Why Management Fails. How Organizations Function and How to Impact Them (PDF)

Master's Thesis from the year 2020 in the subject Business economics - Business Management, Corporate Governance, grade: 1, Otto Beisheim School of Management Vallendar (Kellogg-WHU Executive MBA), language: English, abstract: Despite innovations in management science, leaders struggle to adapt their organizations against rapid environmental changes. Based on the assumption that this struggle results from obsolete management paradigms, this work aims to outline a systemic view of organizations and groups, as well as approaches to manage and change them. This work adopts a fundamental question: What dynamics evolve in organizations and groups (or teams) as a significant part of organizations that increase or decrease management's influence and the organizations' or groups' ability to induce change? This work delivers a systematic approach to equip readers with analytical tools to arrive at their own understanding of a wide range of different organizations or groups.

This literature-based work describes causal and systemic theories to explain human behavior based on an analysis of organizations based on systems theory. Looking through different lenses provides insights into organizations' underlying structures-namely, the machine, game, or façade metaphors. Formal and informal structures and their interactions have been analyzed in different lifecycle stages, immobility, and replaceability. The construction of a systemic view of groups shows group-specific dynamics and behavioral patterns. The specialization in groups drives local best practices, expected informal behavior, and a narrowed perspective of what is essential for the department or organization. These local rationalities are critical to leading groups or organizations.

The explanations of groups and organizations clarify that a hierarchical understanding or an understanding that an organization, or even its culture, can be rationally planned is misleading. Organizations continually adjust to changing conditions in their environment but, unfortunately, not as their executives intend. Therefore, the change of organizations or groups is hypothesis-driven experimentation that integrates the "change of the change" from the beginning. Systemic interventions are based on observations and do not claim predictability. The manager's primary tasks are to develop team reflexivity and autonomous decision-making, as well as increase variation and promote selections in the group or organization. Incremental approaches to management, group-reflection, and development, and lateral and formal mechanisms of influence must be utilized in combination with a comprehensive organizational analysis.