Guide to the Section (QH2)

Your Background. The hierarchy of work-responsibility in formal organizations was discovered by Elliott Jaques and Wilfred Brown. If you are familiar with this work, you may prefer to start with managing in organizations. If you do not have knowledge or experience of large organizations, it may be easier to follow the order shown below. Be warned: the material may be difficult for anyone not conversant with the subject.

Methods for Managing Work Situations

Once the essence of work as responsibility is established, it becomes possible to take a new look at core issues of its management (PH'5QH2)—as distinct from issues related to doing work, which is based on decision and action (PH'1):
seeClosed achievement (PH'1CK), expectations of employment (PH'1CsH), and employment tensions (PH'1CsHK).

The natural taxonomic progression starts from methods for managing work situations. These methods can be used by anyone who takes responsibility for that work.

This set of ways is a Subsidiary Typology. The 7 methods/Types can therefore be plotted on a Typology Essentials Table (TET) to reveal further properties, affinities and antagonisms.

As usual, a derived spiral for managing increasing complexity can be developed. It is the taxonomic origin for the hierarchy of discrete management levels in organizations that follows.

Structuring Management in Organizations

Start with an overview of how 7 work levels are identified within large organizations.

Then get into details of how these levels must be formulated in terms of needs to be met and responses to be made. Examples of responsibility are provided in terms of tasks, jobs and organizations.

  • Various issues immediately arise and several are dealt with here.

From this base, it becomes possible to clarify:

Further Derived Frameworks

Accountability Dynamics for Organizations

Work was initially defined in terms of accountability. Once people are in roles, management decisions start being made to ensure that the mission and its values are converted into desired outcomes via outputs. This reveals a dynamic duality that affects how managers interact with each other as they act to discharge their accountability. The processes can be mapped via a THEE Tree framework.

Organisation of Management in Organizations

Having clarified the management of organizations, it becomes necessary to ensure the organisation of managementwithin organizations. The complexity of a large organization is mind-boggling. Simply structuring it appropriately is difficult enough, but once designed there are so many issues: differences of view about how to proceed, a multiplicity of different expert disciplines, resistance to change, diverse needed resources, the sheer cussedness of things, pressures from the social environment, and much else—it all seems to conspire against success.

However, the taxonomy provides a Framework via a THEE Structural Hierarchy that deals systematically and thoroughly with all these matters.

Participation: Socio-emotional Dynamics of Organizations

The organisation of management identifies unavoidable pressures, even as it unifies and integrates staff at all levels. In addition, handling the various systems spontaneously activates a tension between the individual's autonomy and the organization's need to compel. By treating the Groupings in the Structural Hierarchies as Levels in a Tree, and applying this tension, it is possible to determine interactions that are intrinsic to participation. These are permanent and perennial features of managing in organizations. Handled well, they produce positive socio-emotional states. Handled poorly, they lead to negative social-emotional states.

Originally posted:5-Nov-2013