As hierarchy is also viewed as power, it may be useful to visualize a pyramidal power structure, where those nearest the top have more power than those nearest the bottom, and there being fewer people at the top than at the bottom.
The phenomenon is traditionally observed in religion:
· there is one god who commands, but cannot be commanded;
· in government: the federal section controls the state section;
· at work: your boss tells you what to do, and his boss tells him what to do, but you don't tell anyone what to do until you get promoted.
Power is classified in different ways: as primary and secondary; formal and informal; delegated authority, charisma, expertise etc. Traditionally power in the organization is differentiated as formal and informal. The first one is the superior's power as part of his official position in the organization. The second type is the leader's informal power whereas the leader is a person who has the greatest influence on the members of the organization. He personifies the group norms, values, patterns of behaviour and supports them. An informal leader is a member of the social organization regarded by a group of people as an expert, authority or supporter of the questions the group is interested in. That's why informal power is based on the personal qualities of the individual, his authority as a personal characteristic of the personality. Authority means people's voluntary abeyance to one of them due to his peculiar individual qualities. At appointing a superior, the top management tries to take into account the possibility of combining both formal and informal leaders in one person.
Of interest here is authority as a type of power. In politics, authority generally refers to the ability to make laws, independent of the power to enforce them, or the ability to permit something. People obey authority out of respect, while they obey power out of fear. For example, “the congress has the authority to pass laws” versus “the police have the power to arrest law-breakers”. Authority needn't be consistent or rational, it only needs to be accepted as a source of permission or truth.
Authority is sub-divided into three types as suggested by M. Weber:
· traditional authority which simply derives from long-established habits and social structures, for instance, the right of hereditary monarchs to rule;
· charismatic authority: from time to time, people make claims of heading a revolution of some kind (which is always against an established social system). When followers take such claims seriously, this is charismatic authority because religious or political authority that does not flow from tradition or law, but instead thrives on the short-lived desire of social change. The careers of Lenin, Martin Luther, Hitler, and Lech Waікsa provide examples. Charismatic authority never lasts long even when it is successful and it inevitably gives way to either traditional or to legal-rational authority;
· legal-rational authority depends for its legitimacy on formal rules which are usually written down, and often very complex. Modern societies depend on legal-rational authority.
· nonprofits focus more on fund-raising from donors, for instance, contributions, grants etc. while for-profits - on fund-raising from investors;
· although they both have boards of directors, in for-profits the board members are more highly trained and experienced than in nonprofits, where board members are often volunteers who bring strong passion for the nonprofit mission;
· nonprofits focus more on volunteer management but volunteers are managed much like employees, for instance, with job descriptions, policies etc.;
· as for finances, nonprofits focus on human capital whereas for-profits focus on monetary capital. Nonprofits have certain unique accounts (usually grants) that can only be spent on certain activities. However, both types of organizations carry out very similar basic bookkeeping activities;
· they are different in taxes.
Social organizations can also be differentiated on the basis of a branch of their activities (industrial, financial, agricultural, transport, trading etc), level of independence in making decisions (holding, affiliated or subsidiary etc). According to management science, most human organizations fall roughly into four types: pyramids or hierarchies; committees or juries; matrix organizations and ecologies.
Another important classification with the focus on the character of interactions and relations existing in the organization identifies formal and informal organizations. Formal organizations are large secondary groups that are legally registered and rationally designed to achieve specific objectives. Informal organizations are secondary groups which for their minority or any other reason are not legally registered. They comprise groups of people who are cohered by personal interests in culture, sports, recreation etc., headed by a leader and not involved in activities designed to get material profits.
Formal organizations are so dominant that they are created to supervise and coordinate other organizations. They fulfill a variety of personal and social needs and vary in size. As they are designed for efficiency they have a carefully designed structure based on formal division of labour represented in the system of statuses, or jobs. Each job has a number of specific functions so that all tasks are distributed among members of the organization. Due to their similarity, job functions are grouped into a hierarchical structure on the principle of “superior and supervised” or a ladder of dependences of the lower ones (subordinates) to the upper ones (authorities).
Formal organizations regulate their activities by various means such as programs, patterns of official behaviour, principles and norms of reward etc. They have boards of directors and the management. Formal organizations are rational by nature as they are designed to achieve specific objectives and impersonal as their members are designed to enter into exceptionally official relations.
However, formal organizations tend to turn to bureaucracy. M. Weber considered the formation of bureaucracy, or the management as the major aspect of rationalization. Bureaucracy refers to the way that the administrative execution and enforcement of legal rules is socially organized. Examples of everyday bureaucracies include governments, armed forces, corporations, hospitals, courts, ministries, or schools.
The German sociologist believed that bureaucracy in its ideal type should be governed by the following 7 principles:
1. Formal division of labour determined by regularized procedures: each enterprise or company has a full description of duties performed by its director, personnel manager, line managers or empoyees.
2. Hierarchy of authority: every official's responsibilities and authority are part of a vertical hierarchy of authority, with respective rights of supervision and appeal. In any company, the vertical hierarchy includes top management, middle management and first-line managers executing control over workers.
3. The public office (bureau) as the basis of bureaucracy because it is the place where all written documents (electronic papers in modern companies) about the organization's activities are collected.
4. The formal procedure of the officials' training. The requirements to training a secretary are relatively simple while the programs of training top or middle managers are rather long and complex.
5. Permanent staff as employees who are working for the organization on a continous basis (for as long period of time as possible) and devoted themselves to it, i. e. work for this very organization is their main occupation.
6. Established rules and regulations: they may regulate the beginning and end of work, dinner and coffee breaks, leaves etc. In some organizations, for instance, at university such rules are described in detail: the beginning and end of the academic year, timetable of each shift, each pair, winter and summer sessions, holidays etc.
7. The member's commitment to the organization as his strive to share and demonstrate the organizational rules and procedures. It needn't be commitment or loyalty to the top manager or any other member of the organization.
Governing the formal organization by these principles makes its members' behaviour predictable and helps the management to coordinate their activities. In turn, predictability and coordination are the main factors enabling to increase the organization's efficiency and labour productivity. M. Weber considered high economic efficiency as the main advantage of bureaucracy. He described the ideal type of bureaucracy in positive terms, emphaizing continious character of the managerial process, undivided authority, subordination, expertise, exactness, quickness, official secrecy (know-how) and minimum conflicts.
At the same time some sociologists such as T. Parsons, A. Gouldner etc. identified a number of disadvantages of bureaucracy. For instance, division of labour may lead to trained incapacity; hierarchy of authority - to authoritarianism, communication disruption, and oligarchy. Another unintended consequence is a contradiction between a bureaucratic organization of management and creative activities of its members, capability to introduce innovations. Written rules and regulations may be inefficient in unusual or creative cases, when employees are demanded to work to the rule (the famous red tape), because knowledge and creativity cannot be transferred under order.
Management in the organization
Страницы: 1, 2, 3
