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Communal-Rational Authority, Control, and Self-Managing Teams: Implications for Leadership
Introduction
The last few years have witnessed a dramatic increase in the number practitioners and scholars studying and implementing self-managing teams in a variety of different organizations. Naturally, our knowledge, both theoretical and applied, is dramatically proliferating along with this exploding interest in teamwork. A key area of interest in our study of self-management has been the character and the practice of leadership both within and outside the team.In my own study of teams, I have been fortunate to be able to draw on the years I spent as the "leader" of a self-managing team working for a large trucking company. The lessons I learned from this experience coupled with my on-going research into self-management and control have led to my concern with how we think about leadership in teams today. Briefly stated, I am concerned that we need to articulate our thinking about teamwork in terms of the type of authority that characterizes a self-managing environment and the control system that effectively "fits" such an environment. That is, I am concerned that we refrain from viewing "leadership" in isolation. Leadership on self-managing teams does not happen in an organizational vacuum. This leadership occurs within a particular system of control based on authority that the team members see as legitimate. And this system of control and authority indelibly shapes the character and practice of team leadership.
Elsewhere (Barker, 1993; Barker & Tompkins, 1994) I have argued that the term "concertive control" best characterizes the system of control that emerges in a team environment. The term "concertive" refers to the team members acting in concert with each other to develop a means of their own control. In this paper, I will argue that a particular form of authority, communal-rational authority, exists in a self-managing team environment. Communal-rational authority legitimizes the concertive control system that develops as teams mature. And team leaders have an important role to play in the development of an effective concertive control system.
For team leaders to function effectively in a concertive system that is legitimized by communal-rational authority, they must become skilled in facilitating three critical control functions:
- directing their fellow team members activity;
- monitoring their peers for compliance with the team's directions; and
- eliminating any behavioral deviance from the team's directions.
These three skills are all items that the traditional supervisor could do relatively easily. However, because of the form of authority that legitimizes control on self-managing teams, the team leader cannot "manage" in a traditional system. The team leader must lead a group of peers, and this leadership must be consistent with the system of control and the form of authority that develops in a self-managing environment. By framing team leadership in terms that are consistent with concertive control and communal-rational authority, we can more effectively teach leaders and organize our existing knowledge about leadership on teams.
To make these arguments, I will first explain the relationship between concertive control and communal-rational authority. I will detail how communal-rational authority draws from and builds on more familiar types of organizational authority. Next I will describe how this type of authority necessitates a special view of the three leadership skill areas listed above. Last I will discuss the implications that this perspective on authority and control has for assimilating our current knowledge about team leadership.
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Reprinted with permission from James R. Barker