Academics, consultants, and management gurus regularly forecast their imminent replacement because hierarchies--even when populated by considerate and intelligent people--can be cruel and stupid. They routinely transform motivated and loyal employees into disaffected Dilberts. It's no wonder that we continue to search for more humane and productive alternatives to them.
Yet the intensity with which we struggle against hierarchies only… Expand. View on PubMed. Save to Library Save. Create Alert Alert. Share This Paper. Background Citations. Topics from this paper.
Academia organization Projections and Predictions. Movement Authoritarianism. In this article, organizational behavior expert Harold J. Leavitt presents neither a defense of human hierarchies nor another attack on them.
Instead, he offers a reality check, a reminder that hierarchy remains the basic structure of most, if not all, large, ongoing human organizations.
That's because although they are often depicted as being out of date, hierarchies have proved to be extraordinarily adaptive. Over the past 50 years, for example, they have co-opted the three major managerial movements--human relations, analytic management, and communities of practice.
Hierarchies also persist because they deliver real practical and psychological value, and they fulfill our deep need for order and security. Despite the good they may do, however, hierarchies are inevitably authoritarian. They routinely transform motivated and loyal employees into disaffected Dilberts. It's no wonder that we continue to search for more humane and productive alternatives to them. Yet the intensity with which we struggle against hierarchies only serves to highlight their durability.
Hierarchy, it seems, may be intrinsic not only to the natural world but also to our own natures. The new flatter, faster organizations certainly reflect some important changes in the way business is done, but the basic blueprint is unchanged.
Department heads report to division managers, who report to group VPs and so on. Hierarchy, it seems, may be intrinsic to our natures. This article is neither a defense of hierarchies nor another attack on them.
It is a reality check, a reminder that hierarchy remains the basic structure of most, if not all, large, ongoing human organizations. It is also an examination of why hierarchies persist and even thrive.
One partial explanation is that many of those organizational pyramids—despite their reputations—have proven themselves quite capable of change. More important, though, hierarchies deliver real practical and psychological value. And they get big jobs done. Of course, hierarchies are terribly flawed. They inevitably foster authoritarianism and its destructive offspring: distrust, dishonesty, territoriality, toadying, and fear.
Our ability to work effectively in hierarchies depends in large measure on how we deal with those dangers. One of the most common indictments of hierarchical organizations is that they are outdated—too slow, too unbending for the turbulence of the modern world.
Some have even ceased to exist. On the other hand, many of our biggest companies have prospered, in large part because they have been flexible and responsive to their changing environments. These organizations—GE, Sony, and IBM come to mind—somehow have managed to incorporate into their hierarchies many of the most radical managerial innovations of the past few decades.
They are exceptional performers, of course, but they are not alone. The business world has experienced at least three major managerial innovations in the past 50 years.
Despite their hierarchical structures, many large businesses have been in the forefront of experimenting with and adopting the practices those innovations carried with them. The first of the three waves of change, the human relations movement, began shortly after World War II, when a small group of influential academics envisioned a truly new, people-focused approach to management, one that would point organizations toward employee participation and industrial democracy.
Some of the largest U. This was neither a trivial risk nor a trivial investment. Paradoxically, the human relations thrust initially helped to strengthen, not weaken, hierarchies. HR, though originally intended for all employees, was, in its early years, applied to management much more than to hourly workers, thereby widening the gap between manager and worker.
The new HR ideas became popular just as a horde of knowledge workers, educated with the help of the GI Bill, started to invade the corporate world. Edwards Deming. In the s, big U. The second managerial sea change, analytic management or management by the numbers , was, if anything, a return to traditional military-style, top-down values.
Indeed, a number of influential ex-Pentagon planners were among its leading proponents. One might even say that they led the analytic movement. Department of Defense. Always reason. And reason supported by facts, by statistics—he could prove his rationality with facts—intimidates others. This slide number contradicts slide They did contradict each other. Predictably, analytic management only served to reinforce the hierarchical structure of the large corporation.
Staff people at headquarters could now crunch the numbers and write the plans, then hand them to the foot soldiers to implement. The popularity of management by the numbers can be tied to the arrival of computer technology in business.
By , there were still probably fewer than ten computers—multivacuum-tubed monsters—in place in the United States, according to the American Federation of Information Processing Societies.
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