ABSTRACT
In the previous chapter we saw how leaders emerge from situations that had been initially leaderless. That was the first step in the emergence of a hierarchical structure in an organization. A quick look across the business landscape suggests that the growth of hierarchies is inevitable. A quick tour of the mechanisms of self-organization (e.g., as we did in Chapter 2) indicates that even nonliving systems can generate hierarchical structures. At the same time, however, there are two emerging ironies that wemust address.
First, in spite of the ubiquity of hierarchies in work organizations, there has been a negligible amount research since the beginning of Industrial Psychology (circa 1910) on the subject of work flows up and down hierarchies. What have been studied often are the relationships between some attributes of the managers or organizational culture and the performance of work groups. A downward flow of something is consistently assumed. In the time of the Participation Renaissance there was a new value placed on upward communication. There again, however, was a downward flow of something that should disinhibit, if not also encourage, upward communication. In contrast, the NDS perspective on organizations makes note of two important
points. First, self-organization occurs from the bottom up. As a result, there is greater instability at the top than appearances would indicate. Second, the number
of links in the communication chain grows in a hierarchical formation, which would only serve to slow and to distort communication up or down the hierarchy. Hierarchical pathways would also produce balkanized chains of information flow such that some people would get some part of the story but no one would get all the parts. Many times, what management calls the “need-to-know basis” really means, “We’ll tell you if you ask, but the task of telling everyone everything would be overwhelming.” At other times “need-to-know” means, “We plan on telling as few people as possible.” The next section of this chapter addresses the conventional approach to the
study of phenomena related to hierarchies. Here we encounter nonhierarchical organizations and autonomouswork groups (once again), “reengineering the firm,” and the incredible saga of downsizing. Afterwards we will see that a closer look at relevant NDS theories make conflicting predictions about what does, or should, occur in a hierarchical work flow situation. Then come the (real-time) experiments where hierarchical workflows were studied from an NDS perspective. In the case of the downsizing experiment, we see the organization’s performance as naturally occurring chaos in a production situation, the hierarchical and codependent relationships among organizational subunits, self-organization, and the control of the system.
