Contrary to common wisdom, the absence of traditional leadership does not necessarily lead to chaos. In fact, powerful groups seem to emerge filling the vacuum and changing the landscape of industry and society. Decentralization has changes the rules of the game. What once was considered weakness due to lack of structure and defined leadership and organization, has become a major force to reckon with, often dealing major blows and defeating traditional centralized organization. Brafman and Beckstrom likens the centralized organization to a spider that has eight legs and eight eyes. Cut off the head and the whole organism dies. Similarly in centralized organization, do away with the leader/leadership and such organization would languish and collapse. However, this is not the case with decentralized organizations that are likened to a starfish. There are no heads or leaders to go after. If you cut off one arm of the starfish, the organism can regenerate the lost arm and the severed arm can also regenerate the whole organism as well. Like a starfish, attacking a decentralized organization can lead to a magnified opposing push-back. The authors dig into past anthropogenic history and current economic phenomena for examples to shed light on the immense power that such decentralized organizations wield. They also address how to spot and distinguish starfish organizations, the importance of their core components, and strategies to defeat these organizations. In late March 2005,
One of the themes in Thomas McCraw’s book American Business Since 1920: How It Worked is mastering centralized control through decentralized management. As the business world rapidly expanded competition for market share between the larger companies increased. More task management was necessary in order to delegate within the businesses as they expanded. The market was also changing and as an answer to that some companies implemented a revised version of traditional management; decentralized management (McCraw, 2009).
Bolman and Deal offer four frames with which to break down organizations: their structure, their human resources, their political environment and their symbolic meaning. They offer a metaphor to capture the essence of each frame (translated for orchestra here):
Surprisingly, there are successful organizations that behave like a starfish. Good examples are Wikipedia, Alcohol Anonymous, YouTube, Skype, and Craigslist. These organizations do not have a CEO, if there’s a leader, they do not hinder their people in making their own decision, and the group becomes creative and is productive. They have the freedom to do things that they think that will help the organization to be successful.
The Inherent Limits of Organizational structure and the Unfulfilled Role of hierarchy. Lessons from a near-war: Organization Science, p. 18, 3,
Leadership. Why is proper leadership important? Is there a model out there that makes a good leader? There are some who think that change is bad or there is fear when change is merely mentioned. Why is there so much apprehension about change, what is there to fear. “There is nothing to fear but fear itself” (FDR). We fear change because we fear that our world or our comfort zone being infringed upon. Apple Inc. has said “Here 's to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They 're not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo.
Changing how large governmental structures function is neither an easy task nor a quick one; it will require the undoing and unlearning of a very tightly held political and economic system by all parties involved. At the center of Spade’s call for
The bureaucratic era has been the traditional form of organization for more than a century, in simple terms described as hybridity, standardized operations and none flexibility inside the organization. The change to the post-bureaucratic is shown through personal influence, high trust relationships and the importance of the individuality of everyone (McKenna, Garcia-Lorenzo & Bridgeman, 2010). According to Kernaghan (2000) the characteristic of the bureaucratic era is “position power” and of the post bureaucratic “participate leadership”.
This centralization paved the way for the establishment
In this intriguing Wharton Leadership Digest interview, authors James Quigley and Mehrdad Baghai talk about eight archetypes of leadership from their new book, As One: Individual Action, Collective Power (Portfolio, 2011): • The landlord and tenants – Tenants voluntarily decide to join landlords, but once they do, the boss has the top-down power, controlling access to scarce resources, doling out rewards and sanctions, and dictating the terms of tenants’ participation. • The community organizer and volunteers – The power for setting direction comes from the bottom up, but the community organizer is the glue that holds things together. Volunteers can’t be ordered around; instead, they join on their own terms if
very well planned hierarchy of leadership. This also comes with its own pros and cons which
There are numerous favorable circumstances to a decentralized system. It diminishes the force of the administration and improves the force of people. It likewise makes it less demanding for people to take an interest in the administration and help to give it fitting headings. In the event that the administration still settles on a destructive choice, less individuals get hurt in a decentralized
Other common terms for the idea of organizational decentralization include: team self-management, self-management, shared control, distributed leadership (Lambe, Webb, & Ishida, 2009) and holacracy (Robertson, 2007). While these terms may have small differences they all describe the common theme of distributing power across organizations. Several concepts help to explain why decentralization and the encouragement of teamwork throughout an organization are often superior to traditional management structure.
Throughout history, there have been many systems of government that have been created, and have revolutionised todays modern forms of government. Democracy, Monarchy, Dictatorship, Theocracy, and Anarchy all use various, unique techniques on how to run a civilization. Each of them require different leadership traits in order for it to work properly.
In a centralized organizational structure one individual is responsible for making all the decisions and maintains control of the company by giving direction. While Decentralized organizational structures often rely on several persons with the authority to make final decision for the company’s well being. Some benefits associated with a centralized organization are as follows: Reduction in cost in the work environment, having a focused vision on one common goal and Reduction in conflict. A Few drawbacks of a centralized organization include, No secrecy because all ideas and decisions are conveyed to all, No special attention and Delay in work. Advantages associated with Decentralization are; Huge relief is provided off the top managers, Greater use is made of employees skills and Decision making is left up to educational and well informed people.
Assumptions of Organizational Economics Theory: organizations are superior to markets in managing complex and uncertain economic exchanges because they reduce the cost of transactions; different approaches to organizational economies share a common attention to explaining the emergence and expansion of organizations, hierarchies,