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Chapter 2 ■ Organization structures: choice and leadership
and, more recently, A Passion for Excellence by Peters and Austin (1985). Other
books include Rosabeth Kanter’s The Change Masters (1983). These books suggest
that effectiveness is more likely to emerge from organizational cultures which
encourage the following:
■ Accountability: this word is being used more and more when discussing
management problems and practices. Where once we meant the fiduciary
accountability of the board of directors to the shareholders, we now refer to
something quite different. We now refer to direct and personal accounta-
bility for performance. The stress is on the individual manager and the per-
formance of the unit or team. Clearer accountability and tighter central
control of finance and strategy have gone hand in hand with decentraliza-
tion of activities and resources to unit level. If the 1960s and 1970s were the
eras of involvement in management books, the 1980s was the era of the
individual. If we are now seeing the ‘failure of collectivism’ as both moral
philosophy and organizing principle we are also experiencing the re-emergence
of individualism. In the 1990s and beyond the issue is whether economic
individualism can become transformed to moral or socially responsible indi-
vidualism.
■ Synergy: this is the capacity to obtain cooperation and collaboration. People
increasingly question instructions. Professionals expect to have a say in what
they do. In consequence, effectiveness cannot be ensured by ‘fiat’. Coercion
may well generate compliance but will fail to produce effort or creativity. Thus
it is that the task of management includes the skills of achieving cooperation
and collaboration. Moreover, much work demands the efforts of people drawn
from varying technical disciplines such as engineering, chemistry, metallurgy,
marketing, accounting and so on. In practice getting things done usually
involves gaining cooperation.
■ Cross-cultural skills: in all organizations we work with people from a diversity
of backgrounds. Whether we are looking at a large public service organization in
an urban environment or the various facilities of a multinational corporation,
we deal with cultural diversity. Management development involves developing

what managers do. Thus, building the cross-cultural skills for handling this diver-
sity is important. We shall see that these skills emerge from developing the skill
of empathy, but more of that later.
■ Managing interfaces: management involves the skills of coordinating the deploy-
ment of people, information, resources and technology in order that work can
be carried out effectively. Managers in manufacturing, the public services, in
charities and in schools are all exhorted to this end in books, journals, news-
paper articles and television programmes. Yet managers spend most of their
time engaged in fragmented and, often, problem-solving activities (see Stewart,
1982; Mintzberg, 1973). The nature of management work seems to comprise
the resolution of problems arising from lack of coordination rather than the
planned and systematic pursuit of coordination. Our knowledge of the cir-
cumstances of work is fragmented and incomplete. And thus interface prob-
lems are common – people concerned to carry out a task can find that the
necessary resources, information or equipment are not available.

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