Corporate Ideology and Strategic Delegation

Abstract

As a result of massive doses of external constraints on business, the past two decades have seen a trend in many U.S. companies from aggressive, tough‐minded fast movers, with confident independent middle managers, to much more procedure‐bound and uncertain or slow‐acting bureaucracies. Decisions of importance must now conform to volumes of policy manuals and be ratified by increasing numbers of specialist staff people, particularly legal and accounting staff. Clearly this bureaucratic strangulation leaves much to be desired. To hamstring middle management by imposing layer on layer of caveats and internal “regulations,” and by requiring that their decisions be ratified by burgeoning hierarchies of staff specialists, serves only to slow managers' response times, destroy their initiative, and demotivate those that have any aggressiveness at all. Equally clearly, for a company's middle managers to build and maintain momentum they need to be able to act autonomously and confidently, yet at the same time there is a need for them to act in ways that are appropriate for the overall company they represent.

Citation

MACMILLAN, I.C. (1983), "Corporate Ideology and Strategic Delegation", Journal of Business Strategy, Vol. 3 No. 3, pp. 71-76. https://doi.org/10.1108/eb038981