Department of Management Seminar with Professor Dermot Breslin, Queens University Belfast Managing Tensions in Home Care: A Systematic Review and Integrative Framework

Abstract: Home care is shaped by the conflicting demands of multiple stakeholders, including national and local governments, care organizations, care workers and service users. Hence, competing priorities emerge at different levels, presenting a considerable challenge for organizations. Drawing on a systematic review of the literature, this paper explores how care organizations manage tensions in the delivery of home care. Focusing on the carer-client relationship as the nexus of care delivery, a novel integrative framework is used to shed new light on the management of tensions in home care. Using this framework, two broad approaches to managing tensions are evaluated; organizations which manage tensions structurally through boundaries, rules and processes, and those who devolve this responsibility to frontline carers, who manage tensions through relationships, informal norms and the daily negotiation of activities. Based on this analysis, important lessons for the management of tensions in home care are drawn out.

Bio: Dermot Breslin is the Mary McAleese Chair in Connected Leadership at Queen's Business School, Belfast, and Dean of the BAM Peer Review College. His research focuses on Leading and Managing Change and has been published in leading international journals including the Organization Studies, Academy of Management Perspectives, Organizational Research Methods, Work Employment and Society, and Human Resource Management Journal. Dermot is the Special Issues and Reviews Editor for Human Resource Management Journal and previously served as Co Editor-in-Chief for the International Journal of Management Reviews. He is a Fellow of the British Academy of Management, and Trustee of the Society for the Advanced of Management Studies. Dermot also sits on the editorial boards of the Journal of Management Studies, International Small Business Journal and the International Journal of Entrepreneurial Behaviour & Research.
Lunch will be provided, please confirm any dietary requirements.