Michael Lee - Management, Harvard Business School
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"Empowering Bureaucracy: Achieving non-hierarchical control and employee autonomy through dynamic formalized roles"
As organizations move from more hierarchical to less hierarchical authority structures, they also tend to reduce formalization of work roles. Sometimes called “organic” designs – these structures enable high degrees of employee autonomy at the expense of organizational control. This paper, an inductive qualitative case study, presents and analyzes an alternative to the organic structure. Specifically, the organization I studied adopted a radically decentralized authority structure along with a set of participatory formalizing practices that led to a substantial increase in role formalization. Prior theory would view such an organizational configuration as a logical contradiction, with the benefits of decentralization neutralized by the increase in formalization. In contrast, I propose that the newly formalized roles, which were formalized through a participatory process and frequently revised as work contingencies arose, were used by employees in day-to-day work to support both organizational control and employee autonomy. This study’s key insight is that dynamic, formal role structures can provide adequate constraints to achieve control without hierarchical authority and that by providing clear boundaries within which individuals can exercise discretion, such role structures can enhance, rather than limit, employee autonomy. These findings have implications for research on organizational structure, non-hierarchical control, and employee autonomy.