Who wants to be in the media industry?
8.4 Who wants to be in the media industry?
The statistics are grim in this highly casualised industry. Current figures suggest that up to 70 per cent of all staff within the UK audiovisual industry are freelance, a high percentage of whom are unemployed at any one time. Those in employment are on short-term contracts with no guarantee of their next assignment. To understand what might motivate people to work within this sector, we first need to consider the concept of human motivation. Abraham Maslow, dubbed as ‘the father of humanist psychol-
ogy’ 3 , suggested that we have seven innate needs:
1 Physiological – what our bodies need to physically survive (water, food, sex)
2 Safety – this is a physical security need, so that we can maintain a secure and safe environment from predators (both human and animal)
3 Love – often considered the basic social need, for relationships and a sense of belonging
4 Esteem – some have described this as the need to satisfy the ego by social standing and peer group recognition
5 Self-actualisation – a sense of self-fulfilment
6 Freedom of enquiry and expression – this may be a more nebulous need, but includes a sense of fairness, honesty and ethical dealing
7 To know and understand – to fulfil the need to satisfy an enquiring mind that is curious and wants to learn and explore.
This ‘hierarchy of needs’ is often represented in a simple form (Figure 8.1) as a set of steps or blocks. As one level is satisfied, the individual can go on to the next – in absolute terms, we would agree that the need to eat is a rather greater priority than a career goal. However, this diagram doesn’t really explain the more complex behaviour in relatively stable modern economies, or the paradox of how people behave in relatively unstable industries within these economies, such as the audiovisual sector.
Managing in the Media
Self-actualisation Ego needs Social needs Security needs – Physical safety Physiological needs
Figure 8.1 Maslow’s hierarchy of needs – simple form.
Self-actualisation Self-actualisation Ego needs Ego needs
Social needs Social needs Security needs Security needs
Physical needs Physical needs Physiological Physiological
needs needs
Figure 8.2 Maslow’s hierarchy of needs – complex form.
Given the complexities of the modern industrial working environment, it is probably more useful to envisage Maslow’s hierarchy as less a series of stepping stones and more a continuum of overlapping ladders that might be traversed by the individual (Figure 8.2). This model gives an indication of the behaviour of workers in the audiovisual industry. They operate not with a strict hierarchy of needs, but with an expectation of future promise. The individual who can see future opportunities that might lead them to a point
Behaviour in media organisations and organisational behaviour
of self-actualisation is often more than willing to put up with short-term hardships.
There has been a tradition in the audiovisual industry to appoint new joiners as runners. The tasks they are given are often trivial and sometimes demeaning compared to their intellect and qualifications. Whatever their motivation or ambition, they are party to an industry that gives them the promise of future opportunities and self-actualisation. There is an expecta- tion that if they can see themselves through this period of initiation, then somehow their talent will be recognised. In Hollywood, ‘every taxi driver has
a script in their back pocket or is an out of work actor’. While a film producer was casting roles for his next film, a carpenter working
nearby was making too much noise and had to stop work. To pass the time, the carpenter read the roles with the performers who were being auditioned. The carpenter got the role. The producer was George Lucas, and the carpenter was Harrison Ford. Ford, even though an actor with some credits to his name, worked as a carpenter for approximately 10 years before this break.
In Organisational Behaviour, Huczynski and Buchanan quote Maslow 4 :
. . . a musician must make music, an artist must paint, a poet must write, if he is to be ultimately happy. What a man can be, he must be. This need we may call self-actualisation . . . it refers to the desire for self- fulfilment, namely to the tendency for him to become actualised in what he is potentially – the desire to become more and more what one is, to become everything that one is capable of becoming.
A key driver for the motivation of those in the audiovisual industry is to express a sense of creativity as embodied by the term self-actualisation. Many would recognise that the path to this self-fulfilment will be a rocky one. It is a high profile industry in which creativity, innovation and the potential to earn a great deal of money may be achieved. The freedom of opportunity and choice coupled with financial security is nice work – if you can get it! However, high expectations of success and a limited number of opportunities to fulfil that expectation come with a high degree of failure.
Workers in the media industry are not part of a homogeneous group, and there are some indicators to suggest that a broad picture of three points of entry emerges; technical, entrepreneurial and creative/artisan. These strands are defined as much by the job specification as by individual differences or drivers for career goals.
Managing in the Media
The convergence of the technological platforms has reduced the need for highly qualified engineers and their associated skills in the production chain. There has been a clear shift in the need of engineering competencies from the production chain to the equipment manufacturers. Equipment has become more reliable, and maintenance contracts more dependable. The demarcation line between different craft skills competences have virtually disappeared through multi-skilling requirements.
Multi-skilling and a willingness to be flexible in employment contracts and terms of engagement has removed the once perceived control of the trade
union movement. Witness L!VE TV and its employment strategy 5 . This station relied to a great extent on untrained junior staff with almost no production skills to produce the programmes. In the 1960s and 1970s governments were concerned about union power, and in the 1980s the Thatcher government made radical changes to the industrial relations landscape, shifting employment control mechanisms from national collective bargaining into the hands of the employer and the local contracting companies.
To date, papers written about the employee in the UK audiovisual industry have tended to focus on processes and outcomes, and not on the attitudes and values of the individual. In psychological terms, they have tended to take
a behaviourist approach by examining the inputs and outputs to organisational structures within the audiovisual industry along with the impact of government legislation. They have seen these macro factors as the key influences on the behaviour of the individual within the industry. As a general point it has been argued that by maintaining a degree of uncertainty in the industrial landscape, an employee’s compliance is assured. An alternative view is that individuals choose the audiovisual industry knowing that ambiguity and uncertainty go hand in hand with a creative working environment; they embrace the industry for that very reason. Would the sort of individual who is attracted to the audiovisual industry want a stable and predictable environment? Would you? An evocation of this attitude is the role of the media entrepreneur (see Chapter 7).
The shift in responsibility for skills acquisition has moved from the employer to the employee. Even so, there has been a tradition within the film industry of ‘learning on the job’. With these boundaries of external control, uncertainty and instability established, how would you test whether you or others would be able to cope with this working environment?
A final factor in setting the scene for the worker in the audiovisual industry is some consideration of how effective they may be at working in teams, and possibly leading those teams.
Behaviour in media organisations and organisational behaviour
Employers will almost always look for a good fit between job specification and person specification. There are many tools by which researchers attempt to code individual differences. Business managers, recruiters and careers advisors seek some form of quantitative data to attach to the individual – if it could be shown that most film editors were better than average at crosswords, then it might form part of the basis of selection for
a new editor. Qualitative data is harder to gather, and open to greater challenge. We could stray into the dangerous waters of causal, significant and relevant relationships, viz. storks, Stockholm and birth rate. If this is relevant to you, then its significance is assured; if not, read Simple Statistics by
Clegg 6 . Whether you are a prospective employer or employee, and whether or not
you share or see the value in these processes of modelling attitude and behaviour, forearmed is forewarned. A useful starting point would be to examine one’s own temperament and that of those with whom you are likely to work.
Jung (1875–1961) suggested that each individual has a preferred way of processing information from their internal and external worlds, and these differences between people help to explain the variety found in human behaviour. It was during the 1920s and 1930s that Jung established a set of paired scalar temperaments that could be used to indicate a preferred style or temperament profile for an individual. This was incorporated by Myers and Briggs, who developed the Myers–Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) personality inventory. By the use of a questionnaire and score-sheet system, people are placed at a point on each of the four scalar paired personality types:
䊉 Extraversion (E) vs Introversion (I) 䊉 Intuition(N) vs Sensation (S) 䊉 Thinking (T) vs Feeling (F) 䊉 Judging (J) vs Perceiving(P).
You should note that each of these terms has a specific meaning different to everyday usage. To use one of the scales as an example in the workplace, ‘Js’ like structure and closure, whilst ‘Ps’ like flexibility. Unless these differences are understood, conflict can result – for example, ‘Js’ may interpret flexibility as procrastination, whilst ‘Ps’ may find structure confining and feel controlled. It is important to recognise the limitations of tools such as the MBTI. Useful as they may be, the human personality is far too complex to fit into a particular set of definitions. However, they can be a starting point in gaining an understanding of yourself.
Managing in the Media
Use of the MBTI is not readily available to the general public. Please Understand Me 7 , written by David Keirsey and Marilyn Bates, provides an introductory text to this method. The reader completes a questionnaire from which the answers are coded on a scorecard. From this, an indication of an individual’s temperament on the four scales is measured – more extrovert than introvert, more feeling that thinking, etc.
From the coding, the four pairs of preferences create 16 possible temperament types (e.g. ENTP – extrovert, intuitive, thinking and perceiving). Because some of these pairs can be numerically balanced, up to
a further 32 combinations can be included. These combinations have been defined in four broad personality types:
䊉 Dionysian (SP) – not to be tied by routine, focuses on the present, seeks action, impulsive
䊉 Epimethian (SJ) – dutiful and wants to be part of an organisation, careful, thoughtful and accurate, a giver not a taker
䊉 Promethian (NT) – power, control, predictability; avoids personal and emotional involvement and wants to be seen as confident and in
charge 䊉 Apollonian (NF) – intuitive decision-makers, wants to be unique, finds it
hard to take criticism. For example, the Apollonian (NF) group is strong on the intuitive/feeling
scale, and it is suggested that these people tend to pursue extraordinary goals. To illustrate this, Keirsey and Bates 8 quote from ‘Kubrick’s Grandest Gamble’ (Time, 1975) 9 :
As for Kubrick, he is still working eighteen hours a day overseeing the final fine tuning of the soundtrack . . . there is such a total sense of demoralisation if you say you don’t care. From start to finish on a film the only limitations I observed are those imposed on me by the amount of money and the amount of sleep I need. You either care or you don’t, and I simply don’t know where to draw the line between those two points.
The NF personality is a driven individual who can act unreasonably and be demanding, both on themselves and on others around them.
The importance of personality and temperament type goes beyond just an expression of individual differences or a means of indicating a personal preference for working in one industry or another. In the audiovisual industry, the majority of the work is a team process. How often have we heard the expression ‘all chiefs and no Indians’? It has been shown that
Behaviour in media organisations and organisational behaviour
groups made up of different personality types can function more effectively than a group made up of all the same types of people. Groups made up of people with no similarities at all can similarly be dysfunctional. Let us go on to consider group behaviour as examined and illustrated by Belbin.