TJP

Improving Bureaucratic Organizations

By Byron A. Ellis-October 29, 2008

The United States is plagued with bureaucratic institutions that are inflexible and not prone to change. A bureaucracy is an institution or organization characterized by fixed rules and a hierarchy of authority.

Max Weber’s theory of authority structures characterized organizations in terms of their authority structure: Charismatic, traditional, and rational-legal.

Charismatic is based on personal authority of the leader; traditional is based and precedent and usage; and rational-legal which is known as the bureaucracy.

Weber believed that bureaucracy was the most efficient form of organization, with offices arranged in a hierarchical structure where there are rules and procedures for every potential contingency.

Today, bureaucracy is associated with red tape, redundancies, and inefficient organizational processes, as well as processes plagued by impersonal rules defining the narrow range of allowable behaviors.

The bureaucracy prevailing in for profit firm is often different from the bureaucracy exercised in not for profit and governmental organizations.

Bureaucracy in for profit organizations is generally highly structured and with limited concentration of authority. Conversely, it is less structured and more concentrated in local and central government agencies.

As a result, bureaucratic governmental agencies have many handbooks of rules, addendum and modifications to the handbook of rules, and so on. All these rules lower employees’ efficiency and moral.

The information in these handbooks is mostly reactive information. Hence, when managers are presented with unstructured challenges, often they are not able to react in a timely fashion.

Additionally, bureaucratic government agencies often promote from within, limiting cross-fertilization of ideas.

James McGregor in “Bureaucracy versus leadership” noted, “Bureaucracies assume consensus and discounts and discredits clash and controversy, which seems to threaten the organization stability.”

The lack of governmental oversight of banking institutions is a direct result of unguided bureaucratic governance, emanating from an inbred organizational hierarchical authority with limited reciprocal relationship and a penchant for pursuing personal ends, rather than collective ends, such as organizational shared goals.

It is essential for the new administration to transform governmental agencies into less centralized silos of control and to remake them into production-driven and customer focus agencies.

Thus, the mix of people employed and the managerial philosophies must change.

Population ecologists stress the importance of understanding the dynamics of evolution at the population level. Hence, the infusion managers and employees from private industry within bureaucratic government agencies would contribute to a production-driven and customer focus culture. 

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