Managing without Leadership: Towards a Theory of Organizational Functioning

Citation

Brooks, J.S. (2010), "Managing without Leadership: Towards a Theory of Organizational Functioning", Journal of Educational Administration, Vol. 48 No. 1, pp. 128-131. https://doi.org/10.1108/09578231011015494

Near the beginning of Managing without Leadership: Towards a Theory of Organizational Functioning, Gabriele Lakomski contends that (p. viii) “organizations are complex beasts whose functioning is poorly understood; no one person has a complete overview of what happens, and efficiency and effectiveness, where it is had at all, requires an army of interconnected brains, hands, and artefacts to accomplish”. Part of this complicated problem, Lakomski argues, lies in (p. vii) “a discrepancy between the ways in which members believe that their work places operate and how theories of leadership account for organizational functioning”. Put simply, since people do not understand organizations, leadership in them is fundamentally misconceived. This dilemma should cause both educational practitioners and researchers to pause and reconsider their assumptions and behavior as they lead schools and school systems through various educational processes intended to produce specific results. If educators misconceive organizations and leadership, their guidance most certainly amounts to misleadership rather than leadership.

In Managing without Leadership: Towards a Theory of Organizational Functioning Lakomski explores some of the empirical consequences of misconceiving leadership in organizations, and offers suggestions as to how we might reconsider our assumptions. The book is organized into two parts, each of which consists of four chapters.

Part 1 “Explaining Organizational Functioning: Leadership's Past and Present,” is essentially an historical survey of leadership theories. Chapter 1 is entitled “Why We can manage without leadership” and provides the foundation of the author's argument that organizations might be better off if administrators focused more on the management of processes and people than on the more ambiguous concept of leadership. In fact, Lakomski asserts that leadership is not only a muddled concept, but that it might also not even exist at all, outside of our imaginations. In support of this claim, she offers evidence from several case studies that show what members describe as leadership is not in‐keeping with actual behavior in organizations. Her thoughtful critique of leadership theories traces their evolution from notions of transformational leadership and then segues into a discussion of modern attempts to develop an empirical science around leadership research before considering concepts such organizational culture and contemporary notions such as distributed leadership and leadership as distributed cognition. Lakomski's conclusion, that each of these approaches to understanding leadership is essentially misguided by its attempt to reduce complexity to a few simple conceptual processes, is compelling.

Chapter 2, “Postmodernist leadership,” looks deeply at the possibility that (p. 21) “a scientific approach to educational administration … has proved to be a destructive myth”. Drawing heavily on the work of Spencer Maxcy, Don Willower, and Fenwick English, and her own previous work, Lakomski explains that postmodern leadership theorists have long suggested that educational administrators serve (p. 23) “the interests of power and repression” by demanding and rewarding normative and standardized practice rather than pluralism in organizations. She then critiques postmodernism, as manifest in educational administration literature, as a stance that over‐emphasizes discourse and abstract symbolic interaction and eschews consideration of actual behavior. The end result of this is a characterization of the work of administrators as continual creators of abstract problems, which are never addressed as empirical problems that might be solved. Lakomski concludes that reconsidered, postmodern critiques that condemn or stifle possibility can ultimately be interpreted as incisive critiques if they properly connect the opaque to the concrete toward the end of helping identify new avenues for practice rather than continually laying blame.

“Leadership, organizational culture and change” is the title of Chapter 3 and it both reviews extant literature on cultural and cross‐cultural leadership issues and connects them to emerging concepts such as distributed cognition and in situ organizing. She ponders the organic nature of organizational change and suggests that attempts to design change that is either top down or bottom up may work against the fundamental and natural dynamics of systems.

In Chapter 4, “Substituted or distributed: the end of leadership as we know it?” the author wonders whether distributed leadership, as a way of understanding how leadership behavior is stretched over an organization might augur the end of an era that differentiates leaders and followers. Distributed leadership practice, which emphasis the importance of context, may indeed be a useful heuristic for understanding and explaining certain behaviors, but its emphasis on individual and collective cognition may reduce complicated practices to an abstract and inaccurate extreme. This chapter concludes the first part of the book.

Part 2 of Managing without Leadership: Towards a Theory of Organizational Functioning is called “Explaining Organizational Functioning: Moving beyond Leadership” and advances Lakomski's perspective that a deeper and functional understanding of organizational theory would demand a complete rethinking of what we commonly call leadership. This part begins with Chapter 5, entitled “Managing organizational knowledge.” The chapter focuses on the notion that administrators might be conceived as managers of knowledge, and that thinking of them as such entails a restructuring of organizations based on their specific functions, relative to the way they produce and move information knowledge a system.

Chapter 6, “Moving knowledge: what is transfer?” extends the theme of Chapter 5 by looking more closely at how knowledge is transferred between people and between organizational sub‐units. Further, Lakomski considers how skills and effective behaviors are transferred from training experiences into on the job practice. She advances the interesting idea of sticky transfer, which helps explain problems related to information that is difficult to acquire and move. She also explores the concepts situated learning and of environmental scanning as important factors in the ease or difficulty with which information and knowledge move throughout an organization. The chapter concludes by asking organizational members to rethink the notion of agency, not as something necessarily cultural, political, or social but as something that helps explain someone's ability to move information in an effective and efficient manner.

Chapter 7, “Organization, emergence and design,” urges readers to consider educational systems as self‐organizing and to evaluate whether or not traditional organizational structures stifle the natural patters that develop among groups of people as they work toward certain goals. Here Lakomski asks leaders to consider their role as coordinators and shapers of processes rather than as rational‐functionalist designers who “create” outcomes. She argues that leaders are not ultimately in control of organizations, as control is organic and evolves over time since organizations constantly develop and change to adapt to protean internal and external conditions.

The book's final chapter, “A road map to managing without leadership” suggests possibility rather than offering prescription. Lakomski restates her primary objective, to urge leaders to rethink their assumptions about leadership and to consider whether the way they make sense of their organizations is ultimately accurate and useful or misguided and counter‐productive. This dilemma can only be approached once we have deepened our understanding of individual and organizational cognition, knowledge transfer, and the various ways in which context shapes, and is shaped by, these dynamics.

Considered as a whole, Gabriele Lakomski's Managing without Leadership: Towards a Theory of Organizational Functioning is a challenging yet rewarding book that both articulates the shortcoming of contemporary understanding of organizations and leadership and suggests innovative ways we might expand our thinking toward the ends of creating more effective and efficient organizations. The book will be of interest to organizational and leadership theorists, and to practicing educational leaders seeking a greater understanding of the ways their assumptions about organizations limit their ability to positively influence educational practice.