Metadata
- Author: Harold J. Leavitt (psychologist in management)
- Full Title:: Why Hierarchies Thrive
- Category:: 🗞️Articles
- Document Tags:: DĂ©jame sin trabajo, por favor
- URL:: https://hbr.org/2003/03/why-hierarchies-thrive
- Finished date:: 2023-05-06
Highlights
Back in 1989, Peter Drucker predicted that the businesses of the future would be modeled on a symphony like Mahler’s Eighth, where a single conductor leads more than 1,000 musicians and singers without any intermediaries or assistants. (View Highlight)
The organizations of the knowledge economy—whether loosely coupled, networked, or federalized—seem to be no more than modifications of the same basic design (View Highlight)
Hierarchy, it seems, may be intrinsic to our natures. (View Highlight)
On a fundamental level, they don’t just enslave us, they also fulfill our deep needs for order and security. And they get big jobs done. (View Highlight)
Of course, hierarchies are terribly flawed. They inevitably foster authoritarianism and its destructive offspring: distrust, dishonesty, territoriality, toadying, and fear. Our ability to work effectively in hierarchies depends in large measure on how we deal with those dangers. (View Highlight)
This is the conflict: creativity with order
even above traditional grails like orderliness and productivity (View Highlight)
Large hierarchical companies are incorporating little hot groups, while expanding hot groups, like Apple and Yahoo!, have become more hierarchical. The big ones want some of the speed and agility of the little outfits, and the little ones—as they grow—have to capture some of the grownups’ stability and large-project capabilities. (View Highlight)
Again because of our chunking limit:
Hierarchy, of course, is not just an organizational construct. It is a phenomenon intrinsic to the complexity of the natural world. Indeed, all biological organisms are made up of systems—circulatory, skeletal, and respiratory—which themselves comprise many subsystems. Our mental processes are also often hierarchical, especially when we perform complicated tasks (View Highlight)
hierarchy is more than nature’s way of helping us to process complexity. (View Highlight)
hierarchies offer us report cards in the respectable form of performance appraisals, salary increases, promotions, bonuses, and stock options (View Highlight)
The wrong resaons!
Hierarchies give us more than these somewhat questionable measures of our worth; they give us an identity (View Highlight)
but most of us who work inside hierarchies take comfort from them. Like our families, communities, and religions, they help us define ourselves. They provide identity, a flag to fly. Write down—quickly, off the top of your head—three short answers to the question: “Who are you?” At least one of your answers will have something to do with your role in a hierarchy. (View Highlight)
Hierarchies add structure and regularity to our lives. They give us routines, duties, and responsibilities. We may not realize that we need such things until we lose them (View Highlight)
The phenomenon of authoritarianism makes it impossible for any manager to be “just one of the guys,” even with his own group, much less with people higher up the hierarchy (View Highlight)