Mary Parker Folletts strategy as practice and leadership - Essay Example

Mary Parker Follett’s strategy as practice and leadership Introduction When Mary Parker Follett iterated that management involved accepting people based on their inheritance, tendencies, and environment, this guru of management philosophy was indicating that the traditional approach to management, the scientific approach, was no longer sufficient for strategic management. During the time period, it was widely accepted that proper management involved establishing efficiency systems, eliminating waste, and rationality that tended to view employees as tangible resources, whose job roles could be coordinated somewhat robotically and job activities measured quantitatively (Beissinger 1988). Micromanagement and establishing rigorous control systems to ensure performance were also part of the scientific management approach which led to conflict between management and employees (Mullins 2004). Follett was indicating that management involves acknowledgement of a variety of factors pertaining to worker characteristics that are inclusive of psychological needs and motivations and the sociological condition, thus defying scientific management’s effectiveness. Follett was attempting to illustrate that in order to create functional strategy and improve organisational performance, managers must develop leadership traits, avoiding the process of over-managing workers and instead seeking followership rather than command and control systems. This management philosopher, quite ahead of her time, saw organisations as complex organisms that required interaction between disparate manager and employee personalities and differing psychological tendencies in order to maximise employee productivity and commitment. This essay performs a critical appraisal of Mary Parker Follett’s assessment of the organisation, focusing specifically on the concepts of organisational complexity, the structure and purpose of complex adaptive systems, the impact of Follett’s viewpoint on leadership obligations and compares this to the practice perspective in real-world organisations. Based on the research on contemporary strategic management, human resources theory, and leadership perspectives, Follett’s assessment is absolutely logical and positively associated with the realistic activities and responsibilities of modern managers regarding the management of people in an organisational context. The complexity perspective It is the role of managers to develop strategy in order to outperform competition in an established market, improve organisational productivity, and even ensure higher revenue production whilst minimising waste. Strategy is therefore a planned process which is inclusive of determining an organisation’s long-run objectives, setting specific goals, and determining the most rational and productive course of action to achieve goals whilst also properly allocating the organisation’s resources in the most effective way (Kvint 2009). This is the logical and rather scientific approach to improving organisational productivity and achieving long-term goals. However, Mintzberg and Lampel (1999) define strategy as situations where management creates simple and concise strategies whereby everyone in the organisation is aligned to implement strategy. Hence, strategy would seem to be inclusive of not only setting logical activities and allocating resources, but including human capital as a methodology to obtain strategic goals. The effective implementation of strategy, therefore, is dependent on the human contributions toward achieving goals and objectives. This brings into the forefront of organisational consciousness the idea of organisations as being complex systems. Managers can no longer view employees as automatons, as machines that can be coordinated and controlled using autocratic management philosophy which was a predominating business theory perspective in the early 20th Century. What, however, makes organisations complex systems? Strategic managers, once setting responsibilities, objectives and goals, implement a wide variety of process and procedure changes in order to align the organisation with external market conditions. However, as noted by Ford, Ford and D’Amelio (2008) human beings in the organisation, from a psychological perspective, have a common tendency to resist change when it is executed. Managers, according to the authors, are subject to the irrational and illogical responses to change which can conflict achieving goals within the timeframe established (Ford et al. 2008). Hence, though in statistical format and from a theoretical perspective, strategic managers in the organisation might have a well-developed plan of action to achieve long-term goals, however employee behaviours and attitudes conflict the process which involves the need for establishing a more complex strategy to gain commitment, loyalty and motivation. Organisations are complex systems whereby employees cannot simply be given a direction with a set of consequences for failing to conform to policy and procedure associated with a strategic change initiative. Strategy development is not completely predictable as the psychological responses from employees in the organisational population conflicts or poses challenges to achieving a more scientific set of productivity and efficiency outcomes. Stacey (1993) indicates that any attempt to develop strategy using statistical relationships between human work activity and objectives is dubious and vision, therefore, becomes an illusion (Stacey). Why is this? Organisations must be considerate of internal culture and sociological dimensions that drive interpersonal relationship development in order to gain followership and willingness to fulfil employee roles related with achieving a strategic goal. Concurrently, the organisational management teams must be aware of competitive activity, the marketing needs of the business to properly position the organisation against competition, the resource and/or production capacity of the firm, and the structure that guides employee roles and obligations in order to achieve any notable strategy fulfilment. Hence, organisations must recognise the inter-dependency between internal factors and external market factors in order to achieve objectives related to new strategy formulation. This is due to the fact that organisations are rather chaotic, where enterprises are growing larger, information is arriving faster, and environments are evolving due to rapid globalisation. As a result, organisations never achieve a type of equilibrium but, instead, are constantly inundated with change needs to maintain relevancy in a competitive marketplace. What Mary Parker Follett was attempting to illustrate was the reality of organisations being dependent upon human capital to achieve strategic goals in the face of an environment that is disordered and relatively uncertain. As a result, managers would be ineffective if they did not take into consideration the complexities of human nature and human motivations as a component of strategic action development. Managers, traditionally, have embraced a management-by-objectives philosophy in which employees are given a set of potential rewards for meeting or exceeding job role expectations which is determined proactively prior to implementing change (Drucker 1986). However, human behaviour and psychological responses to change can create an anarchic organisational environment causing management to rethink strategies in order to rebuild a sense of trust in the organisation and its management teams and gain a legitimate desire for subordinate followership. If managers are to believe that once a strategic intention has been implemented that the organisation will achieve a smooth and effortless achievement of established goals, managers are undermining their own strategic prowess and will, ultimately, recognise failures in productivity, efficiency and achieving competitive advantage. The notion that strategic managers can simply list a set of clear objectives is a substantial oversight that is not sufficient for achieving employee productivity and motivation. The inter-dependencies in organisations, such as engaging customers using human support systems, ensuring effective utilisation of information technologies, the need for collaborative team functioning to achieve innovation production and a wide variety of other common organisational activities cannot be quantitatively determined. Mary Parker Follett was a pioneer in knowledge management theory, a process involving the capturing of information, sharing this data among disparate managers and employees, and effectively transforming this information into practical and relevant knowledge as a communal organisational whole. From a theoretical perspective, tacit knowledge holders in the organisation with specialised skills and expertise are able to transform knowledge to make it comprehensible and relevant (explicit) for those who are not experts in a particular domain of knowledge. Theoretically, knowledge management is a productive system of engaging the entire organisation and providing them with capital that enhances their talents and abilities in a cohesive organisational culture. However, Hislop (2009) iterates that knowledge management is not always facilitated without considerable conflicts and disagreements among organisational members. Some employees and managers feel that knowledge is only relevant when it is based on social systems whilst others strongly iterate that genuine and relevant knowledge should be based on factual data and quantitative measurement. Therefore, knowledge management often becomes a political issue that drives conflict and disagreement, as well as lack of collaboration, between disparate organisational members (Hislop). Many employees will feel that being inundated with knowledge not necessarily relevant to their job roles, and compliance measures established to ensure employees are accessing this information, is wasteful and will resist becoming part of a knowledge culture. This is what Follett was attempting to illustrate as it pertains to the complexity of organisational systems. Strategy is uncertain and is impacted by behavioural and personality-based differences of employees that are absolutely critical to achieving long-term goals and objectives in a business environment that is growing more complex and where there are more demands for achieving competitive advantage. Whilst in theory it should be highly advantageous to building a knowledge management system so as to improve human capital talents and improve inter-collaboration, when knowledge becomes an irrational political objective, strategic managers might witness ineffective strategic outcomes if they are not considerate of the inheritances and tendencies of diverse employees who are necessary as tools to achieve positive strategic outcomes. Complex adaptive systems and the development of leadership Though Follett was seemingly attempting to warn of the potential for ineffective strategic developments if managers were not considerate of human behavioural components, she did serve as an underpinning foundation for the theory of complex adaptive systems from an organisational perspective. The best method of defining these systems is that of collective wholes which, through evolution and collaboration, are able to adapt to changing external and internal factors. From a biological perspective, complex adaptive systems can be metaphorically compared to insect colonies, social colonies that achieve collective behaviours, such as with ants, which regulate their activities to service the whole in the face of changing environmental conditions (Camazine, Deneubourg, Franks, Sneyd, Theraulaz and Bonabeau 2001). As previously identified, in order to achieve long-run strategic goals, it is necessary for managers to be considerate of allocating human resources effectively. Historically, during the period of time in which Mary Parker Follett was considered a pioneer of management philosophy, it was common to have highly centralised hierarchies where information and decision-making moved horizontally with little (if any) consultation with subordinate employee groups. However, as organisational environments changed and competitive forces emerged in established markets, it was no longer practical to maintain the centralised hierarchy of control and, instead, induce inter-collaboration with a variety of employees in different fields of knowledge and levels of subordination. Hence, it was becoming necessary, in order to adapt to changing environmental conditions, for employees to establish complex social systems, for managers to consider the role of the interpersonal relationship between managers and employees, and focus on building a cohesive organisational culture to achieve strategic objectives. The main premise in complex adaptive systems is that such systems have a rich history. Individual human components as part of the holistic organisation learn from mistakes, make necessary evolutions, and the culture (as a whole) becomes co-responsible for the premises of current behaviours as a result of this adaptation (Cilliers 1998). Follett was iterating that in order to achieve strategic objectives, managers must embrace the disparities and diversity of employees to build a unified organisational culture that is dedicated to achieving strategic mission or vision whilst also recognising the challenges of human behaviour as an element that can conflict or enhance group inter-collaboration. Fairholm (2009) iterates that in order to build such a cohesive culture, it is necessary for managers to be visionary, role model desired behaviours (for trust development), open lines of communication and consult employees in various decision-making processes. This assessment has management taking on the role of leader rather than controller whereby a variety of strategies are developed to ensure that employees are involved in coming up with contingency alternatives, are willing to share knowledge co-dependently, are motivated to improve their productivity, and learn from emergent mistakes that guide more productive job role behaviours and attitudes. There is a theory in psychology that serves to explain how employees become willing to learn and adapt to changing conditions known as Constraint Theory. This theory indicates that humans have their own filtering system as it pertains to the learning process and will, at the cognitive level, shut out any information that they deem irrelevant or extraneous (Desforges and Lings 1998). This is a type of bias that can be detrimental to gaining a cohesive organisational culture, especially as it pertains to a knowledge-sharing culture. Follett was attempting to illustrate these biases and challenges of human behaviour as it pertains to the learning and collaboration process that warns managers that it will be impossible to achieve strategic goals without taking into consideration that employees have their own unique tendencies that reject or accept learning. Though emergent understandings of historical failures are iterated by managers or leaders, employees may have their own unique biases about the relevancy of these understandings and refuse to change behaviours, a phenomenon illustrated by Ford, et al. (2008) related to change resistance. Hence, in order to be a genuinely complex adaptive system, there must be human support and willingness to conform to organisational or job role-related evolutions with a dedication and commitment to servicing a collective whole that is focused on achieving strategic goals. Mary Parker Follett, even in her timeframe, recognised the complexity of human attitude and psychological tendencies which served as caution for how managers should go about building an organisational culture and the method by which employees are consulted and/or managed. This is why the concept of leadership is now a fundamental part of strategic human resources as, in order to reduce inherent change resistance tendencies and properly motivate employees, managers must appeal to the minds and hearts of employees and reinforce that they are considered to be valuable contributors to the entire organisational model (Armstrong 2007). Strategic managers that do not engage employees in this positive fashion, with open communications systems and feedback that praises positive performance (as only two leadership examples), will be unable to build the collective adaptive system necessary in an environment where change is constant and environmental conditions require evolution in order to build organisational performance and productivity. The practice perspective Theory, versus practice, often illustrates that managerial activities and obligations are exposed to a need for evolution that defies a more scientific approach to strategic management. “Genuine know-how is revealed in practice and created out of practice” (Strategic Aims 2008, p.3). Many theoretical models, such as the systems view and scientific management, offer a variety of models that tend to view the organisation as being statistically operational, meaning that management can quantitatively determine role allocation, resource allocation, establish operational procedures, and even control productivity levels in a fashion that is fluid and effortless. However, tangible elements associated with social theory, psychological theory, and even chaos theory indicate that the organisational environment is filled with uncertainties, ambiguities and complications that involve human behaviour and leader-follower communications effectiveness (as only two relevant examples). For instance, a strategic leader may determine that the best course of action for an organisation is to radically change manufacturing policy to include a three-shift system which changes a traditional two-shift, 12-hour system. As a result, to achieve strategic objectives or maintain competitive advantage, the manager is forced to restructure the organisation to sustain eight-hour shifts for all of its employees to meet production output expectations. Theoretically, this should be a viable system that ensures, still, a 24-hour production system with flawless strategic results. What Follett warned, in the aforementioned example, is that human tendencies could easily conflict the effectiveness of practice versus theoretical management activity. Employees who had long-since established social lives or familial lifestyles accustomed to working 12-hour production shifts would find their interpersonal scenarios radically affected by new working conditions and schedules, hence decreasing motivation, commitment, trust or even productivity. The manager, who used traditional models of scientific management as a means of developing a course of action to achieve new strategic goals, would learn only through practice that maintaining a consideration for what drives human motivation is the only methodology of obtaining desired strategic outcomes. Follett, again, asserts that managers must develop team functioning and establish a collaborative organisational culture in order to create positive outcomes. She seems to be aware that practice is quite different from theoretical management philosophy with each and every strategic decision implemented being impacted or challenged by human characteristics and behaviours. Managers, as another example, might find that the organisation requires a focus on innovation production and, therefore, demands collaboration with many different employees. However, in practice, the manager discovers that there is continuing conflict and disagreement in these collaborative sessions which not only conflicts innovation production, but establishes long-term problems in the social environment with employees carrying weighty animosities against one another. The practice perspective illustrates that effective and realistic strategic developments are borne of experience and are not always congruent and productive with theoretical management philosophy. Conclusion As illustrated, Follett’s assessment of the relevancy of human inheritances, their environments and tendencies as an influence in strategic development is quite relevant and provides a substantial foundation for how managers should, today, be tackling strategic management. Human behavioural components are highly influential in whether or not a strategic objective is achieved and if managers want to create a series of effective strategic outcomes, they cannot accomplish this in a proverbial vacuum without the assistance and motivations of support employees in the organisational population. Without understanding the dimensions of personality, socialisation and psychology, managers will be unable to build a type of human capital competency that is absolutely vital in tangible practice, but not always recognised in traditional management theory. Managers must, in order to properly engage employees, take on leadership characteristics, promote knowledge dissemination that is deemed relevant to the cohesive organisational whole and utilise human resources-based strategies to ensure that complex and uncertain systems become adaptive systems with people focused on achieving long-term goals through collaboration and dedication. Follett warns of this far ahead of her time and should be commended for this foresight. References Armstrong, M. (2007). Armstrong’s handbook of strategic human resource management, 5th edn. London: Kogan Page. Beissinger, M.R. (1988). Scientific management, socialist discipline and Soviet power. London: I.B. Tauris & Co Ltd. Camazine, S., Deneubourg, J., Franks, N.R., Sneyd, J., Theraulaz, G. and Bonabeau, E. (2001) Self-organization in biological systems. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Cilliers, P. (1998). Complexity and postmodernism: understanding complex systems. Abingdon: Routledge. Desforges, C. and Lings, P. (1998). Teaching knowledge application: advances in theoretical conceptions and their professional implications, British Journal of Educational Studies, 46, pp.386-398. Drucker, P.F. (1986). The Practice of Management. New York: Harper Collins. Fairholm, M. (2009), Leadership and organisational strategy, The Public Sector Innovation Journal, 14(1), pp.26-27. 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