We have written much about the flattened org chart that the younger generations subscribe. The extremely veridical, military-like chain-of-command days are waning in the modern work world. The decision-making distribution of authority is having a tremendous impact on slow-to-react companies.
I encountered this shift years ago working for a company that was headed up by older managers. My group made a presentation to management to streamline the complex business model we were running. Instead of a near-impossible vertical structure, we recommended distributing the decision process to the different business groups. The approach, which we thought made the most sense in terms of efficiency, was to have managers individually guide each unit. There would be one over-arching manager to maintain consistency throughout the distributed units.
The plan was summarily dismissed.
The older managers simply refused to permit low level command-and-control decisions to be made without their micro-management. Their plan, which was followed, was to try to retain control through a single hierarchy that made even the most insignificant decisions laborious. This small company should have been nimble and aggressive in the market place. Instead they moved like an ocean liner and eventually went out of business.
This long setup leads to a CareerJournal.com article titled How Understanding the ‘Why’ Behind Bosses’ Decisions Matters. From the article:
In a study last year, Mr. Clampitt found that employees are more likely to support decisions when they are told about the rationale. The study surveyed roughly 300 managers and employees at more than 100 U.S. employers, asking what they knew of decisions and how supportive they were of them. Mr. Clampitt says employees of companies that explained decisions more fully were more than twice as likely to support those decisions as workers who got less information.
I can personally relate to those findings. There is nothing worse than mushroom management.