Degeneration and Transition

Stage-2: Structuralist

The PRAGMATIC → STRUCTURALIST transition is a forceful process that feeds back positively on itself. Work on a daily basis substantiates and reinforces the values of clear roles and responsibilities, handled by staff with matching capabilities, combined with sensible reporting arrangements.

In Stage-2, management is not only buttressed by the sensible, distributed commitment to do all necessary work, it can be at least as expedient and dynamic as in a purely pragmatic culture.  

With a strong, coherent direction, efficiency is up, fire-fighting is down and gains are unmistakable. However, slowly but inexorably, friction and tensions start to increase. Chief executives become somewhat disturbed, when they discover that their best people are increasingly focused on building their empires and fighting each other for spoils. Organizational goals seem in danger of being forgotten.

The structuralist stage, much like the pragmatic, seems to be highly prone to degeneration, but this time the descent is into a competitive-cum-bureaucratic nightmare.

Individual accountability degenerates into Empire-building.
e.g. ►

Accountability starts to become: controlling ever bigger budgets and ever more staff on an ever higher salary. (Some bodies perversely encourage empire-building by pegging salary to budget or numbers of staff being managed.) Unhealthy competition increases, with each department and discipline defending its turf and ignoring the good of the whole. Eventually a divisive and even alienated atmosphere permeates the organization.

Procedural control degenerates into Rigidity.
e.g. ►

Procedures start becoming inflexible. More and more rules and red-tape are introduced to consolidate control.

Assigned authority degenerates into Pulling rank.
e.g. ►

Because structures deliberately compartmentalize and divide an organization, boundary issues between roles and between departments generate tensions.  The result is to reduce delegation, prevent cross-departmental working, disrupt autonomy and stifle personal initiative. Authority produces greater disconnection in values and objectives.

Minimal hierarchy degenerates into Status preoccupations.
e.g.

Status replaces a concern for achievement. Levels start to proliferate. Elitism and pecking order problems develop. Attendance in teams and at meetings becomes politicized.

Teams and meetings degenerate into Bureaucracy.
e.g. ►

All operations become bogged down in memos, minutes, reports, form-filling and other manifestations of bureaucratic paperwork and pettiness.

Autonomy degenerates into Disconnected silos.
e.g. ►

Leadership becomes mechanistic or rigid and remote, as managers lose contact with goals, facts and people. Although members suffer personally if the organization fails, departmental and disciplinary loyalties may be so strong that they push the organization to the brink.

Professional expertise degenerates into Know-it-all arrogance.
i.e. ►

As impersonality increases in social dealings, so the autonomy generated by roles creates further disconnection.  Experts become increasingly unmanageable in meetings, due to their superior and denigrating know-it-all attitude.

Where to Next?

The time to start the next stage of organizational development is when the new functional and departmental hierarchies not only develop sharply different perspectives on issues affecting the whole organization but fight for them to the point of avoiding discussions.

These tribe-like values do not put the well-being of the organization first. But just opposing tribalism does not work: ►

Senior managers who simply reject tribalism, or view it as irrational and unnecessary, will evoke deep and counter-productive anxieties in those on whom they depend. Many who take this «anti-politics» stance tend to deny their own tribalism and become in danger of lapsing into power plays as a substitute for managing.

As soon as inter-departmental conflicts and occupational tribalism are accepted as intrinsic to the organizational life, a limited number of choices emerge.

► Relax the stringency of structural principles but ►

this lets pragmatic manoeuvring and cut-and-thrust dominate. But this would be to give up on strengthening the management culture, so this just re-energizes past problems.

► Strive to suppress differences and emphasize commonalities, but ►

professionals and departments are properly proud of their distinctiveness and rightly determined to fight for their views. So this is simply unworkable.

► Buttress structural values with a new set of management values affirming the need to deal directly and positively with differences of perspective. So ►

this is the only sensible option: and it defines the Dialectic mode of achievement.

Note: The 4 other modes—rationalist, empiricist, imaginist, systemicist—are not possible because: they all assume and depend upon the absence or resolution of entrenched clashes which could bring the organization almost to a standstill. So none of them can solve the problems of structuralist degeneration.

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• Continue to the Dialectic Mode and Stage-3.

Originally posted: 17-Jun-2011