This is the fourth post in my ‘mini series’ of commentaries on the report about the informal organization published by respected US-based consultancy Katzenbach Partners. In the earlier posts, having welcomed the authors’ recognition of the power of the informal organization, I have raised a number of issues with the report arising from an informal coalitions view of organizational dynamics. To date, I have looked at:
- whether or not this represents a radical challenge to conventional management thinking and practice (#1);
- the extent to which managers can control the impact that the informal organization has on organizational outcomes (#2); and
- whether the notion of “managing” the informal organization is a credible aspiration (#3).
Here, I draw attention to the strong inclination in the report to equate the “informal organization in action” with such things as empowerment strategies; an emphasis on personalized customer service; and the adoption of other semi-structured, people-centric approaches (such as the use of communities of practice), rather than to see it in terms of the natural, underlying dynamics of all organizations.
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