Senior manager decision‐making and interactions with frontline staff in intellectual disability organisations: A Delphi study

Very little is known of the activities of the most senior managers in organisations providing social care in the community to people with intellectual disabilities. Yet the importance of the focus and activities of senior managers in directing and supporting staff practice and staff experiences is likely to be central to an organisation's functioning and support provided for staff and service users. This study employed Delphi methodology with a panel of 11 senior managers, mostly chief executives, managing small to very large organisations providing support for people with intellectual disabilities, in the UK. Answering three rounds of questions, senior managers described their face‐to‐face and non‐face‐to‐face contacts with staff and decision‐making. Narrative data were subject to quantitative and thematic analysis. In the last round, themes were subject to quantitative analysis. Most contacts between senior managers and staff were in formal structured contexts and all managers used social media to promote the organisations' ambitions regarding good practice. The panel focused upon accessing and understanding the informal aspects of their organisations and staff factors. Decisions were both short‐term reactive and long‐term strategic and an effort to link these was felt to improve organisational functioning. A framework for understanding senior managers' activities emerged showing two sources of demands and opportunity, extra‐organisational focused upon meeting legal and regulatory demands and intra‐organisational focused upon understanding and influencing informal staff practices/experiences and cultures within their organisations.