Gone fishing

摘要

As someone who is researching how CEOs build organisational trust, your Autumn issue struck a chord. The raft of articles focusing upon the reinvention of management in service of 21st century stakeholders was very welcome. The closing piece from Simon Caulkin (page 74) hinted at a hidden resistance that is putting a brake on this wave of change. Caulkin cited "underlying assumptions that are still in place" that "curdle many well-meaning experiments at source". However, he fell short from naming these assumptions. Caulkin was referring to the governance model that underpins pics that is known as agency theory. Agency theory arose from the economics of Adam Smith and is based on the assumption that company owners cannot trust the agents - managers in other words - whom they hire to run their organisations. A new, alternative theory of governance exists that is built on a different set of assumptions, namely stewardship theory. In stewardship theory, the managers of an organisation are assumed to be trustworthy and collectivist. The crucial point is that governance models tend to be self-fulfilling; agency governance creates untrustworthy organisations while stewardship creates trustworthy organisations.