The Manager's Dilemma
The origins of management hierarchy in large organizations probably have their roots in ego. At some point, someone pointed at someone else and said, "He needs a manager. He needs to be controlled, kept in line, instructed...and I'm just the guy to do it!"
That's not to decry organizational hierarchy. To say it's born of self-importance, whether reasonable or not, is only to say it's quintessentially human.
These hierarchies, while they have some major drawbacks, exist for a few reasons. Since they originated in the military, there's obviously a chain-of-command that's in place by design. Orders come from on high, and trickle down the layers of people to those at the bottom where, eventually, someone actually does some work.
It's not clear whether a company producing consumer goods or software necessarily needs a chain-of-command. In these situations, my guess is that hierarchy exists to control the flow of information. Tasks requiring groups of people to accomplish them are allocated to silos of people, and information flows from top to bottom, and vice versa. This keeps everyone in the loop. (At least, in theory.)
I do wonder if this could be superseded. As a society that's become permeated by the Internet, we're moving away from more traditional social systems to sociotechnical systems. As is characteristic of all computerized social systems, interactions produce a substantial, and ever-persisted, trail of data. This is usually perceived as a threat to privacy, so it seems like a drawback.
If everyone in your company is communicating with each other using a private social network to interact with someone, then all you need to do to stay in the loop is keep up on reading a news feed.
Of course, I'm oversimplifying. In any company of substantial size, some things will need to be made private. Some people need to be in charge of an organization, to make the tough decisions that would make everyone else in the company uncomfortable. Cutting spending on the company health benefits for employees, for example, will likely always happen behind closed doors.
But have any smaller companies experimented with computerized systems to let teams of people coordinate amongst themselves? Or to have departments coordinate between each other?
That's not to decry organizational hierarchy. To say it's born of self-importance, whether reasonable or not, is only to say it's quintessentially human.
These hierarchies, while they have some major drawbacks, exist for a few reasons. Since they originated in the military, there's obviously a chain-of-command that's in place by design. Orders come from on high, and trickle down the layers of people to those at the bottom where, eventually, someone actually does some work.
It's not clear whether a company producing consumer goods or software necessarily needs a chain-of-command. In these situations, my guess is that hierarchy exists to control the flow of information. Tasks requiring groups of people to accomplish them are allocated to silos of people, and information flows from top to bottom, and vice versa. This keeps everyone in the loop. (At least, in theory.)
I do wonder if this could be superseded. As a society that's become permeated by the Internet, we're moving away from more traditional social systems to sociotechnical systems. As is characteristic of all computerized social systems, interactions produce a substantial, and ever-persisted, trail of data. This is usually perceived as a threat to privacy, so it seems like a drawback.
If everyone in your company is communicating with each other using a private social network to interact with someone, then all you need to do to stay in the loop is keep up on reading a news feed.
Of course, I'm oversimplifying. In any company of substantial size, some things will need to be made private. Some people need to be in charge of an organization, to make the tough decisions that would make everyone else in the company uncomfortable. Cutting spending on the company health benefits for employees, for example, will likely always happen behind closed doors.
But have any smaller companies experimented with computerized systems to let teams of people coordinate amongst themselves? Or to have departments coordinate between each other?