Battle Between Change Agents and Status Quo Interests in Every Organization
The Battle between Change Agents and Status Quo Adherents Every organization has its change agents who seek to take risks, disrupt the status quo, and introduce changes to steer the organization in a particular direction. On the other hand, there are also those who advocate the Status Quo and want the organization to treasure stability […]
Middle Level Management – Sandwich Layer and its Importance to Organizations
In previous articles, at many places, we have discussed how the middle management is in the unique position of actualizing change in organizations. We have talked about how the middle management needs to be brought on board for any meaningful change and how the senior leadership cannot alone get things going in any organization. The […]
Difference between Communication and Effective Communication
Boss to his employee -“I want you to bring the file to my table”. The boss left the poor employee confused as he forgot to mention the name of the file and the employee also didn’t bother to ask his boss. The boss did communicate to his employee but the message was not clear to […]
Four Dimensional Model of Virtual Teams
Virtual team is the new reality of 21st century workplace. Large number of HR practitioners as well as organizational leaders has come to acknowledge it as different from traditional teams. They have now shifted their attention towards devising and utilizing new tools and techniques to manage the unique challenges posed by virtual teams. Jessica Lipnack […]
Public Policy Approach to Public Administration
We remember reading about the Wilsonian philosophy of public administration and the famous dichotomy of politics and administration. After Wilson, there were many authors like Frank J Goodnow, L D White and F. W. Willoughby who elaborated on the topic and reaffirmed the need to separate the political functions and administrative functions of the government. […]
In many organizations, it is often the practice to give autonomy to many teams and let them take the decisions that affect their day to day affairs as well as some strategic issues. These are the so-called self-directed teams that exist in all organizations where the managers of these teams take the decisions regarding the management of the team with greater autonomy than the other teams.
These self-directed teams are liked by many managers since there is greater freedom and greater say over their affairs and the rank and file employees also like these teams because it gives them greater control over their work. However, senior management in most cases does not like to cede autonomy and hence there is often a tussle going on between senior management and middle management as far as these self-directed teams and their functioning goes.
The previous articles have discussed how many transnational corporations cede autonomy to regional and divisional heads and let them run their regions or divisions as they see fit. It is the case that within these divisions and regions there is often the tendency to not pass the autonomy down the ranks and instead be as authoritarian as possible. This is indeed a travesty but something which happens in practice in many organizations.
The standard defense that the senior managers in these divisions and regions offer is that the passing down of the autonomy to the rank and file might not be practically possible given the lack of strategic focus and direction that individual teams have which makes them take orders instead of deciding for themselves.
Of course, the intra-organizational tussles that go on between the senior management and the rank and file employees along with the middle managers might make for interesting gossip but in reality these tussles have negative effects on the organizational fabric.
Hence, a possible solution to this issue would be to ensure that sufficient autonomy is ceded to the middle managers without compromising on the strategic imperatives. This can be done if the decision making is decentralized in some functions like HR, Admin, Finance, Operations and Project Management and Project Delivery and at the same time retain control over the overall strategic direction and focus that the company must take.
Though this solution might sound simplistic, in reality this is something that has been actualized in many organizations especially in Fidelity and Unilever where functional and divisional heads as well as regional heads take decisions regarding these activities without interference from the higher ups.
Though there are bound to be some issues that crop up from time to time because of this arrangement, there are some positive benefits to this arrangement. These benefits are to do with the way in which the regional and divisional autonomy manifests in better decisions made about the day to day operations based on local conditions instead of centralized decision making that is top down and done without knowledge of ground realities.
In conclusion, decision making in self-directed teams must be encouraged without ceding complete control over the larger areas of policy and strategy. This can be actualized with some deft planning of the organizational structure and reorienting the organizational culture.
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