Hierarchijos organizacijose: argumentai, alternatyvos, perspektyvos
HIERARCHIES IN ORGANIZATIONS: ARGUMENTS, ALTERNATIVES, PERSPECTIVES

Summary/Abstract: Scholars, consultants and managers constantly predict that hierarchies will be replaced with new egalitarian structures in organizations, but hierarchies still exist. The hierarchy theory is a dialect of general systems theory. It has emerged as part of a movement toward a general science of complexity. The hierarchy theory uses a relatively small set of principles to keep track of the complex structure and the behavior of systems with multiple levels. A hierarchy is a system of ranking and organizing things or people, where each element of the system (except for the top element) is a subordinate to a single other element. Many human organizations, such as governments, educational institutions, businesses, churches, armies and political movements are hierarchical organizations, at least officially; commonly seniors, called „bosses“, have more power than their subordinates. The term ‘hierarchy’ immediately conjures up the idea of bureaucracy, which represents rationality in an attempt to define an order in organizations and to control social existence. In recent years the concept of hierarchy has come under increasing scholarly criticism. The hierarchical design inevitably leads to organizational dysfunctions and unanticipated outcomes, it is emphasized the impact of rigid hierarchy on the individual, suggesting that over-concern for an organizational structure and regulation leads to timidity, conservatism, and technicism. The rigid hierarchy stifles professional judgments, limits innovation, and creates dependency and subordination. Modern organizations equate the pay grade with hierarchical work levels and are blamed for having too many layers. With too many layers, accountability is unclear. Individuals in hierarchies become passive players and enter a heteronymous state in which autonomy, responsibility, and moral judgment are suspended. There are many alternatives to hierarchies and ways how to adapt them to modern organizational environment in management science. The triarchy theory refers to the three fundamental ways of getting things done in organizations: hierarchy, heterarchy and responsible autonomy. All organizations use a mixture of these three ways, but the proportions can differ widely. Heterarchy and responsible autonomy are often misunderstood or neglected. Any actual social analysis of coordination involves the employment of the market, hierarchy and network models in comparison and comparative framework, which tends to highlight different aspects of the coordinating activity and overlaps. Another way of thinking about the relationship between the models is that the idea of networks might be used to encompass both markets and hierarchy. Thus, networks could be used as the most general category of coordination. A comparison between the market and hierarchy shows that the idea of hierarchy splits into two types: bureaucracies, which are hierarchical-competitive systems, and clans, which are hierarchical-cooperative systems

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