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Communal-Rational Authority, Control, and Self-Managing Teams: Implications for Leadership
Rational Authority in the Concertive Organization
In my study of ISE (Barker, 1993), I argued that self-managing teams will develop value-based norms and then, over time, standardized rules for team behavior, such as decision making. Teams will socialize and assimilate their members into these norms and rules. Thus, the value-based norms become "rationalized"; that is, easily understandable for new members coming onto the team. These rules then function to legitimize a powerful system of control over both new and old team members alike. In the concertive organization, team members normally create this set of rational rules themselves instead of having it thrust upon them by a traditional supervisor. The team leader must assist the team with creating functional rules, rules that work for them. On the other hand, the team leader must help the team to avoid creating unnecessary rules that will ultimately keep the team from acting quickly and effectively.In the team design, this normative process of creating new forms of rational authority stems from the interactions of the team members over time. Team members make their own decisions, gather their own information, and take collective responsibility for their team's performance. For team members to accomplish this, they must form patterns of behaviors that they can all understand and user to help them make sense of the work environment. This is an example of the process Weick (1979) called "organizing":
Organizing is like a grammar [controlling rules] in the sense that it is a systematic account of some rules and conventions by which sets of interlocked behaviors assembled to form social processes that are intelligible to actors. It is also a grammar in the sense that it consists of rules for forming variables and causal linkages into meaningful structures... that summarize the recent experience of the people who are organized. (Pp. 3-4)
This process manes that the team will invent their own set of rational normative rules, based on their original value consensus and norms, for how to act in ways functional for the organization.
The example I used above to demonstrate the influence of communal authority on the teams also shows the rational authority of these normative behaviors. When a problem arose, the team had a normative system for dealing with it; the team leader called a brief meeting, and the team decided to work overtime to meet the customer's needs. They also had behavioral patterns for ensuring that their decision works. A team member coordinated for late shipping. Another member arranged for the building to be opened. In this situation, the team members would experience interpersonal pressure to work overtime to help ensure that the team meets its collective commitment to its customer. This system of functional behaviors extends from a negotiated ideology based on the team's values and not from a set of objective bureaucratic rules.
This rational system of rules exerts influence on (or, is granted authority by) team members for several reasons. First, the team members have enacted these rules from their original value consensus, as based upon the company's mission statement. The communal authority of their value consensus legitimizes how the team makes their rational rules. Second, as I have discussed, the normative rules that the teams develop are rational. They are enactable behaviors that allow the team to work on its own and still be productive. The team members see these behavioral rules as the legitimate ways of working together as a team. Third, because the team's behaviors have elements of communal and rational authority, the team can legitimately demand willful obedience to these negotiated rules as a condition of team membership. A member who does not follow these rules, such as a person who refuses to work overtime (with no acceptable excuse) in the above example, will face increasing pressure from the team members either to behave by their rules or leave the team. For example, as one work team worker as ISE told me, "Poor performers don't last." Another team worker, described to me how the team members take on leadership roles to sanction their own behavior:
We've had occasions where we've had a person say, 'I refuse to sit on the [assembly] line.' And we had to remind him, 'Hey, you are a part of the team and you go where you're needed and you do it.' (Barker, 1993, p. 425)
Essentially, these normative behaviors create a discipline for the team members to follow. Discipline, in this sense, refers to organizing collective behavior to make it purposeful, functional, and controlled (Barker & Cheney, 1994). The patterns of normative behaviors enacted by the team "disciplines" their actions so that the team functions effectively (makes its own decisions, solves its own problems, supervises its own behaviors, etc.). Again, the leader's role here is to ensure that this discipline is working for the team, not against it. To work, the team-based, concertive, system team design needs legitimacy from both communal values and disciplined, rational behaviors. The team's rational behavior enacted from their value consensus provides the concertive control system, its essential source of rational authority.
As with communal values, rational rules and the authority they entail play an important role in the concertive design. Here the rules are normative behaviors negotiated by the team members within the context of the organization's ideology as opposed to bureaucratic standards mandated by the hierarchy. The team's value-based, rational rules, which the team members themselves have negotiated, create a new rationality that allows the concertive organization to function with out the constraints common to more bureaucratic designs. These negotiated behavioral rules allow the team to make quick decisions, adapt to changing conditions and crises, and increases productivity. The organization streamlines its structure while workers increase their commitment to the company and its product. While the rules have changed on the surface, from bureaucratic to negotiated, the underlying authority of the rules, rationality, has not changed.
The concertive, team-based organization draws its legitimizing authority form a blend of communal values and rational rules. That is, team members develop a legitimate system of control by negotiating consensus on particular communal values and by developing a system of normative rules form these values. Team leaders must learn within the constraints of this form of legitimized authority. While this form of authority blends and builds on Weber's original forms of organizational authority, communal-rational authority is till different in its own right. And it brings with it a particular set of leadership requirements.
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Reprinted with permission from James R. Barker.