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Communal-Rational Authority, Control, and Self-Managing Teams: Implications for Leadership
Concertive Control and Communal-Rational Authority
The emergence of the self-managing design has radically reshaped our thinking about the possibilities of action in the modern organization. Today we practically assume as a matter of course that the team-based organization heralds a new work design that will transcend the stultifying affects of bureaucratic authority, the core base of the modern organization, and replace it with a dynamic new design based upon an open, flexible authority structure that extends from a consunsual, normative ideology, not a system of formal rules (Alvesson, 1987; Lawler, 1989; Parker, 1992).Several organizational theorists have touched on the role of authority in the team-based organization. Normally, these theorists "touch on" authority by describing elements of how the team-based organization controls member behavior. For example, Mintzberg (1980; 1989) described the appearance of organizations designed around ideological structures, interpersonally enacted systems of norms and beliefs rather than the traditional, hierarchically-mandated systems of standards an procedures. Ideology, in this sense, refers to the interactive (an inherently persuasive) process of exerting influence by promoting or assimilating particular attitudes, values, and behavioral norms. Ideology, then, provides a means for both worker motivation and control (Morgan, 1986).
Ouchi (1980) saw the rise of "clan-like" organizations that socialized their members according to implicit ideological traditions which produce for the workers a culturally coherent "point of view." This "point of view" functions as a theory for the workers that defines what is and is not appropriate behavior at work:
A member who grasps such an essential theory can deduce from it an appropriate rule to govern any possible decision, thus producing a very elegant and complete form of control. (1980, p. 139)
Tompkins and Cheney (1985) described "concertive" organizations in ways similar to that of Mintzberg and Ouchi. They characterized some contemporary organizations as fostering collaborative behavior by framing organizational roles and expected behaviors around traditional common value systems. Employees work in "concert" with each other as guided by the value system, which calls out powerful decision premises. The strength of these traditional value systems constrains worker behaviors in ways functional for the organization.
This term "concertive" best describes control in the self-managing environment. As discussed earlier, team members must work closely in "concert" with each other. They control their behaviors through a complex system of values, norms, and rules (Barker, 1993). Leaders in the team environment must work to facilitate the effective development of the team's concertive system. They must ensure that concertive control works for them, not against them.
Because of the character of a concertive control environment, workers in a team-based system will experience work and enact their job related behaviors in terms of their own value-based norms and beliefs rather than from the traditional, hierarchical-based, system of job standards and procedures so often associated with work organizations. This means that the concertive design initiates a substantive change in the adoptive organization's formal authority structure. Authority, in the traditional sense, refers to that which legitimately influences, governs, or determines an actor's behavior in an organization (Barnard, 1968; Simon, 1976). Most often and very familiar to us, our conceptualizations of authority in work organizations stem form Weber's (1978) model of rational-legal (or bureaucratic) rules and hierarchical directives. Workers shape their job behaviors around the rational set of procedures and standards (the "rules") for productive performance as mandated by the organization's hierarchy.
The concertive, team-based, organization asserts a more egalitarian form of authority. Here authority stems from the team's values and the socially constructed behavioral norms and beliefs it produces rather than from the most rationally efficient method of doing work or from an unquestioned managerial directive. Socializing and assimilating new members to these norms, beliefs, and values is more important for the team than learning the "rational" procedures and standards. Thus, the emerging concertive design changes organizational authority from the classical (and traditionally observed) rational and hierarchical (bureaucratic) model common to work organizations to a more negotiated authority model centered on values and enacted norms and beliefs.
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Reprinted with permission from James R. Barker