HIGH POINT OR HOBGOBLIN? CONSISTENCY AND PERFORMANCE IN ORGANIZATIONS

摘要

"A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with his shadow on the wall. Speak what you think now in hard words and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said to-day." Ralph Waldo Emerson - Self-Reliance (1841), italics added. Max Weber (1922/1946) championed bureaucratic practices as a rationalizing force that increases organizational success by improving accountability, reliability, speed, and efficiency. In direct response to Weber's "classical analysis of bureaucracy", Robert Merton (1940) called for a "transition to the study of the negative aspects of bureaucracy" prevalent in popular accounts and scholarly discussion. These authors noted that by emphasizing rules and rule following, bureaucracies stifle organizational adaptation across periods of fundamental environmental change. This concern about organizational inertia, which the last sentence of Emerson's quote above captures, has attracted empirical attention exploring whether organizations adapt when their environment changes and whether organizations benefit from or suffer as a result of discrete adaptation in their central features. Failure to change, however, was not these authors' only or even necessarily their primary concern about bureaucracies. Bureaucracies, they argued, do change but in ways that are not helpful. Bureaucracies drift toward excessive adherence to rules that are inadequate as responses to client needs (the "little minds" of the first sentence of Emerson's quote). Consistency, defined as close adherence over time to a set of simple rules for conducting business, rises over time but, as a direct result, responsiveness to cross-sectional variations and longitudinal fluctuations in client and organizational demands falls. While examples of unresponsive bureaucracies are widespread and the concern about a tradeoff between rising consistency and falling responsiveness has informed discussions about organizational design, the argument for organizational drift and tradeoffs has received little critical attention. This paper explores whether organizations become more consistent over time and, if so, when, for what rules, and whether it helps or harms them.