Charles Handy article on the necessity of shrinking the centre in organizations to reduce corruption, offer more leadership, and increase efficiency. Handy begins the article discussing how there is no political centre in Italy anymore, but there remains a large administrative centre, which highlights, for Handy, a supreme irony--a centre without leadership that does nothing, but controls everything and has all the power. He perceives such an administrative state as one with “negative power” and open to corruption, but states that such power haunts the corridors of every large organization. Handy proceeds to identify “positive power” as the authority to make something happen, understanding that if an organization does not have positive power, it most certainly will have negative power, which creates the conditions for stagnant bureaucracies. In order to rectify this situation, Handy suggests that organizations shrink the centre, recommending that it should be stronger but smaller and offer more leadership but fewer licenses. Doing so will help facilitate the use of positive power, thus lessening the need for the use of negative power. However, he notes that smaller centres will rely on more trust in the right people to begin with, so proper training, positive employee relations, and knowledge of employees as individuals is essential. Handy then reflects on Italy and its traditional culture of negative power, stating that such a culture is quite difficult to change, while for the rest of modern nations the outlook is more promising as centres are becoming smaller and smaller, and more individual responsibility is being granted. He concludes the article observing that the more people experience the pleasures of organizations that operate on positive power, the more fashionable and popular such arrangements will become.
Handy, Charles B Jones, Helen Mars, Incorporated Zurich (Switzerland) Italy Organizational behavior Organizational change Organizational effectiveness Operations management Organizations Bureaucracy Irony Corruption Trust Employee selection Employees - Training of Employees Recruiting Employee retention Institute of Directors University of Bologna
Source
Charles Handy article on the necessity of shrinking the centre in organizations to reduce corruption, offer more leadership, and increase efficiency, 1994; Charles Handy Papers; Box 20, Folder 8; 1 page
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