Power, Authority, and Leadership: A Proposal for Organizational Theory in the Post-Bureaucratic Era

Organizations are privileged structures in contemporary society given that they contain and manage a large part of individuals’ activities. This is so much so that a company’s success depends on an adequate organizational structure. As such, this chapter studies the depths of organizations’ political dimension with a conceptual, philosophical-political, and historical investigation on the development of the relationship between power and authority within organizational theory. It does so with the aid of Spanish author Juan Antonio Pérez López’s organizational management framework. Starting from the crisis of the modern bureaucratic model, in which rationalization continually increases, and power is separated from authority, this chapter maintains, to the contrary, the hypothesis that, in the post-bureaucratic era, a new paradigm for organizational theory is needed for studying the relationship between power and authority. This paradigm has the advantage of reflecting a healthy way of governing organizations focused on human development.