Enacting Decentralized Authority: The Practices and Limits of Moving Beyond Hierarchy

Decentralization as an organizing principle has drawn growing interest from scholars and practitioners because of its perceived suitability for contemporary market conditions and alignment with employees’ evolving work expectations. However, efforts to decentralize authority face significant obstacl...

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Veröffentlicht in:Administrative science quarterly Jg. 69; H. 3; S. 791 - 833
1. Verfasser: Lee, Michael Y.
Format: Journal Article
Sprache:Englisch
Veröffentlicht: Los Angeles, CA SAGE Publications 01.09.2024
SAGE PUBLICATIONS, INC
Schlagworte:
Attribution
Authority
Boundaries
Decentralization
Depersonalization
Ethnography
Hierarchies
Organization theory
Structural change
Suitability
Work
less-hierarchical forms of organizing
organization design
decentralization
self-management
authority
hierarchy
ISSN:0001-8392, 1930-3815
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Zusammenfassung:Decentralization as an organizing principle has drawn growing interest from scholars and practitioners because of its perceived suitability for contemporary market conditions and alignment with employees’ evolving work expectations. However, efforts to decentralize authority face significant obstacles and often end in failure. I propose that existing research on decentralization has struggled to generate insight into how such barriers can be overcome because it has treated decentralization as a static outcome imposed by organizational designers. In contrast, this article treats decentralization as a dynamic and situated achievement that must be continually enacted, and it leverages ethnographic data from a decentralization effort in order to build theory on the organizational practices that support enactments of decentralized authority. I find that successful enactments of decentralized authority were supported by practices that established clear boundaries of authority and focused collective attention on these boundaries, as well as by practices that depersonalized collective attributions of the source of authority. At the same time, the practices were difficult to sustain because they were cognitively, emotionally, and temporally demanding. Through this study, I show that decentralization is not merely a one-time structural change but an ongoing collective process that requires navigating and neutralizing the structural and psychological forces pulling organizations back toward hierarchy.
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ISSN:0001-8392
1930-3815
DOI:10.1177/00018392241257372