Why does bureaucracy take a hierarchical form

Considered the architect of modern sociology, German sociologist Max Weber recommended bureaucracy as the best way for large organizations to maintain order and maximize efficiency. Weber also defined the essential characteristics of modern bureaucracy as follows:. Peter, the Peter principle states that "in a hierarchy , every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence. According to this principle, an employee who is competent at their job will be promoted to a higher-level job that requires different skills and knowledge.

If they are competent at the new job, they will be promoted again, and so on. However, at some point, the employee may be promoted to a position for which they lack the necessary specialized skills and knowledge. Once they have reached their personal level of incompetence, the employee will no longer be promoted; instead, he or she will remain in their level of incompetence for the remainder of their career.

Before he became a U. President, Woodrow Wilson was a professor. Merton criticized earlier theories of bureaucracy. He also reasoned that bureaucrats are more likely to put their own interests and needs ahead of those that would benefit the organization. Merton, Robert K. Weber, Max. Wilson, Woodrow. Actively scan device characteristics for identification. Use precise geolocation data. Select personalised content. Create a personalised content profile.

Measure ad performance. Select basic ads. Create a personalised ads profile. Select personalised ads. As results, bureaucrats map, along their career, different goals - some more personal, others directed to policies. Although these behavioral approaches enriches the analysis of the bureaucracy, they still lack a more interdependent understanding regarding the type and nature of policymaking involved and the responsibilities assumed by the bureaucrats in their daily work.

In this regard, another set of interesting typologies focus on differentiating the bureaucrats from the organizational locus or nature of the policies in which they operate. In studies of management and especially in organizational studies, for example, it is common to find a distinction between the bureaucrats of the middle areas or executive areas - considering that the former are more concerned with administrative activities, with little interaction with final users or external public; while the latter focuses at carrying out the policies and interacting more directly with the external public.

Another typology relates to the sectors where these bureaucrats act: social, economic, infrastructure, government sector, etc. In: Pedro Cavalcante; Gabriela Lotta. The same logic applies to the bureaucracy types based on the nature of the policies in which they work regulatory, distributive and redistributive.

Although this field of study is barely explored, there are demonstrations that different policy natures are associated with different types of bureaucracies, especially with regard to their duties and responsibilities Brehm and Gates, BREHM, John; GATES, Scott From the empirical analysis and comparing the Weberian scale in several countries, the authors demonstrate that the relationship between the scale and economic growth is strong and significant, so that the scale has a powerful impact on economic growth.

Assuming that bureaucracy is one of the institutional foundations for effective functioning in the democratic system, the report analyzes different indicators of strength and institutionalization bureaucracy in governments. The central idea is that the weakness or strength of the bureaucracy strongly contributes to the policy results in Latin American nations. Bureaucratic weakness is one of the causes for the historically ineffective development of these countries.

Bureaucracy is responsible for different roles in decision-making and the more neutral and professional their operations, the greater the guarantee of stability, adaptability and public interest goal in policies. The study has been developed by comparing 18 countries in the region. One of the measures adopted was the degree of autonomy of the bureaucracy, which evaluates the degree to which effective guarantees of professionalism in the civil service are in place and the degree to which civil servants are effectively protected from arbitrariness, politicization, and rent-seeking IADB, IADB.

The analysis shows that there are three groups of countries, separated according to their performance on the indicator. The second indicator, the functional capacity index, covers the ability of bureaucracies to formulate and implement public policies, considering their technical capabilities and appropriate incentives for effective performance. From the intersection between the two indicators, the report groups the countries of Latin America in three different degrees of bureaucratic development.

The first group has bureaucracies with minimum development, in which the civil service system cannot guarantee the attraction and retention of competent personnel, and lacks the managerial mechanisms necessary to promote efficient performance on the part of civil servants. The second group shows the countries where public service systems are fairly well structured but that have not been consolidated in terms of merit guarantees and management tools that would allow for an effective utilization of its capabilities IADB, IADB.

The third and final group, in which Brazil is located, is composed of countries with a high degree of institutionalization - comparatively - despite having systems with different characteristics. Finally, the quality indicator of the bureaucracy is constructed from a combination of metric indices and functional capacity with an efficiency indicator that measures the percentage of the total employed population in the public service. The result of this combination is a typology of bureaucratic types to formulate, organized into four different types:.

Administrative bureaucracy: It is characterized by a low capacity and high relative degree of autonomy. For the authors, it is usually related to a partial or failed attempt to develop a traditional Weberian bureaucracy.

Civil servants are hired based more on political than meritocratic criteria, but they have some job security. This bureaucracy has, therefore, limited abilities to act in a more active and influential way in the decision making process of public policies, whose decisions are generally associated with the ministers. It is the bureaucracy with a more focused role in the implementation of policies, although with a tendency to formalism and control procedures and not the effectiveness of policies.

Clientelistic Bureaucracy: This group is characterized by low autonomy and low capacity. It is based on a high turnover of positions associated strongly to political loyalty or party affiliation. This rotation, in turn, affects the stock of human resources of the State. The role of these bureaucracies to formulate is related to their nature primarily as a political resource of the governing party to exchange jobs for votes or political support. This type of bureaucracy is an extension of the political party.

There are potential conflicts with other professional and meritocratic segments of bureaucracies to formulate, competing for their ideas and roles in the design of policies. Bureaucracies are formed in a job system logic, based on hiring committed managers by flexible contracts. Therefore, those contracted are not part of the permanent structure and can be renewed constantly.

They find relative degrees of resistance from other bureaucratic actors and their success varies from case to case. Meritocratic bureaucracy. Type formed by a high degree of autonomy and high capacity with different combinations. Bureaucracies are composed of stable civil servants recruited based on merit and incorporated into the state careers.

May have incentive systems based on its own merits and capabilities. The authors argue that the countries in Latin America are very heterogeneous and composed of different organizations marked by distinctive characteristics, namely the heterogeneity, also reflected internally in states. This differentiation and typology, however, helps to advance the understanding of development levels and capacity of the bureaucracies. One important assumption in the literature is that mid-level bureaucrats are heterogeneous, considering a vast range of dimensions, such as profile, professional background and performance, among others.

Based on that, the survey data collected in from Brazilian federal mid-level bureaucrats with commissioned positions was explored, known as DAS , to create a typology. Then, the data was divided in four dimensions: profile, job attachment, professional background and performance.

Lastly, the performance dimension is depicted by three variables: relationship, influence and activities. As the literature argues, the relational dimension of MLBs is important to explain their performance, position and interactions. At the same time, this dimension is the one that differentiates the MLBs from the other levels of civil servants in the policymaking process, as they take responsibility and locus for establishing relationships between different kinds of actors Kuratko et al, KURATKO, Donald F.

This literature also demonstrates that MLBs perform operating two different axis of relationships: the horizontal one with peers and the vertical one with superiors and subordinates Pires, PIRES, Roberto Besides, MLBs have, or develop, an ability to influence decisions. Regarding the profile, civil servants age and educational level, ranging from elementary to doctorate, are included. Four variables describe different aspects of job attachment.

Second, whether career or non-career civil servants occupy the commissioned position. Moreover, job attachment is also analyzed by hierarchical levels and advisory or executive functions. Chart 1 sets out details of the hierarchical levels of these posts as well as the most common functions associated to them. The professional background is calculated by two continuous variables: years of work and years as a team manager in the federal government.

Regarding performance dimension, as discussed previously, the capacity to influence decision making processes is highlighted as a core feature of the MLB literature. Normally, to become effective, they connect the formulation process to the execution, or even make the translation among political and technical elements involved in public policies Keiser, KEISER, Lael Public Administration, Volume 90, Issue 4, pages , December. IRB is grounded on the following question: thinking about the work routine of your current position consider the last year , indicate how often you interact negotiate, send and receive orders, resolve, request information, etc.

Have post-bureaucratic changes occurred in managerial work? Therefore, the complete-linkage clustering farthest neighbor was employed, which aims at grouping together successive sets of variables or individuals until the distance between them starts to decrease Johnson and Wichern, JOHNSON, Richard A. This method ensures that all observations in a cluster are within a maximum distance, and tends to produce clusters with similar diameters. Biometrics Note that this coefficient was used to jointly analyze qualitative and quantitative variables.

As a result, the cophenetic correlation coefficient was 0. Table 1 presents the relative frequency of each variable within their respective groups or types of mid-level bureaucrats. None of the group-oriented panaceas face this issue of accountability.

All the theorists refer to group authority, group decisions, and group consensus, none of them to group accountability. Indeed, they avoid the issue of accountability altogether, for to hold a group accountable, the employment contract would have to be with the group, not with the individuals, and companies simply do not employ groups as such. To understand hierarchy, first you must understand employment. To be employed is to have an ongoing contract that holds you accountable for doing work of a given type for a specified number of hours per week in exchange for payment.

Your specific tasks within that given work are assigned to you by a person called your manager or boss or supervisor , who ought to be held accountable for the work you do. If we are to make our hierarchies function properly, it is essential to place the emphasis on accountability for getting work done. This is what hierarchical systems ought to be about.

Authority is a secondary issue and flows from accountability in the sense that there should be just that amount of authority needed to discharge the accountability. So if a group is to be given authority, its members must be held accountable as a group, and unless this is done, it is very hard to take so-called group decisions seriously. If the CEO or the manager of the group is held accountable for outcomes, then in the final analysis, he or she will have to agree with group decisions or have the authority to block them, which means that the group never really had decision-making power to begin with.

And it would be shocking if it were. In the long run, therefore, group authority without group accountability is dysfunctional, and group authority with group accountability is unacceptable. In employment systems, after all, people are not mustered to play together as their manager beats time.

As for hospitals, they are the essence of everything bad about bureaucratic organization. They function in spite of the system, only because of the enormous professional devotion of their staffs.

The Indian civil service was in many ways like a hospital, its people bound together by the struggle to survive in a hostile environment. Managers do need authority, but authority based appropriately on the accountabilities they must discharge.

The bodies that govern companies, unions, clubs, and nations all employ people to do work, and they all organize these employees in managerial hierarchies, systems that allow organizations to hold people accountable for getting assigned work done. Unfortunately, we often lose sight of this goal and set up the organizational layers in our managerial hierarchies to accommodate pay brackets and facilitate career development instead.

If work happens to get done as well, we consider that a useful bonus. But if our managerial hierarchical organizations tend to choke so readily on debilitating bureaucratic practices, how do we explain the persistence and continued spread of this form of organization for more than 3, years?

And why has the determined search for alternatives proved so fruitless? The answer is that managerial hierarchy is and will remain the only way to structure unified working systems with hundreds, thousands, or tens of thousands of employees, for the very good reason that managerial hierarchy is the expression of two fundamental characteristics of real work.

First, the tasks we carry out are not only more or less complex but they also become more complex as they separate out into discrete categories or types of complexity. Second, the same is true of the mental work that people do on the job, for as this work grows more complex, it too separates out into distinct categories or types of mental activity. The complexity of the problems encountered in a particular task, project, or strategy is a function of the variables involved—their number, their clarity or ambiguity, the rate at which they change, and overall, the extent to which they are distinct or tangled.

Obviously, as you move higher in a managerial hierarchy, the most difficult problems you have to contend with become increasingly complex. The biggest problems faced by the CEO of a large corporation are vastly more complex than those encountered on the shop floor. The CEO must cope not only with a huge array of often amorphous and constantly changing data but also with variables so tightly interwoven that they must be disentangled before they will yield useful information.

Such variables might include the cost of capital, the interplay of corporate cash flow, the structure of the international competitive market, the uncertainties of Europe in the next decade, the future of Pacific Rim development, social developments with respect to labor, political developments in Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and the Third World, and technological research and change.

The question is—and always has been—where does the change in quality occur? On a continuum of complexity from the bottom of the structure to the top, where are the discontinuities that will allow us to identify layers of hierarchy that are distinct and separable, as different as ice is from water and water from steam?

I spent years looking for the answer, and what I found was somewhat unexpected. My first step was to recognize the obvious, that the layers have to do with manager-subordinate relationships. What then sets the necessary distance between? This question cannot be answered without knowing just what it is that a manager does. The managerial role has three critical features. For example, agile processes that make improvements through an iterative process characterized by self-organization and accountability.

Over time, a rigid bureaucracy reduces operational efficiency , particularly compared to rival organizations without large bureaucracies. Losses in efficiency are most pronounced in circumstances where bureaucracy is also used to insulate established power structures from the competition. Classic bureaucratic rigidity and protectionism are prevalent in the U.

For example, firing poor performers is difficult because there is an arduous termination process that has been put in place. Heskett questioned whether bureaucracy is a good thing in government or private businesses.

The article describes bureaucracies as entities that focus on decision rights rather than decision making and states that "they are not created to deliberate or think. Some of the article's contributors who served in government agencies defend the role of bureaucracy while recognizing that reforming bureaucracies could provide greater autonomy to decision-makers. Another comment noted that the bureaucracy of the U.

Roosevelt, also in , whereby many social programs helped the United States to recover from the Great Depression. The concept of bureaucracy is fairly old, going back to the Han dynasty in China. But the modern interpretation of the idea dates back to 18th century France. The term bureaucracy is a hybrid word whose roots go back to French and Greek.

It's made up of the French word bureau , which means desk or office, and the Greek term kratein , which means to rule. The use of these two words together combine to loosely mean ruling by or from a desk or office. The word was first officially in France used after the French Revolution. From there, the word and concept spread throughout the rest of the world.

German sociologist Max Weber was one of the first scholars to use the term and expand its influence. He described the concept in a positive sense and considered the ideal bureaucracy to be both efficient and rational.

He believed that bureaucracy clearly defined the roles of the individuals involved and helped narrow the focus of administrative goals. The term bureaucrat refers to someone who is a member of a bureaucracy.

This can allude to someone who is a government official or someone in a position of power, such as a chief executive officer or board member of a company or another organization.

Bureaucracies can help organizations run smoothly and efficiently. This allows large organizations to streamline processes and bring order to systems and procedures. Management becomes easier and processes become less chaotic.

Bureaucracies tend to include a division of labor with clearly defined roles. They also ensure that everyone is treated equally and fairly, which means there is no bias toward any one entity. For instance, the government makes everyone fill out the same often cumbersome paperwork for benefits like student loans. Bureaucracies are often looked down upon because people view them as valuing procedures over efficiency.

Many people feel that rules and paperwork can pile up under bureaucracies. This is often referred to as the red tape people and companies need to overcome in order to achieve certain goals like establishing a business. Rules and regulations can often be difficult to navigate and may even favor some people over others, such as the wealthy.

Some of the most common characteristics of a bureaucracy include a hierarchy, rules and regulations, and specialization.