|
|
|
| Current Issue |
|
|
| Resources |
|
|
|
Managerial Leadership: The Key to Good Organization
| Article
# : |
19647 |
|
|
Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
|
| Issue
Date : |
10 / 1991 |
2,637 Words |
| Author
: |
Elliott Jaques
Elliott Jaques is visiting research professor of management
science at George Washington University. His two most recent
books are Requisite Organization and Executive Leadership. |
There is a seriously disruptive movement afoot in American management. It bids fair to undermine our business competitiveness steadily and relentlessly. This movement is centered around the general idea of workplace democracy and worker involvement. These aspirations towards a better and more humane workplace are admirable; they cannot be gainsaid. The difficulty is that the steps proposed for fulfilling these aspirations are unrealistic and self-defeating. They demoralize the managerial system and take the heart out of the innovativeness of individual contributors.
These current ideas center upon replacing the managerial hierarchy, which is considered undemocratic, with so-called democratic group practices of various kinds. But the issue is not one of democracy versus hierarchy. What is required is to leave democracy and democratic voting to the political field where they belong and to find ways of transforming the managerial hierarchy into systems of accountable, human, value-adding managerial leadership.
To try to eliminate the managerial hierarchy in order to eliminate managerial autocracy is to throw out the baby with the bathwater. For the exercise of authority tied properly to accountability is one of the most constructive of all human activities. The real task--and the difficult one--is to replace autocratic management with accountable authoritative management. It can be done. I propose here to show how.
Background
For some years now there has been a constant stream of publications by human resource experts and academics foreseeing the end of the managerial hierarchy and its replacement by some vague and unspecified new form or forms of organization. Peter Drucker, Tom Peters, Rosabeth Moss Kanter, Ed Lawler, Warren Bennis, Quinn Mills, Michael Hammer, Shoshana Zuboff, Barker and Ghoshal, Stan Davis, and countless others have forecast the end of the industrial age and the entrepreneurial age, and the coming of what has been called variously the information age, the services age, or the post-modern age.
This new age will supposedly require a transformation of the managerial hierarchy into an extraordinary array of "new" organizations--all of them democratic in tone. Thus we see arguments in favor of: workplace democracy, the company with-out boundaries or walls, cluster organizations, self-managing teams, corporate hubs, global matrix networks, symphony-orchestra-type systems, groups that grow spontaneously around information
...
Read Full Article
Look for this article in Ask.com
|
|
