Challenging the Power and Authority approach to organisational design
Challenging the Power and Authority approach to organisational design
A Complex Journey
By Dr. Reg Butterfield
9-minutes read. (Image: ©Reg Butterfield, 2021)
In an earlier article I suggested that the role and operation of leadership in today’s organisations was still predominantly from a past era of controls set within hierarchical bureaucratic organisations. I argued that these approaches are now out of kilter with the changes in both the nature of work activities and significant changes in society.
Today, I will introduce the background to a journey that sought to find alternatives to the current power and control model of organisations that dominate society and business. This journey uncovers a wide range of areas of organisational and individual behaviours that are important to understand if we are to develop a new way of executing the business of organisations effectively. Over the next few weeks, I will illustrate parts of that journey.
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To meet today’s business challenges, many commentators recommend adaptations to the current management and leadership models whilst maintaining the traditional hierarchical organisational designs. My colleague Dr Ross Wirth and I challenge this assumption as being more a sticking plaster or ‘Band-Aid’ that avoids the real need for identifying a new approach to achieving an effective organisation. The current ‘solutions’ tend to be ways to adapt the old to the new. Those who do not follow this adaptive route tend to be entrepreneurs or creative thinkers who develop completely different organisational designs and operations that have a very new or novel take on what management and leadership means. I mentioned some of these organisations last week.
The adaptive approach is understandable from a marketing point of view. If you can sell a new approach that seems to be easy and convenient to adopt within the current hierarchical model, then why spend energy on the more difficult challenge.
The problem is that the deficiencies of the ‘old’ system are still there because the leadership and management process has not dealt with the underlying problems. In real terms, the adaptive approach slows things down and becomes more complex as a result. Interestingly, they either become more mechanistic and process-driven, and avoid the people issues or over stress the people side in defining their ’new’ model. So how can this trap of reinventing the existing be avoided?
Ross and I have spent almost five years working on this question. Leadership and management rely on specific forms of position and/or personal power to achieve their role in any form of organisation, bureaucratic or otherwise. We decided to start from the beginning and cast aside the idea of a new leadership model. We worked from a greenfield site and looked at what work is becoming and how an organisation’s purpose can be achieved by focusing on the work itself and not control.
We decided that the leadership and management question could only be answered after we identified how the actual work would be undertaken. After all, without work there is no need for leadership or anything organisational.
We argue that it is only at this stage of having explored and clarified what the work is, that we can identify the nature and types of support required to achieve that work; leadership and management possibly being one of these support mechanisms or processes.
The challenge to find an organisational design with appropriate and effective leadership and management has had a varied and bumpy ride over centuries. Today the challenge still seems to be irresolvable when faced with the current ways of operating almost exclusively based on some form of outdated historical hierarchy, predominantly in a form of bureaucracy.
To make sense of this challenge it was important for us to include a comparison of the complexity of organisational life today with that of the earlier ages. In doing so, we found that even though changes in technology have been the main driver of change, we are currently confronted with challenges that nobody could have foreseen. The increasing use of sophisticated technology that impacts almost everybody personally and globally, the impact of artificial intelligence, the current threats to what seemed just a year ago to be an ever-evolving nature of globalisation, the tensions of the war between organisational stakeholders and shareholder interests, and society’s changing value system are chief among the demands of organisations and the design of work that we face.
We found that it is helpful to go back in time and look for clues and ideas about how we have reached the current organisational state and what we can learn from that journey. Much of that journey was published by us in 2021 during our online global conference and associated publications on Futocracy.network.
Whilst the current model of management and leadership emerged during the 1970s, let’s go back even further to put it into context for readers who may have not read our earlier publications.
Briefly, even before Socrates came on the scene around 400 BC, the concept of management was around. As time progressed, whether it was the Roman Legions and their practice of accountability through hierarchy, the Roman Catholic Church with specific territories and lines of command, or the Guilds and masters of the Middle Ages (476 AD through to 1450 AD), similar forms of power and control were developed and fine-tuned. As we fast track through the 1700s and 1800s the Industrial Revolution changed the shape and nature of work from rural communities of farming and local products to mass production in cities and large factories.
This move to large factories created a need for some different form of management and direction of the workforce. To a large extent the need for skilled craftspeople to produce and modify bespoke items changed to standardised parts in 1908, coupled with associated new forms of production. Nothing demonstrates this more than the introduction of production line methods by Henry Ford in 1913. Attempts to find the most appropriate production methods and management approaches have continued to the present day. The current production lines are evidence of little changing in that area of work since 1913 other than improved use of technology and associated quality, and less people involved.
However, the focus on gaining more from the processes and people has been a great motivation for researchers, management gurus and others right up to this day. One approach that seems to have gained momentum over recent years is that of using a matrix approach. The matrix design was first introduced in the 1970s as an alternative to traditional organisations with more clear-cut hierarchies and dedicated teams. Unfortunately, experience over the years has shown that this matrix approach has served to create more organisational complexity. To be successful it relies on high dependency and cooperation between the designated line and other functional managers. The term ‘feeling lost in a matrix’ is often used by employees and managers where such a structural approach is used. Organisations have found that a matrix structure designed to address limitations of functional, product, or geographic structures, also brought a new set of problems of conflicting authority and disjointed responsibilities. Instead of getting the best of both structures, the matrix had the unintended consequence of the worst of each. The following figure shows how the matrix is just another version of a traditional hierarchical bureaucracy, yet its proponents argue that it breaks away from problems of such a hierarchical model.
Figure 1. The Hierarchical relationships in a standard Matrix organisation (Butterfield & Wirth, 2022)
A longitudinal study (2013–2021) by Hughes J., & Hetrick A, (2021) indicates that organisational performance is often lost in matrix organisations. Diverse perspectives create conflict rather than innovation, and decision-making gridlock undermines agility and compromises execution. Their report reinforces Ross’ and my experience of helping organisations unwrap and change the working conditions that are undermining the morale of the workforce, damaging relationships, and even creating difficulties in the execution of normal daily tasks.
Another important aspect of this historical journey was the behaviour of workers and those who managed them. We found that there has been a need to manage the way that work, and market trade was undertaken for as far back as records have been kept. The forms of control, which is what they were, were not always for the benefit of the workers. It has always appeared to be the power of the rich or educated over those less fortunate.
The process of achieving power over the workers was often a brutal one, physically and/or mentally, and seldom discussed as such in the training institutions and development courses of today; yet it is still happening. The ‘modern’ approach to managing people was born out of the Scientific Management theories of the early 1900s, which was akin to reintroducing slavery in industry. Yes, the physical chains were gone and yet the same practices of de-humanising were promulgated. Workers were set into economic units with carrot and stick performance measures seen as a more ethical way of punishing slow workers and incentivising faster ones. The methods of tracking and measuring were similar to and became more sophisticated than the awful days of slavery.
Today, all of this is wrapped up in neat terminology and management speak that is taught to managers worldwide. Strategic Human Resource Management (strategic HRM) is the epitome of how to ‘harness’ worker behaviour through compliance to the enrichment of shareholder value. It is little wonder that in parallel to its introduction by Fombrun et al in 1984, and its wider use since 1990, that the level of employee disengagement has continued to reach worrying levels. It can be seen as an indication that the relationship between employee and employer is more complex than the 1984 model represents
Some commentators suggest that the Big Quit and Great Resignation is linked to this unwillingness to be shackled to organisations and treated as machines and not recognised as people.
Our journey through history confirmed for us that bringing about change has tended to imply and result in different versions of the existing shape and management of organisations, whatever the driver of change. This confirmation reinforced the need to start from scratch and focus on the nature and operation of work as the foundation of developing a new perspective of organisational life.
Ross and I then stepped out of the traditional management pathways and lenses of viewing organisational life. We entered a new and challenging world built up through visiting numerous areas of the four major branches of science, mathematics and logic, biological science, physical science, and social science. Neither of us are experts in any of these fields, which created both an exhilarating and scary challenge.
Originally published on Substack on June 5, 2022.
