we see how when working together the strategic plan and the planner make the owner’s demand present in the meeting and the TMT reinforces such presence by articulating it in relation to the need for objectives. In other words, the TMT responds to the demand by reproducing the need to address it. On the other hand, such a response is ambivalent since the articulation of the strategic plan is only partially negotiated and authored by the TMT together. As Vasquez et al. (2018) point out, authoring is an important process to grant a document the authority to direct further action, which means that this document may end up not animating subsequent talk. Table 2 provides an overview of the doings taking form in this first event.

Table 2. Doings taking form during the first communicational episode.

	An obligation is made to matter	What happens in the communicational events and in conjunction with them	Which doings are enacted
May 2019	There is a demand in the owner’s directive for the company to be a tool in the development of a sustainable region (that may become an obligation) and for agreement to articulate how to answer it through a strategic plan.	– The draft of the strategic plan articulates how to respond to the owner’s demand. – In this draft, a concrete objective is defined – this objective is not negotiated. – The TMT further articulates how to respond to the owner’s demand and negotiates it (in relation to sustainability). – The TMT is asked to co-author the strategic plan. – The TMT declines by providing accounts that are accepted without discussion.	– The articulation and partial negotiation of what to write in the strategic plan make the demand present. Negotiation is interrupted and no co-authoring of the strategic plan in the TMT is done. – The demand animates the TMT-member writing the plan and thus co-authors the strategic plan. A concrete objective is defined for product portfolio renewal to respond to the demand who is to work towards it and how is not defined. – Accounts are provided and accepted about what to do in relation to the demand.

The way the TMT works together is a concern for the team members, expressed in meetings as well as during the interviews we performed in the spring of 2019. In particular, limited attention paid to strategic work and TMT members focusing on their own part of the organization and not working together for the organization as a whole are highlighted as problematic. After discussing this issue in a workshop, the CEO, alone, compiles a list of nine duties for the TMT. In the last part of the TMT meeting in August 2019, the CEO brings up the issue of how to work together as an extra item on the otherwise predetermined agenda. He shows the list of duties on the screen and reads the list out loud before opening up for opinions. Responses are positive: ‘When I read the list, I think it is good – everything is correct’, and ‘I think it is easy to understand […], the document is clear, and we can mobilize it in our work’. The other members of the team nod in approval, and the issue as well as the whole meeting is closed.

Hence, this list is approved and is allowed to construct the TMT’s way of working in specific terms. Some of the duties in the list are about how they work together as a TMT. In particular, they agree to ‘contribute to the strategic plan, tactical plan and budget’ and to ‘prioritize common goals’. In relation to the focus of our analysis, agreement on the list of duties means that the TMT is constructed as the group that should produce the strategic plan by prioritizing common goals. The TMT is therefore also constructed as the group that is going to respond to the owner’s demands by translating them into concrete objectives in the strategic plan. The demand in the owner’s directive to act as a tool for the municipality in the development of a sustainable region is thus made to matter as an obligation for the TMT (and this is what we refer to in the following as ‘the obligation’). This is not done by explicitly talking about obligations, nor by explicitly talking about the owner’s directive. In other words, this is neither a linear nor a structured process. Rather, what we have brought to the fore so far is that through the different practices the TMT performs and in the middle of addressing different issues (from problems in how their collective work is organized to writing a strategic plan), the demand from the owner becomes an obligation for the TMT.

From the Strategic Plan to Renewal of the Product Portfolio

In this section, we follow how the obligation to act as a tool for the municipality in the development of a sustainable region is made to matter by focusing on a communicational event in which the renewal of the product portfolio, articulated in the strategic plan, is discussed. The strategic plan, in fact, translates the owner’s demands into concrete objectives. The obligation that we focus on, to act as a tool in the development of a sustainable region, is made present in particular through an objective stating the target of renewing the product portfolio. This objective entails the development of new products expected to generate quite a substantial amount of revenue.

Before the communicational event analysed below, during the autumn, the CEO organizes the work of renewing the product portfolio. The TMT does not discuss this. The result is that the work of renewal is divided into a project dedicated to the development of entirely new business areas and into the tasks given to each BU to develop new products related to their already existing products. The issue of the renewed product portfolio is then put on the agenda at the TMT meeting in December. After a brief mention of the decisions made to divide the work for renewal as described above, most of the discussion focuses on the project initiated by the CEO.

In this event, the obligation we focus on is made present in its concretization into an objective for product portfolio renewal and an articulation of what to do about it. The task of working for such an objective has been assigned partly to a project in which most of the TMT is not involved and partly to the BUs who are supposed to work toward developing what they already work with. After briefly touching on decisions already made resulting in work aimed at renewing the product portfolio being divided between the BUs and a project, the discussion focuses on the project initiated and controlled by the CEO. The first business manager to reply claims that it is important to assign the responsibility for the business that the project is supposed to develop to one BU, rather than considering it a shared responsibility. This is reiterated in the second reply to the CEO, who tries to argue for keeping this a shared responsibility. At this point, the CEO states what he thinks needs to be done, which boils down to employees needing to go through a training programme. The BU managers claim that this is not feasible as there are more urgent matters and it is agreed to postpone such training till later.

In this conversation, we thus see that the objective to renew product portfolio makes the TMT act as they get involved in discussing how to handle this. The objective thus makes them try to define discrete tasks to be allocated. In particular, some utterances translate the obligation we focus on in terms of tasks to be assigned to specific units (see for instance ‘It is important to decide where the business belongs’) rather than defining objectives and tasks for the TMT itself. The objective of renewal also makes the TMT agree on tasks the TMT needs to do, to some degree, as they all agree on making employees go to a training programme.

Although product renewal is produced as an important objective in the strategic plan, accounts such as ‘I see the importance but I am too busy at the moment’ are accepted, and no answering is demanded about the lack of action. When the members of the TMT are interviewed afterwards, they also bring to the fore the fact that they may need to provide accounts at TMT meetings but that they are seldom made to answer for when their work is not going according to plan. For space reasons, we do not provide here examples of such TMT meetings, but we stress that this is something the TMT members themselves articulate as an issue. Table 3 provides an overview of the doings described above.

Table 3. Doings taking form during the second communicational event.

	An obligation is made to matter	What happens in the communicational events and in conjunction with them	Which doings are enacted
December 2019	The obligation is made to matter to some extent through the concrete objective for portfolio renewal defined in the strategic plan that is discussed.	– The objective of product portfolio renewal is articulated since it is on the agenda through the project that the CEO has initiated. – The TMT engages in articulating and negotiating how this project and its results should be handled. – The discussion mostly centres around how to define discrete tasks to be allocated – Accounts of why things cannot go faster are provided and accepted. – The TMT agrees on the need for competence development and a training programme to be performed.	– The articulation and negotiation of how to achieve the objective of product portfolio renewal make the obligation present. There is no plan that is co-authored in writing. – Attempts at defining discrete tasks for others make the obligation animate the discussion. The TMT also defines a task for the team to some extent. – Accounts of what it is possible to do regarding the obligation are provided and accepted. They are mostly about why it is not possible to act more on the obligation. No answers are demanded for such a lack of action.

In the next section, we will look at a specific communicational event not directly related to the strategic plan, where we see another example of team members providing accounts, but not answers, and expand on this aspect of making an obligation matter.

An Unexpected Issue

In this event, the TMT is faced with a challenging unexpected situation due to the mild winter that has meant reduced profit for the company. The most affected TMT member is asked to answer for what is being done. The members of the TMT then articulate different aspects of how to solve the situation. The actions proposed can result in savings in the short term. But they also actualize the issue of sustainable development. In this case, the discussion does not directly revolve around the strategic plan or the renewal of the product portfolio, but rather the different members of the TMT are providing accounts of what has been done so far, what could be done and what the consequences could be in relation to this specific situation. This indirectly makes the obligation matter, as we describe below.

In this event, the obligation to act as a tool for the municipality in the development of a sustainable region is articulated in utterances questioning the proposed actions (‘that is not sustainable’), thus making it not possible to construct a coherent narrative of how to address a mild winter. Hence, the obligation is made present for the TMT while providing accounts of the organization in an unexpected situation and of proper actions taken/to be taken, and this leads to a divergence in relation to what to do next that is not resolved. The obligation to be a tool for sustainable development leads to the provision of some accounts in the discussion (for instance ‘without endangering our future’), whereas the demand to have a certain amount of profit leads to other accounts (‘it is a quick fix’). Finally, the decision made that all TMT members should add suggestions of activities means that making the obligation present makes the TMT define tasks for others to perform. There is an attempt at making the TMT answer for the obligation, but this is not supported in the course of the conversation. Hence, whereas the need to do something is produced in the TMT talk, the obligation to be a tool for sustainable development is made to matter only to some extent. The obligation being made to matter impedes, rather than facilitates, defining an objective or task for the TMT. Table 4 summarizes these doings.

Table 4. Doings taking form during the third communicational episode.

	An obligation is made to matter	What happens in the communicational events and in conjunction with them	Which doings are enacted
February 2020	The obligation is made to matter to some extent while discussing an unexpected issue leading to profit loss.	– Different aspects of how to deal with the situation are articulated and negotiated. – Accounts proposing actions that are not compatible with being a tool for sustainable development are articulated. – Sustainability is articulated as impeding taking a decision focused on the short-term. – The TMT is asked to provide answers in relation to the sustainability of the proposed measures, but a shared answer is not provided. – The TMT defines tasks to be assigned. – Agreement is produced on making a forecast.	– The articulation of issues related to sustainability of the short-term proposed actions makes the obligation present. – As the obligation is made present, it impedes defining a task or objective for the team since the proposed actions are not in line with the obligation. This leads to defining a task for others: producing a forecast. The obligation thus enables action in terms of stopping some actions and evaluating them first. – The obligation makes certain accounts be provided, whereas, for instance, profit requirement results in other accounts There is an attempt at making the TMT answer for the obligation, but this is not fully supported in the conversation.

A new Round of Strategic Planning

In this final event, we are back to the writing of the strategic plan. The person being assigned to produce the plan makes attempts to involve the TMT in its production, this time with the above-mentioned list of TMT duties to lean on.

In this episode, as in the first one, the obligation is made present in its articulation consisting of the authoring of a strategic plan that details how to respond to the owner’s demand. The TMT has previously been constructed as a group that should work together with this through the duties to ‘contribute to the strategic plan, tactical plan and budget’ and to ‘prioritize common goals’ that were produced as the group’s duties in the meeting in August 2019. TMT members, however, decline to co-author the document due to other issues constructed as more pressing (‘We are swamped with work’). The TMT is thus not made to answer for not engaging in co-authoring the plan as agreed; rather, it is the planner that is made to answer for why they have not received the information in time (‘We should have been told in November’). The planner makes attempts at asking the TMT to answer for having agreed to work together on strategy and on the overall development of the company (‘We all know that we review the strategic plan every year’). However, these attempts are not supported; rather, the accounts of why TMT members cannot engage in co-authoring provided (workload, timing, need for working with their own BU, etc) are accepted and the task of authoring the strategic plan is defined as a task for the planner. The discussion is concluded, and the team decides to meet again to further discuss priorities. Table 5 summarizes the doings in this communicational event.

Table 5. Doings taking form during the fourth communicational episode.

	An obligation is made to matter	What happens in the communicational events and in conjunction with them	Which doings are enacted
February 2020	The obligation is made to matter to some extent while discussing the authoring of a new version of the strategic plan in which response to the owner’s demand is to be detailed.	– The strategic plan is on the agenda and the TMT is asked to co-author it. – The TMT declines to co-author it. – The TMT is not asked to answer for this lack of co-authoring in relation to the list of duties compiled in 2019. – Accounts about why engaging in co-authoring is not possible are provided and accepted.	– The articulation of the need to produce a new strategic plan detailing how to respond to the owner’s demand makes the obligation present. Co-authoring the strategic plan is proposed but declined. – The obligation does animate the planner’s talk but is not let enable action in terms of defining a task for the team. Rather, it is by defining the plan as a task for the planner that the obligation partly enables action. – Accounts of why the TMT cannot engage in co-authoring, despite previous agreements, are provided and accepted. The planner attempts asking for answers but is not supported in this.

We will elaborate below on our analysis of these communicational events.

Managing Responsibly Together

The aim of this article is to contribute to the responsible management field by developing knowledge on how managing responsibly together in a TMT may be accomplished. Whereas managers may be managing responsibly towards their employees in their own unit or towards a specific stakeholder or in relation to a specific issue, as TMT members they are supposed to coordinate and integrate different efforts (Hambrick, 1987). We therefore studied how managing responsibly together is accomplished by analysing how an obligation is worked with together in communication. Building on process and practice approaches to managerial work, we considered the obligation not as existing outside of communication, but rather as made to matter in communication. In the previous section, we followed how an obligation was made to matter by looking at different communicational events over time when the TMT worked together. At an organizational level, typical routines and procedures for organizational responsibility seem to be in place. We also have no reason to doubt the personal morality or intentions of TMT members. It is when we look at the level of practice, when we look at how they work together, that we can appreciate the nuances and challenges embedded in managing responsibly together. Moreover, we can also see how making an obligation matter is not a rational or linear process. It is amid working with different issues that the obligation is made to matter in different forms. The strategic plan is of course an important element in the work of TMTs – how it is produced is as important as what it includes. The strategic plan itself may be given more or less authority depending on how it is authored (Vasquez et al., 2018). The obligation is made to matter at different levels of detail in the meetings, even when the issue on the table is not the strategic plan itself, for instance when discussing new products or issues caused by too warm a winter. Hence, while more abstract notions of what responsible management entails may provide models and guidelines to support the activities of managers, the perspective we adopt enables us to unpack how an obligation is made to matter at multiple times and places, taking multiple forms. In the doings enacted in discussions including people and documents summarized in Table 6, managing responsibly together is shaped.

Table 6. An overview of the doings and the accomplishments that make the studied obligation matter.

	Which doings are enacted	What these doings accomplish
May 2019	– The articulation and partial negotiation of what to write in the strategic plan make the demand present. Negotiation is interrupted and no co-authoring of the strategic plan in the TMT is done.	Making the demand present
	– The demand animates the TMT-member writing the plan and thus co-authors the strategic plan. A concrete objective is defined for product portfolio renewal to respond to the demand – who is to work towards this and how is not defined.	Making the demand enable action
	– Accounts are provided and accepted about what to do in relation to the demand.	Accounting for the demand
December 2019	– The articulation and negotiation of how to achieve the objective of product portfolio renewal make the obligation present. There is no plan that is co-authored in writing.	Making the obligation present
	– Attempts at defining discrete tasks for others make the obligation animate the discussion. The TMT also defines a task for the team to some extent.	Making the obligation enable action
	– Accounts of what it is possible to do regarding the obligation are provided and accepted. They mostly are about why it is not possible to act more on the obligation. No answers are demanded for such a lack of action.	Accounting for the obligation
February 2020	– The articulation of issues related to sustainability of the short-term proposed actions makes the obligation present.	Making the obligation present
	– As the obligation is made present, it impedes defining a task or objective for the team since the proposed actions are not in line with the obligation. This leads to defining a task for others: producing a forecast. The obligation thus enables action in terms of stopping some actions and evaluating them first.	Making the obligation enable action
	– The obligation makes certain accounts be provided, whereas, for instance, profit requirement results in other accounts There is an attempt at making the TMT answer for the obligation, but this is not fully supported in the conversation	Accounting for the obligation
February 2020	– The articulation of the need to produce a new strategic plan detailing how to respond to the owner’s demand makes the obligation present. Co-authoring the strategic plan is proposed but declined.	Making the obligation present
	– The obligation does animate the planner’s talk but is not permitted to enable action in terms of defining a task for the team. Rather, it is by defining the plan as a task for the planner that the obligation partly enables action.	Making the obligation enable action
	– Accounts of why the TMT cannot engage in co-authoring, despite previous agreements, are provided and accepted. The planner attempts asking for answers but is not supported in this.	Accounting for the obligation

In the previous section, we went through chosen communicational events and foregrounded certain doings without categorizing them. In this section, we categorize them and thus identify three accomplishments that these doings achieved, making an obligation matter in different ways. In Table 6 we summarize the doings and accomplishments that we can see in the different communicational events analysed. Articulating and negotiating/co-authoring are doings that achieve making the obligation present. Defining objectives and tasks for others and defining objectives and tasks for the team are doings that achieve making the obligation enable action. Finally, providing and accepting accounts and answering are doings that achieve accounting for the obligation.

Making an obligation present points to the obligation being made to matter when made present over and over again, in different documents and discussions. We see in our case how articulating the obligation is done in meeting after meeting. But we also see how TMT members seem to refrain from dedicating time to negotiating in depth with each other and to co-authoring texts in which such an obligation is inscribed, as well as to letting such texts co-author their further speeches. Leaning on a perspective that considers communication as constituting organizing, not depicting it, we show that an obligation is not something that is agreed upon once and then acted upon, but rather something that is made present over time to make it matter. This requires work – if the TMT is to manage the organization as a whole together, tensions between different views may not need to be resolved, but rather to be worked with, by bringing different perspectives to the surface and finding a shared stance together (Knight & Cuganesan, 2020) – this takes time. Negotiating enables an individual’s matters to become collective matters that can become consequential for further developments. Expressing different views and opinions is the first step to producing something as a matter of concern (Latour, 2004). To then make what is agreed on matter in other conversations, it needs to be inscribed in some object, such as a document, which may then be voiced by people engaged in these conversations (Vasquez et al., 2018). This was often not the case in the TMT studied, where the documents were single-authored and seldom made to have a voice in discussions. We thus propose that making the obligation present is one important accomplishment for making an obligation matter which takes place in articulating the obligation and in negotiating and co-authoring.

The second accomplishment, making the obligation enable action, concerns the TMT letting themselves mobilize as a team to organize a response to the obligation. As Czarniawska (2011) points out, there is often a risk of talking of responsibility in an ostensive way, as something to assign to someone else who may eventually be praised for succeeding or blamed for failing. It is rarer to also act to respond, to make sure that actions are taken in relation to what needs to be done. Once responsibility is produced as formally assigned, it is easier to refrain from actually act. Looking at how the TMT activates, they define and assign objectives and tasks to different units/individuals to some extent. When sudden issues emerge, such as those caused by too mild a winter, the team acts to find a way forward. When the obligation to be a tool for sustainable development is made present, however, the obligation is not allowed to enable action, which would have meant moving the focus from solving a short-term profitability issue to responding to the obligation. The TMT, through its conversations and the documents produced, thus make the obligation enable action only to some extent. This can be understood as related to the lack of negotiating and co-authoring of the obligation, which thus lacks authority when discussions are held on possible courses of action (Vasquez et al., 2018). That is, the obligation is given a limited authority to animate the team to act. On the other hand, seeing that documents lack authority may play a role in the team not feeling compelled to co-author documents (for instance, in the interviews, documents were framed as something that may not need to be acted upon).

We thus propose to foreground action as central by labelling the second accomplishment making the obligation enable action, achieved in defining objectives and tasks for others and defining objectives and tasks for the team (the TMT).

Finally, accounting for the obligation points to the importance of how accounting is performed. It is quite apparent in the meetings observed that there is plenty of time to provide accounts of how things are proceeding in the organization. Indeed, reporting on different issues is often done, and not least there are procedures in place for reporting on sustainability. Accounts, however, are not only produced in these formal ways, but also in discussions about issues the TMT works with, such as when accounts are presented of why the TMT members have no possibility to work with the strategic plan. What is interesting in the case studied is that such accounts often do not lead to answers being asked for or demanded. For instance, the lack of time to work with the strategic plan is accepted without question. The low degree of negotiation and co-authoring of the obligation may be considered to be both producing, and being produced by, answers not being asked for. If the strategic plan has low authority, then there is a lesser need to answer for why it is legitimate not to work with it, and at the same time not engaging in co-authoring is made easier by the experience of not being asked to answer for not attending to such work. The low degree of defining objectives and tasks for the team may also be understood as being related to lack of answering. Accounts of why not to act are not being questioned and not acting therefore also becomes more legitimated. In other words, whereas part of the TMT meetings is dedicated to reporting and presenting results, no practice has been developed in which the TMT can interrogate themselves about what they are doing and why, connecting abstract ideas of responsibility to the practice of managing responsibly (Hibbert & Cunliffe, 2015). We thus propose labelling the third accomplishment accounting for the obligation, being achieved in providing and accepting accounts and answering.

To summarize the three identified accomplishments which shape how an obligation is made to matter when a TMT works together, these are: making the obligation present, making the obligation enable action and accounting for the obligation. The three accomplishments are not disconnected and do not happen in a certain sequence; they are not phases, but rather are co-constitutive of how an obligation is made to matter; they are at play to a different extent in different discussions, but all contribute to managing responsibly together.

Whereas the responsible management literature has often focused on individual managers, we add to this field by focusing on managing responsibly together and providing a vocabulary for understanding how this takes place in situ while the TMT works together. We propose to bring to the fore how obligations are made to matter, and we identify three accomplishments to pay attention to. We also show that the process of making an obligation matter is not linear, i.e. there is not first an obligation that is clearly defined and then a response to it. This also means that an obligation is translated in new ways in different talks and texts, taking at times new shapes and at times being reproduced in similar terms. Moreover, the work done by a TMT has a specific character, as described in the first part of the article, implying fragmentation, uncertainty and lack of clear purpose and mutual accountability, (see, among others Hambrick, 1995; Katzenbach, 1997; Shrivastava, 1989). We posit that this specific character makes the non-linearity and the ongoing making the obligation matter more clearly observable when analysing managing together in a TMT than when looking at other managerial groups. This enables us to develop a vocabulary that can be used when working for developing responsible management.

Conclusion

The emerging field of responsible management has moved researchers’ attention from abstract and decontextualized notions of responsibility to the everyday, situated work of managers, bringing managing responsibly to the fore (Gherardi & Laasch, 2022; Hibbert & Cunliffe, 2015; Laasch et al., 2020a). However, the focus of this stream of research has been on individual managers. Our article adds to knowledge about responsible management by focusing instead on managers working together. More specifically, we focus on the group of managers working together who are often assumed to be the ones taking responsibility for the whole organization, that is the TMT. To develop knowledge about how they together manage responsibly we have mobilized the concept of obligation to characterize what emerges as what a TMT needs to respond to. We have thus looked at how an obligation is made to matter in situ.

Having followed the TMT for a municipal company working together in meetings over a period of time, we see that an obligation is produced and responded to through three accomplishments: making the obligation present, making the obligation enable action and accounting for the obligation. Our study thus provides one way of understanding how managing responsibly together unfolds as an aspect of managerial work for a TMT. This is an alternative view compared to the more traditional entitative understanding of responsible managers being the cause of responsible management. This is not only theoretically relevant but has also practical consequences pointing to what a TMT may need to develop in order to manage responsibly. Rather than only focusing on individual managers in development programmes, or on abstract notions of responsibility, attention may also be paid to how to develop the daily practices TMTs by focusing on the three accomplishments that we have identified. Finally, the case we studied offered a good opportunity to study how an obligation concerned with sustainable development is made to matter, given the nature of the organization studied. Future research may explore other contexts in which managing responsibly together may emerge in other ways and obligations concerned with sustainable development may be less present in the daily work of a TMT. Moreover, given that the TMT works together in meetings, it would also be interesting to further explore the practice of work meetings and whether this practice supports or constrains making an obligation matter.

Acknowledgements

The authors would also like to thank the members of the NOMP group at MDU for support in the development of the paper, and in particular prof Silvia Gherardi that has provided precious feedback on an early version of the paper.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Knowledge Foundation [grant no. 20190129].

Notes on contributors

Karin Ahlström

Karin Ahlström, Industrial PhD student at Mälardalen University, Sweden where she is a member of the NOMP research group and an associated with two national research schools, Management and IT (MIT) and Future Proof Cities (FPC). As a researcher she studies how a top management team for a municipal company enacts the collective responsibility for sustainable urban development, using a practice-based approach. Furthermore, Karin has 30 years of experience from various management positions and from being a consultant in the field of leadership and organization.

Lucia Crevani

Lucia Crevani, PhD, is Editor (Leadership) of Journal of Change Management: Reframing Leadership and Organizational Practice and Director of Research for Industrial Economics and Organization at Mälardalen University, Sweden where she is a member of the NOMP research group. What fascinates her is the everyday-practices and interactions that make organizational processes develop in certain ways. She thus focuses on developing the leadership as practice stream of research and contributing to processual understandings of organizing and place, as well as of organizational change and technology. Her ambition is also to contribute to increased inclusion and justice in organizing practices.

Notes

1 https://sdgs.un.org/2030agenda retrieved on February 7th, 2023

2 https://www.unglobalcompact.org retrieved on February 7th, 2023