Checkmate – can the price for influence be too high?

Shadow work and workarounds among employees in psychiatry

Abstract

Research in work environment has established influence in work as an important factor for wellbeing and the ability to solve key tasks. However, new management logics within New Public Management can tie and limit employees’ influence in new ways. Based on ethnographic fi eld study and 41 semistructured interviews, this article shows how care pathways and the electronic patient journal (Sundhedsplatformen) standardize task completion to the extent that employees in a psychiatric center experience not having suffi cient influence to solve tasks using their professional judgement. The analysis shows how employees find ways to increase their influence in secret through shadow working and workarounds. But, this secretly acquired influence comes with a price in terms of added work, feelings of self-insufficiency, and fear of getting caught. We show how employees are in a diffi cult situation as open criticism of the situation is mostly ignored. Thus, they can choose to suspend their professional judgement or increase their work intensity in the shadows.