The Basic Building Blocks of Organizational Structure

The emergence and disappearance of fads appears to be a predictable aspect of modern society. A fad arises when some element of popular culture becomes enthusiastically embraced by a group of people. Over the past few decades, for example, fashion fads have included leisure suits (1970s), "Members Only" jackets (1980s), Doc Martens shoes (1990s), and Crocs (2000s). Ironically, the reason a fad arises is also usually the cause of its demise. The uniqueness (or even outrageousness) of a fashion, toy, or hairstyle creates "buzz" and publicity but also ensures that its appeal is only temporary.

Figure 9.22: Managing Management Fads

Fads also seem to be a predictable aspect of the business world (Figure 9.22 "Managing Management Fads"). As with cultural fads, many provocative business ideas go through a life cycle of creating buzz, captivating a group of enthusiastic adherents, and then giving way to the next fad. Bookstore shelves offer a seemingly endless supply of popular management books whose premises range from the intriguing to the absurd. Within the topic of leadership, for example, various books promise to reveal the "leadership secrets" of an eclectic array of famous individuals such as Jesus Christ, Hillary Clinton, Attila the Hun, and Santa Claus.

Beyond the striking similarities between cultural and business fads, there are also important differences. Most cultural fads are harmless, and they rarely create any long-term problems for those that embrace them. In contrast, embracing business fads could lead executives to make bad decisions. As the quote from Colin Powell suggests, relying on sound business practices is much more likely to help executives to execute their organization's strategy than are generic words of wisdom from Old St. Nick.

Many management fads have been closely tied to organizational control systems. For example, one of the best-known fads was an attempt to use output control to improve performance. Management by objectives (MBO)  is a process wherein managers and employees work together to create goals. These goals guide employees' behaviours and serve as the benchmarks for assessing their performance. Following the presentation of MBO in Peter Drucker's 1954 book The Practice of Management, many executives embraced the process as a cure-all for organizational problems and challenges as if previous management had not been concerned with their objectives!

Like many fads, however, MBO became a good idea run amok. Companies that attempted to create an objective for every aspect of employees' activities eventually discovered that this was unrealistic. The creation of explicit goals can conflict with activities involving tacit knowledge about the organization. Intangible notions such as "providing excellent customer service," "treating people right," and "going the extra mile" are central to many organizations' success, but these notions are difficult if not impossible to quantify. Thus, in some cases, getting employees to embrace certain values and other aspects of clan control is more effective than MBO.

Quality circles were a second fad that built on the notion of behavioural control. Quality circles began in Japan in the 1960s and were first introduced in the United States in 1972. A quality circle is a formal group of employees that meets regularly to brainstorm solutions to organizational problems. As the name "quality circle" suggests, identifying behaviours that would improve the quality of products and the operations management processes that create the products was the formal charge of many quality circles.

While the quality circle fad depicted quality as the key driver of productivity, it quickly became apparent that this perspective was too narrow. Instead, quality is just one of four critical dimensions of the production process; speed, cost, and flexibility are also vital. Maximizing any one of these four dimensions often results in a product that simply cannot satisfy customers' needs. Many products with perfect quality, for example, would be created too slowly and at too great a cost to compete in the market effectively. Thus trade-offs among quality, speed, cost, and flexibility are inevitable.

Improving clan control was the aim of sensitivity-training groups (or T-groups) that were used in many organizations in the 1960s. This fad involved gatherings of approximately eight to fifteen people openly discussing their emotions, feelings, beliefs, and biases about workplace issues. In stark contrast to the rigid nature of MBO, the T-group involved free-flowing conversations led by a facilitator. These discussions were thought to lead individuals to greater understanding of themselves and others. The anticipated results were more enlightened workers and a greater spirit of teamwork.

Research on social psychology has found that groups are often far crueler than individuals. Unfortunately, this meant that the candid nature of T-group discussions could easily degenerate into accusations and humiliation. Eventually, the T-group fad gave way to recognition that creating potentially hurtful situations has no place within an organization. Hints of the softer side of T-groups can still be observed in modern team-building fads, however. Perhaps the best known is the "trust game," which claims to build trust between employees by having individuals fall backward and depend on their coworkers to catch them.

Improving clan control was the basis for the fascination with organizational culture that was all the rage in the 1980s. This fad was fueled by a best-selling 1982 book titled In Search of Excellence: Lessons from America's Best-Run Companies. Authors Tom Peters and Robert Waterman studied companies that they viewed as stellar performers and distilled eight similarities that were shared across the companies. Most of the similarities, including staying "close to the customer" and "productivity through people," arose from powerful corporate cultures. The book quickly became an international sensation; more than three million copies were sold in the first four years after its publication.

Soon it became clear that organizational culture's importance was being exaggerated. Before long, both the popular press and academic research revealed that many of Peters and Waterman's "excellent" companies quickly had fallen on hard times. Basic themes such as customer service and valuing one's company are quite useful, but these clan control elements often cannot take the place of holding employees accountable for their performance.

Figure 9.23: Spirited games of kickball can help build an organization's culture, but such events should not substitute for holding employees accountable for delivering results.

The history of fads allows us to make certain predictions about today's hot ideas, such as empowerment, "good to great," and viral marketing. Executives who distill and act on basic lessons from these fads are likely to enjoy performance improvements. Empowerment, for example, builds on important research findings regarding employees - many workers have important insights to offer to their firms, and these workers become more engaged in their jobs when executives take their insights seriously. Relying too heavily on a fad, however, seldom turns out well.

Just as executives in the 1980s could not treat In Search of Excellence as a recipe for success, today's executives should avoid treating James Collins's 2001 best-selling book Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap…and Others Don't as a detailed blueprint for running their companies. Overall, executives should understand that management fads usually contain a core truth that can help organizations improve but that a balance of output, behavioural , and clan control is needed within most organizations. As legendary author Jack Kerouac noted, "Great things are not accomplished by those who yield to trends and fads and popular opinion".