Modern organizations shift management’s role from supervision to cultivating employee self-leadership

Evidence

Manz and Sims challenge us to rethink our ideas about leadership and its relationship to management in the modern organization. In their view, the dynamic business environment, characterized by rapid technological change, information richness, and global competition, necessitates the meaningful mobilization of human effort as well as continued innovation and new organizational structures. The forms of organizational structure they believe are appropriate for the 21^^ century include the horizontal organization, the project-based organization, and the networked organization. All of these structures emphasize teamwork, open and distributed information systems, and empowerment of employees. In this context, what should management and leadership be based on? According to Manz and Sims, the answer is self-leadership. Self-leadership requires that individuals and teams set their own goals, plan and implement their own task and operating procedures, be selfobservant and critical, solve their own problems, and be motivated by the natural rewards associated with their work. Superleaders encourage selfleadership through modeling this set of behaviors in relationships with their subordinates and the teams they manage. — Thomas Davenport & John Beck, The Attention Economy, 30

Categorization

• XREF: Self-leadership anticipates later self-management/self-discipline discourse (Foucault’s governmentality, corporate wellness self-tracking) — the same delegation of oversight onto the worker appears in platform-era labor. — connects to: Superleadership means managing others to lead themselves through delegation and empowerment — Thomas Davenport & John Beck, The Attention Economy: Understanding…, 29; Effective leadership makes those led experience development as self-generated — , The Rod and the Child: A Global History…, 4098; Rising organizational complexity shifts power toward subordinates. — Niklas Luhmann, Trust and Power, 799 (+2 more)

Related

• Superleadership means managing others to lead themselves through delegation and empowerment (similarity 0.90)

Broader Connections

• Effective leadership makes those led experience development as self-generated #expands (0.92) — , The Rod and the Child, 4098
• Rising organizational complexity shifts power toward subordinates. #corroborates (0.85) — Niklas Luhmann, Trust and Power, 799
• The modern leader image is a collective self-projection, not a father figure #expands (0.82)
• Real organizational power flows from career influence, not from directive-and-dismissal authority #corroborates (0.80) — Niklas Luhmann, Trust and Power, 790