Home Organizational Psychology Leadership Leading into the Future XIa: Can the Center Hold Given the Challenge of Size and Complexity?

Leading into the Future XIa: Can the Center Hold Given the Challenge of Size and Complexity?

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There is an important distinction to be made regarding complexity in the modern and postmodern organization. While modern organizations may become very large and might require multiple operations far-flung around the world, they remained remarkably simply in their structure and operations. Most of these organizations followed the standard formulation of hierarchy and standardization. There would be an operation manual, legally required job descriptions, and standard performance review procedures.

While these orderly policies and procedures might have been violated on occasion (or frequently in those corporations where worker/management tensions existed), there was at least the goal of standardization: everyone was to obey the rules no matter how high up they were in the organization. The nepotism of family-run businesses was discouraged (even outlawed) and the mythic “democratization of the workplace” was in place: “no one is about the law or free from the company rule book”. Along with this democratization comes an ironic juxtaposition: “I am treated as an equal with every other member of the organization, but in becoming just like everyone else I seem to be losing my own distinctive identity.” Modern leaders were faced with the problem of avoiding the personal alienation of those employed in their organization while insuring uniformity and equity of treatment.

Then . . . . along came the late 20th Century and early 21st Century, complete with the computer, Internet and the flattened, boundary-violating world described by Thomas Friedman (2005). Size and complexity suddenly became major challenges for leaders of the postmodern organization. How exactly do we manage the growth of our organizations and how are we to plot and navigate the best course through a complex organization and world?  It is to the nature of these challenges that I turn in this essay and the additional essays in this set. I set the stage for this analysis, as I will do in each set of essays, by considering some of the wise observations made major theorists and researchers in the fields of psychology and management as they viewed organizational life from several different vantage points.

The major question to be faced by those who are leaders of the future—and the fundamental question  to be asked in this first essay (and in the remaining essays in this set) is simple and fundamental: how does the center of the organization hold given the variable size and high levels of complexity to be found in the organization? How does a leader successfully retain the founding purposes and values of their organization midst uncertainty, turbulence and ambiguity?

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