Post Bureaucratic Style Essay

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Q: The practices of leadership have changed in the post-bureaucratic era
The practice and perception of a successful leader has significantly changed in aeon of post-bureaucracy. An implementation of post-bureaucratic frameworks has established the paragon effective leader in the 20th century (Browning 2007). Since leadership is the process of stimulating, incentivising and administrating members (Clegg, Kornberger & Pitsis 2011), the post-bureaucratic era has caused a growing awareness of developing the leader-member relationship to incite teamwork and empowerment. Godwyn & Gittell (2011) define post-bureaucracy, or ‘soft power’ as the organisational shift of culture whereby rules, regulation and hierarchies are substituted with communication, …show more content…

Where previously leaders sought to adapt a robust approach to leadership through systematic processes and suppressing originality, organisational authority has been achieved through an amalgamation of technical, human and conceptual skills (Swedberg & Agevall 2005). The responsibilities of a leader to adapt these strategies provide a framework of the post-bureaucratic approach where traits such as maintaining goodwill, morale and employee wellbeing are of utmost value (Cameron et al. 2003). Cameron argues that leadership in the post-bureaucratic era embodies integrity, honesty and a firm understanding of human needs, thus being of intrinsic value in an organisation. In light of this however, Chand (2015) attests that a leader that implements bureaucratic legitimacy paves way for organised task performance and an “optimum utilisation of human resources”, as opposed to the post-bureaucratic mindset. For example, websites such as ‘Totally Free Movie Download’ apply the post-bureaucratic approach by creating a certain degree of trust however has in turn lead to an immense revenue decline of the film industry in Hong Kong between 1997 and 2004, illustrating that the trust aspect of post-bureaucracy is deficient (Rochester, 2008). This study is indicative of a generalised analysis of the bureaucratic approach, as effective leadership is …show more content…

The principles of the human relations movement initiated by Elton Mayo (as cited in Kyle 2006) stress that employees are guaranteed to become more productive and efficient with an implementation of democratic and participative power. The post-bureaucratic approach however, in an attempt to establish a universal organisational culture, does so by sacrificing individual values and beliefs therefore embrace espoused values superficially, indirectly becoming subordinate to a leader’s vision. This is supported by a participative observation by Rosen (1988), evidencing the degree of controlled socialisation established by leaders despite the attempts of creating a post-bureaucratic environment, thus arguably revealing the ideologies of soft power being superficial. This study is indicative of the fact that the intrinsic nature of bureaucratic legitimacy pertaining to leadership has not entirely shifted in the post-bureaucratic era, due to the growing awareness of inefficiency caused by lack of rules and regulations. Furthermore, an analysis of the post-bureaucratisation process by Gouldner (1954), introduced the notion of ‘mock-bureaucracy’, wherein leadership through soft power may amount to a disregard of generic protocol and respect, therefore

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