Status Updates From Classics of Organization Th...

Managers are hired to be fired reflects a great amount of truth about all managers. one of the reasons for having a manager is to have someone who is responsible, accountable for the organization's activities and outcomes. If the manager has little influence over these activities or outcomes, it is still useful to hold him responsible. His firing itself may permit loosening some of the constraints facing the org.

Because attempts to control and coordinate activities in institutionalized organizations lead to conflicts and loss of legitimacy, elements of structure are decoupled from activities and from each other...Goals are made ambiguous or vacuous, and categorical ends are substituted for technical ends...the ability to coordinate things in violation of the rules—that is, to get along with other people—is highly valued.

...attention is focused on variables which are not included in any of the rational models—sentiments, cliques, social controls via informal norms, status, status striving, and so on. It is clear that students of informal organizations regard these variables not as random deviations or error, but as patterned, adaptive responses of human beings in problematic situations.

In a closed physical system the same initial conditions must lead to the same final result. In open systems this is not true even at the biological level. It is much less true at the social level. Yet in practice we insist that there is one best way...

Organizations are not, at their core, problems to be solved. Just the opposite. Every organization was created as a solution designed in its own time to meet a challenge or satisfy a need of society.

...the success of a hierarchy, or bureaucracy, can be costly. But whatever the financial cost, these protective mechanisms take over when individual contribution can be equitably assessed only through the somewhat more subtle form of bureaucratic surveillance...by comparison clans succeed when teamwork and change render individual performance almost totally ambiguous.

Culture is an abstraction, yet the forces that are created in social and organizational situations that derive from culture are powerful. If we don't understand the operation of these forces, we become victim to them...The bottom line for leaders is that if they do not become conscious of the cultures in which they are embedded, those cultures will manage them.

...the only thing of real importance that leaders do is to create and manage culture; that the unique talent of leaders is their ability to understand and work with culture; and that it is an ultimate act of leadership to destroy culture when it is viewed as dysfunctional. If one wishes to distinguish leadership from management...leadership creates and changes cultures, while management acts within a culture.

From the organizational culture perspective, systems of formal rules, authority, and norms of rational behavior do not restrain the personal preferences of organizational members. Instead, they are controlled by cultural norms, values, beliefs, and assumptions.

Understanding what it takes to have power and recognizing the classic behavior of the powerless can immediately help managers make sense out of a number of familiar organizational problems that are usually attributed to inadequate people.

Power is America's last dirty word. It is easier to talk about money--and much easier to talk about sex--than it is to talk about power. People who have it deny it; people who want it do not want to appear to hunger for it; and people who engage in its machinations do so secretly.

It is certainly much more noble to think of oneself as developing skills toward the more efficient allocation and use of resources-implicitly for the greater good of society as a whole-than to think of oneself as engaged with other organizational participants in a political struggle over values, preferences, and definitions of technology.

Organizations are complex systems of individuals and coalitions, each having its own interests, beliefs, values, preferences, perspectives, and perceptions. The coalitions continuously compete with each other for scarce organizational resources. Conflict is inevitable. Influence, as well as the power and political activities through which influence is acquired and maintained, is the primary weapon.

It is impossible to understand the nature of a formal organization without investigating the networks of informal relations and the unofficial norms as well as the formal hierarchy of authority and the official body of rules, since the formally instituted and the informally emerging patterns are inextricably intertwined.

The organic form, by departing from the familiar clarity and fixity of the hierarchic structure, is often experienced by [a] manager as an uneasy, embarrassed, or chronically anxious quest for knowledge about what he should be doing, or what is expected of him, and similar apprehensiveness about what others are doing. This kind of response is necessary if the organic form of organization is to work effectively.

In most work situations the meaning of a change is likely to be as important, if not more so, than the change itself...However, the meaning which these changes have for the worker is not strictly and primarily logical, for they are fraught with human feeling and values.

But as we inspect these formal structures we begin to see that they never succeed in conquering the non rational dimensions of organizational behavior. The latter remain at once indispensable to the continued existence of the system of coordination and at the same time the source of friction, dilemma, doubt, and ruin.

...the determination of the precise combination of incentives and persuasion that will be both effective and feasible is a matter of great delicacy. Indeed, it is so delicate and complex that rarely, if ever, is the scheme of incentives determinable in advance of application. It can only evolve...invariably external conditions affect the possibilities of material incentives and human motives are likewise variable

The sovereign is never entirely in command, and must sacrifice rational controls (and unitary goals) to accede to a variety of internal and external pressures. The best and most rational way to do things, in principle, may not be feasible in practice, depending on what competitive and supportive elements the environment supplies.