Текст 5
Empowerment
Empowerment is the idea that an organisation is most productive when all its employees are empowered to make and take decisions on their own, when authority is devolved down to all levels of the organisation. It is a feelgood idea that seems to prove what all sensitive, liberal folk believe should be the case.
The idea was most closely associated with Rosabeth Moss Kanter, a Harvard Business School professor who also edited Harvard Business Review, and it was central to her influential book “When Giants Learn to Dance”. Kanter argued that large companies need to liberate their employees from stultifying hierarchies if they are going to be able to “dance” in the flexible, fast-changing future. Too many employees, she believed, still needed “the crutch” of hierarchy. These “powerless” people, said Kanter, “live in a different world … they may turn instead to the ultimate weapon of those who lack productive power—oppressive power”. She felt that women were particularly in need of empowerment because traditionally they had been allocated low-status jobs.
The idea harks back to Douglas McGregor’s Theory X and Theory Y, but gives McGregor’s framework a new spin by adding information technology. IT has the ability to put into the hands of Theory Yers (self-motivating individuals) the raw material (knowledge, or power) that they need in order to act responsibly and to take decisions for themselves.
Ten years after Kanter’s book was published, another Harvard Business School professor, Chris Argyris, wrote an article in Harvard Business Review entitled “Empowerment: The Emperor’s New Clothes”. In it he said, more or less, “Nice idea; shame about the results”. Everyone is talking about empowerment, said Argyris, but it is not working. Chief executives subtly undermine it, despite Kanter’s assertion that “by empowering others, a leader does not decrease his power”. Employees are often unprepared or unwilling to assume the new responsibilities that it entails.
To understand why it was not working, Argyris set empowerment in the context of commitment, an individual’s commitment to his or her place of work. He said that there are two types of commitment:
• External commitment, or contractual compliance. This is the sort of commitment that employees display under the command-and-control type of structure, when they have little control over their own destiny and little idea of how to change things.
• Internal commitment. This is something that occurs when employees are committed to a particular project or person for their own individual reasons. Internal commitment, said Argyris, is closely allied with empowerment.
Argyris argued that the problem with many corporate programmes designed to encourage empowerment was that they created more external than internal commitment. One reason was that the programmes were riddled with contradictions and sent out mixed messages, such as “do your own thing—but do it the way we tell you”. The result was that employees felt little responsibility for the programme, and people throughout the organisation felt less empowered.
Argyris suggested that companies should recognise that empowerment has its limits. It should not be a goal in itself; it is only a means to the ultimate goal of superior performance. Organisations should then set out to establish working conditions that will encourage their employees’ internal commitment, clearly recognising how this differs from the external variety.
Further reading
Argyris, C., “Empowerment: The Emperor’s New Clothes”, Harvard Business Review, May–June 1998
Kanter, R.M., “Power Failures in Management Circuits”, Harvard Business Review, July–August 1979
Kanter, R.M., “When Giants Learn to Dance: Mastering the Challenge of Strategy, Management, and Careers in the 1990s”, Simon & Schuster, 1989; Unwin, 1990
Malone, T.W., “Is ‘Empowerment’ Just a Fad?”, Sloan Management Review, Winter 1997
Текст 6
Rosabeth Moss Kanter
One of the few women in recent years to have achieved genuine guru status, Rosabeth Moss Kanter (born 1943) hit the management headlines in 1977 with her first book, “Men and Women of the Corporation”, which won an award as the best book of the year on social issues. In it she introduced the concept for which she has ever since been best known: empowerment.
Kanter carries the name of her first husband, Stuart Kanter, who died in 1969. In 1977 she set up a consultancy, called Goodmeasure, with her second husband, Barry A. Stein. Kanter is still its chairman and Stein its president.
She is a sociologist by training. Her doctoral thesis was on communes and she was an associate professor of sociology at Brandeis University between 1966 and 1977. She moved to Harvard Business School in 1986 and for many years held the post of professor of business administration. She was the last academic to be editor, from 1989 to 1992, of Harvard Business Review. Since her tenure the post has been in the hands of professional editors and journalists.
Her interests are broad. In 2007, a year before the first American presidential election in which a woman stood a real chance of winning, she wrote “America the Principled: Six Opportunities for Becoming a Can-Do Nation Again”. In it, among other things, she talked about education, a workplace social contract and international relations. (In 1988 she had been an adviser to the Democrat Michael Dukakis in his unsuccessful presidential campaign.)
Her first big management book, “Men and Women of the Corporation”, was an examination of one particular large corporation (which she calls Indsco) and the effect of power and powerlessness on behaviour and relationships within it. Kanter argued that structural issues—the structure of opportunities, the structure of power and the proportions of people from different groups—explained the behaviour of these groups within Indsco. It was not the behaviour of women, for example, that determined their relative lack of success within corporate life, but the structure of the organisations for which they were working. If there was to be any progress on issues such as the glass ceiling, it would come about because organisations changed, not people. Kanter did not reserve her arguments for women alone—they applied equally to other powerless minorities within corporate life.
“The powerless live in a different world … they may turn instead to the ultimate weapon of those who lack productive power, oppressive power.”
In “The Change Masters” (1983), she looked at ways in which this change might be brought about by examining six companies that were successful at it (her so-called change masters). Such companies have open communications systems and decentralisation of resources. In “When Giants Learn to Dance” (1989), the last of what is in effect a trilogy, Kanter likened the world of global competition to a “corporate Olympics”. The winners in these “games” would be non-hierarchical, co-operative and focused on processes—the way things are done. They would also, she said, have a dose of humility.
Kanter’s books embrace some complex ideas and are supported by a wealth of research, all of which has led to her being branded as “the thinking woman’s Tom Peters”. A large selection of her writing was gathered together in “Rosabeth Moss Kanter on The Frontiers of Change” (Harvard Business School Press, 1997).
Notable publications
“Men and Women of the Corporation”, Basic Books, 1977; 1993
“The Change Masters”, Simon & Schuster, 1983
“When Giants Learn to Dance: Mastering the Challenge of Strategy, Management, and Careers in the 1990s”, Simon & Schuster, 1989; Unwin, 1990
“Confidence: How Winning Streaks and Losing Streaks Begin and End”, Random House Business Books, 2004
Адреса в Интернете
http://www.amc.ru/
http://www.bbc.com/
http://www.economist. com/
http://www.ft.com/
http://www.msu.ru/russian/inside/etis/grros.html
http://www.libfl.ru/
Оглавление
Введение………………………………………………………………..4
Этапы работы над рефератом………………………………………....6
Структура реферата…………………………………………………….9
Требования к оформлению реферата……………………………..…..9
Критерии оценки реферата…………………………………………...10
Методика обработки полученной информации……………………..11
Приложение……………………………………………………………15
Образец оформления титульного листа реферата ………………….17
Тренировочные упражнения………………………………………….18
Образец выполнения упражнений по тексту………………………...21
Тексты для реферирования…………………………………………....22
Адреса в Интернете…………………………………………………….38
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