Working Alone: Whatever Happened to the Idea of Organizations as Communities?

Remember when everyone was talking about organizational culture and the idea of building strong cultures to achieve competitive advantage (e.g., Kotter and Heskett 1992; O’Reilly 1989; Tushman and O’Reilly 1997, chapter 5)? Remember Theory Zand Ouchi’s (1981) argument that Williamson’s (1975) description of possible organizing arrangements was incomplete? Ouchi maintained that in addition to achieving coordination and control through market-like mechanisms such as prices and contracts on the one hand, and hierarchies or bureaucracies on the other, there was yet another way of organizing and managing employees, and that was through clan-like relationships among people (e.g., Ouchi and Jaeger 1978), characterized by high levels of trust and stability. More recently, Gittell’s (2003) description of Southwest Airlines is consistent with the idea of achieving coordination through interpersonal trust and mutual adjustment of behavior (Thompson 1967). Gittell argued that Southwest’s extraordinary level of productivity and performance has come through high levels of coordination and control achieved through interpersonal relationships rather than simply through relying on either formal mechanisms or incentives.