Rise and Fall of an Information Technology Outsourcing Program: a qualitative Analysis of a Troubled Corporate Initiative

Decision making. 
Employees and executives recognized the time tax—or burden—the 
Icarus collaborative culture added to the speed at which decisions were made. In order to 
understand executives’ communication rituals, it is important to appreciate how employees and 
executives viewed the Icarus IT department’s decision-making rituals, as these generally 
informed how executives shared information with employees. Employees specifically described 
the IT department’s processes, bureaucracy, and consensus-driven culture as the “department of 
redundancy:” 
I’m kind of surprised at how long it takes to make a decision and how many people need 
to be pulled into that decision and impact that decision...[The IT Department is] not that 
different than other areas where everything’s all decided before you have the big meeting 
to decide. Overlaying the bureaucracy and politics, you have the usual, “got to do this 
step, then this step, then this step,” even though it seems like it’s right out of the 
department of redundancy. (Employee, personal communication, December 21, 2012) 
While decisions made at the employee levels were different in their scope than those made by 
executives, the decision-making pattern was similar. In an almost passive-aggressive and risk-
averse style, employees and executives scheduled the meeting-before-the-meeting, or “pre-
meeting,” to make decisions in order to avoid any surprises during the actual decision-making 
meeting that nevertheless followed. Below, one executive described the way individuals would 
passively agree with or acquiesce to a decision as it was being made, but continue “reserving the 
right to have an opinion as the work unfolds:” 
When I say passively, what I mean there is [the inherent likelihood that] the people that 
are not active in that work are reserving the right to have an opinion as the work unfolds. 
This is where the decision rights comes in because as the work unfolds, then we have this 

---

68 
emotional connection to the work, and as the people that were not involved in it start to 
have an opinion about it, it’s a little bit too late. There’s almost this big “now or forever 
hold your peace” moment that we tend to always go past in the very, very beginning. 
(Executive, personal communication, August 29, 2013) 
The socializing imperative (counter-intuitively) left decisions open to being revisited in the 
future. It also provided a culturally acceptable way for executives to defer challenging their 
peers’ projects until they could find a more opportunistic window to challenge them. As Jackall 
(2010) noted, leaders often demonstrate this type of “looking up and looking around” behavior 
when faced with nonroutine or “gut” decision making. Rather than rock the boat, Icarus IT 
executives would look around for social clues to determine if a project was turning out as their 
boss had expected, or if new assessments of the situation were emerging. I focus specifically on 
executives’ decision making pertaining to SSP in subsequent chapters.