Need for distribution of authority is commensurate to an organization’s size.
As organizations grow from a small team of innovators to a large system with organizational subsystems, the tendency to ossify into bureaucratic hierarchies increases. Thus, if an organization is to retain its strategic agility and resilience, its leaders need to distribute authority throughout it as it scales up.
The larger and more complex a company becomes, the more important it is for senior managers to train employees at every level to make independent decisions about priorities that are consistent with the strategic direction and the business model of the company.[1]
See also:
- Large systems tend to disintegrate during development
- Emerging markets are decreasingly attractive as organizations get larger
- Consistency of rigid management processes decreases flexibility
The Innovator’s Dilemma – Christensen (1997), ch. 8, 164. ↩︎