Week 7 - Hierarchy

Many human organizations, such as governments, educational institutions, businesses, churches, armies and political movements are hierarchical organizations, at least officially; commonly seniors, called "bosses", have more power than their subordinates. Thus the relationship defining this hierarchy is "commands" or "has power over". Some analysts question whether power "actually" works in the way the traditional organizational chart indicates, however. This view tends to emphasize the significance of the informal organization.

In collaboration, each party accepts responsibility for its own inputs as well as for the equitable sharing of returns on outputs. Collaborative relationships are voluntary. They facilitate knowledge creation. Corporations, however, are typically based on hierarchical, non-voluntary relationships. Corporations are built to exploit knowledge and to appropriate a financial profit from it. Consequently, collaboration is difficult tocombine with corporate hierarchy. Nevertheless, there is a growing list of examplesillustrating successful co-existence of collaboration and hierarchy.[1]

Hierarchy also provides deference and decisional authority to persons at the highest levels. In fact such persons enjoy a broad range of authorities, many of which directly affect the freedoms of their subordinates. To maintain needed predictability, hierarchy often restrict the freedoms of persons within the organization. Differentiation plays an important roll in organisational complexity within collaboration, which includes number of hierarchical levels, number of formal organisational units, division of task, number of specialisation etc. Group decisions can be made in a number of ways:

- Decision by authority without discussion, ie. leader makes all the decisions without the group. It is efficient but does not build team commmitment.

- Expert member decides for team. That can cause difficulty deciding who.

- Average of mumber's opinions- Decision by authority after discussion, ie. designate leader makes decision after discussion with group. Only as effective as the leaders ability to listen.

- Minority control, ie. two or more members constituting less than 50% of group make decision by acting as a special problem solving sub group or as an executive committee.

- Majority control, ie. discussion occurs until 51% of members agree on course of action.

- Consensus. Most effective method in terms of quality and gaining member commitment to decision. Consensus is achieved when everyone has had their say and will commit to the decision even though not everyone agrees with the decision. [2]



A hierarchy diagram for human resource [3]

The origins of education's hierarchy are rooted somewhere in the human need to assert ascendancy over others. That involves a protocol of behavious that emphasize ordered relationships and routine predictability. well before reowned German sociologist Max Weber asserted the need for graded levels of authority in bureaucratic organizations, hierarchies were evident everywhere, such as the aggressive over the passive, and the strong over the weak.[4] Those occupying the highest levels of the hierarchy invariably sustain their positions and maintain the organization by requiring predictable behaviours.

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Reference

[1] "Entrepreneurial Organizations: The Role of Hierarchy and Collaboration", accessed on 5 May, 2008, <http://www.iou.uzh.ch/bwl/iou/lehrveranstaltungen/SS2004/Topics_and_Literature_Seminar_Collaboration_SS_2004.pdf>
[2] Bruce Carnie's lecture note on Teamwork for SDES 2116

[3] "Human Hierarchy + Creative Collaboration in the Workplace", accessed on 5 May, 2008, <http://darmano.typepad.com/logic_emotion/2006/07/human_hierarchy.html>

[4] Mike Koehler & Jeanne C. Baxter, Eye On Education,Inc 1997, Leadership Through Collaboration: Alternatives to the Hierarchy