BUREAUCRATIC WORK EXPERIENCE

The bureaucratic hierarchy is by far the most abundant organization form as we start the new millennium. It is something everyone is intimately familiar with from having to deal with them as a client, customer or employee. They are everywhere all of the time and it is hard to envision a world without them, or indeed any other kind of organization form that will work as well (chapter 8 presents a thought experiment for creating a nonhierarchical and bureaucratic organization). The superabundance of the bureaucratic hierarchical organization form merits a brief “time-out” to establish a historical context for its ascendancy to a position of dominance in organizational design.

As we start the twenty-first century, the omnipresence of an organizational form developed during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and further perfected in the twentieth century points to the hard to deny fact that little progress has been made in creating new theoretical models that transcend the bureaucratic hierarchical organizational design paradigm. Before proceeding, revisiting the industrial revolution and its contribution to the rise of the bureaucratic hierarchy is informative. Daniel Wren (1979) writes:

Starting in the mid 1700s and eventually aided by James Watt’s perfection of the steam engine during the last quarter of the century, the 1800s witnessed the ever growing impact of industrialization. The Industrial Revolution created a new cultural environment and a revised set of problems for management. People’s needs were becoming more complex as they sought to adjust to life in the city and to the new rigor of the factory. Organizations were being reshaped by the demands for heavy infusions of capital, by the division of labor, and by the need for economical, predictable performance. Organizations needed to innovate and compete in a market economy and this created pressures for growth and the economies to be obtained from large-scale production and distribution. Economic theory recognized that the entrepreneur-manager performed a distinct role in combining the traditional three factors of production in the ever-growing factory system. With size came the need for managers, the need for a capable, disciplined, trained, motivated work force, and the need for rationalizing the planning, organizing, and controlling of operations in the early enterprise. (p. 69)

Wren’s encapsulation of the basis for the creation of the bureaucratic hierarchy allows us to appreciate that we continue to try to perfect it. When it comes to organizational design one needs to look no further than Elliott Jaques (1989, 1990), who is of the firm belief that the bureaucratic hierarchy’s only problem is that it still lacks complete perfection, and Hammer and Champy (1993), who assert that bureaucracy is a glue that holds organizations together.

This brief historical overview despite its brevity provides a powerful testament to the dominance of the bureaucratic hierarchy. It is, therefore, only appropriate to have it as one of the central elements to any theory that accounts for workplace experience. We are all familiar with the hierarchical nature of our organizations where positions are arrayed in vertical columns downward from the chief executive officer or owner to positions that possess almost no power, authority or discretion as to how to perform work. It is also the case that the bureaucratic hierarchy is a response to specialization that may take many forms. The columns of an organization chart are composed of the specialties such as finance, human resource management, marketing, planning, sales, legal, information systems and operations, to list but some of the possibilities. Each area of specialization possesses its own language, way of thinking about the workplace and unique knowledge base and ethics that make it a profession. Our organizations are, therefore, divided into layers of power and authority and columns of specialization. Above all this seems logical when you stop to think about it.

Nonetheless this logical form of organization is notoriously filled with dysfunctions that detract from performance and introduce uncertainty, losses of predictability and personal safety and even chaotic experiences and instances where routinized leadership is temporarily abandoned for charismatic leadership. These dysfunctions arise from the layers and columns where instructions, information and communications become distorted as they move up and down the organization through the hierarchical layers where each layer filters information. A performance problem in one work team in one department within one division may gradually have the information about the analysis of the problem modified as it moves upward through the filtering layers. Eventually awareness of the problem at the top of the organization may be entirely lost. Yet another example of organizational dysfunction is illustrated by one specialized division knowing that a product will be changed in the near future and a second division proceeding to purchase improved equipment to produce the current product design that will ultimately be incompatible with the new design. Considerable waste and inefficiency is built into these commonplace workplace dynamics. The logical organization design does not always work so logically.