Workplace Democracy - Comparison To Taylorism - Organizational Structure and Management

Organizational Structure and Management

Office politics in such an environment can be extreme: people might devote a lot of time to keeping their colleagues satisfied and supporting them socially and politically, and there is less surety of success. Performance appraisals in particular is extremely sensitive, as it's conducted by peers. Meetings and meeting systems must generally be extremely efficient, and require strong models of chairmanship and sophisticated models of how to handle consent and dissent. Open-space meetings and wiki methods to define their agendas have been used by some organizations, notably political party and management consultant organizations. One example is the Living Agenda pioneered by Canadian political parties.

Organizational commitment cannot be promised without extreme consultation. This may be an edge, in some industries, but it certainly takes longer. Organizational development, metrics for same, changes in the structure also take longer to negotiate. Organizational culture should however be generally more accepting of organizational learning and peer review of performance.

Performance improvement, self-assessment and coping with one's own resistance to change is easier if the rate of change or depth of assessment is negotiated with one's peers who must deal with the same changes and challenges. However, this is not to say those skills always apply in management: Peter principle applies if anything faster: people who are perceived as effective are elected to run things, which they promptly fail at. However, there is much more acceptance of returning to the shop as a worker if someone fails at management, which is much more difficult in organizations where there is a culture gap between managers and workers. Process improvement is often thought to be facilitated by such swaps, e.g. the CBC television show Venture runs a regular series called Back to the Floor, a corporate reality show where Chief Executive Officers and a low level employee change jobs for a week. Process management is usually reported as benefiting from the direct attention of the CEO, and professional development of the lower level employee is also facilitated, as they discover whether they feel fit to take leadership or not.

According to proponents, Servant leadership is inevitable: leaders who do not serve are simply voted out of the job.