(Dialectical principle in Management)
Increasingly,
managers live in a world of paradox. For instance, they are told that they must
manage by surrendering control and that they must stay on top by continuing to
learn, thus admitting that they do not fully know what they do. Paradox is
becoming increasingly pervasive in and around organizations, increasing the
need for an approach to management that allows both researchers and
practitioners to address these paradoxes. A synthesis is required between such
contradictory forces as efficiency and effectiveness, planning and action, and
structure and freedom. A dialectical view of strategy and organizations, built
from four identifiable principles of simultaneity, locality, minimalist and
generality, enables us to build the tools to achieve such synthesis. Put
together, these principles offer new perspectives for researchers to look at
management phenomena and provide practitioners with a means of addressing the
increasingly paradoxical world that they confront.
The principle
of social construction calls for the identification of both a source of constraint
and a source of deviation/construction. As far as dialectical strategy goes,
the source of constraint is the plan. Its source of variation comes from the
stimuli that press the organization/individual to adapt and to be flexible as
action unfolds and from the ability to do its self with and around the
prescribed plan. As far as dialectical organization goes, the source of constraint
is the minimally formalized structure, including shared goals and the
stereotypes acquired in the indoctrination process. Deviation and construction
comes from the perception of errors as learning opportunities and from the role
of action as a ground for coordination.
The
principle of totality calls for finding an underlying ‘whole’ to which
semiautonomous parts are linked. At the organizational level, the ‘whole’
behind an instance of a dialectical strategy is the overarching action culture
that grounds it. Individually, looking at this phenomenon as an enactment of
distilled experience, a high level of skill frames organizational members’ life
experiences as the background that allows for discrete instances of
improvisation to appear. These overarching elements notwithstanding, each
dialectical strategy is autonomous in the way that it depends on the specific
details of the plan driving it and on the people working towards it.
Dialectical organizations, on their side, take much of their rules and structure
from general societal norms and depend on the diversity of their members,
encompassing a wide span of settings in which a particular organization is just
a single element.
The principle
of contradiction offers the clearest illustration of dialectics. Contradiction
only emerges where two opposing forces are at work. The fact that plans
necessarily possess an emergent component, ), either because of the complexity
of environmental interaction or because of communication distortion, allows us
to uncover this principle in a dialectical strategy. The fact that human
interaction creates an informal ‘shadow’ system in every formal structure
allows us to do the same regarding the concept of dialectical organization. Dialectical
view of management is grounded on the interplay of contradictory forces and not
on the attempt to subdue one to the other. Under this principle, a thesis does
not exist despite its antithesis but because of it. The concepts of dialectical
strategy and dialectical organization support this argument. Research has shown
that, from a dialectical view of strategy, the design of a ‘minimal’ plan,
where goals and deadlines are scrupulously prescribed and enforced, enhances
the firm’s flexibility and adaptability to unexpected internal and external
shifts. Additionally, some level of structure is needed for informal
cooperation to emerge and it found that loosely coupled structures were heavily
dependent upon highly structured relationships and reward systems. Thus, a
second insight from this principle is to shift the role of the manager from one
of choice between the poles of a given paradox, as contingency theory
prescribes.
Instead,
paradoxes will be surfaced, held, lived, experienced, their visibility
promoting integration between its opposites. Finally, ones simultaneity can
seldom escape paradox in managerial life. This situation close to linkage
between deliberate and emergent strategy. Showing us that emergent and
unplanned/unintended action will probably sprout from the most deliberate of plans.
There are two brief explanations for this phenomenon. The first is that
communication distortion impedes people in understanding a message exactly as
its conveyor understands it. The second is that the changes in the environment
surrounding most businesses has shifted towards a state of turbulence, where
emergence is the norm because of the complexity of relationships between
environmental factors.
Synthesis
between two opposing poles of a paradox does not result from an overarching
design effort but from case-by-case enactment. But the first inference one can
make from this principle is that a synthesis is a local phenomenon; it results
from the decisions taken by an organization or individual concerning a specific
challenge or problem. Secondly, this synthesis occurs not in reflection but in
action. It given by the most organization’s biases towards pre-conception, few
would endure the poles of paradoxes dealing with deviation from current
practice if it were not because of poignant challenges from the environment.
Moreover, it is these demands for action that permits and facilitates the
integration between opposites as action unfolds. Finally, and in spite of this,
the transition from local responses to organizational (global) routines is
possible.
Paradoxes
flourish where environmental changes and situational opportunities are creatively
engaged with organizational theory and practice. Contradictions co-exist in
time and must be tackled simultaneously. Its take on dialectical phenomena in
organizations provides a basis for empirical investigation and practical action
to make new synthesis of decision.
References
Amabile, T. M. How to kill creativity. Harvard Business Review, 1988, 76 (4),
77-87
Berry, J. W. & Irvine, S. H.
Bricolage: Savages do it daily. In R. J. Sternberg & R. K. Wagner (Eds),
Practical intelligence: Nature and
origins of competence in the everyday world. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1986, pp.271-306.
Brews, P.J. & Hunt, M.R. Learning to
plan and planning to learn: Resolving the planning school/learning school
debate. Strategic Management Journal, 1999, 20, 889-913.
Chanin, N.M. & Shapiro, H. J.
Dialectical inquiry in strategic planning: Extending the boundaries. Academy of
Management Review, 1985, 10, 663-675.
