In Praise of Top-Down Decision Making in Managerial Hierarchies

Abstract

Many organization development consultants argue that decision making should be relatively “flat” or “non-hierarchical” rather than “top-down.” A Metasystematic stage 12 perspective argues otherwise. Under the right conditions, managers should unilaterally decide the tasks and resources to assign subordinates and the departmental strategy. For the best organizational decisions and the best employee working conditions, a manager needs to be one developmental level more capable than the subordinate and all employees need to be accountable for giving their manager their best advice. Limitations of those conditions and consequences of implementing and using top-down decision making are discussed.

KEYWORDS:

• Accountability
• association
• authority
• complexity
• Jaques
• managerial accountability hierarchy
• Model of Hierarchical Complexity
• Requisite Organization
• stratum
• time span
• trust

Notes

^a Lining up Jaques' levels with the Model of Hierarchical Complexity comes from conversations with Sara Ross, Glenn Mehltretter, and Thomas Jordan and is still very much a work in process. Correlations of the higher strata with the Model are undetermined

1. This article is largely grounded in Elliott Jaques' research, the organizational model developed by him and Sir Wilfred Brown (1960, 1962), and the consulting and management experience of hundreds of people who have employed his research in the workplace. Rather than give citations after each point, I shall explain where the references are in general. My statements about human capability come largely from Jaques and Cason (1994). Statements about the nature of organizations and work and people within them are from Jaques (1976, 1996). Case studies of application of his work can be found in Shepard, Gray, Hunt, and McArthur (2007). Finally, research is summarized in a 1,000-page bibliography (Craddock, 2007).

2. These were Piaget's main focus. Jaques relates Piaget's stages to his own schema of orders of information and processes in Jaques and Cason (1994, pp. 97–101).