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Journal of Business, Economics & Finance - JBEF(2015), Vol.4 (3) Yuksel
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TRACING BACK THE SIGNS OF COMPLEXITY THINKING IN MANAGEMENT:
MARY PARKER FOLLETT RE-VISITED
DOI: 10.17261/Pressacademia.2015313069
Ahmet Hakan Yuksel¹
¹Isik University, Turkey. Email: hyuksel@isikun.edu.tr
Keywords
Complexity,
Nonlinear
dynamics, Mary
Parker Follett,
Management
Theory.
JEL Classification
M10, M19
ABSTRACT
The modernist stream of thought had immensely influenced the theories of
organizational management in the early twentieth century. Equilibrium-
oriented and universally valid reductionist approaches viewed organizations
as machines that could be broken down into pieces, hence, behavior of the
whole could be understood from the knowledge of its parts. Mary Parker
Follett, owing to her valuable contribution ahead of her time, emerges as a
prominent figure in the history of management thought and organizational
studies. Most of what is written and discussed today in the field of
organization studies and management such as power, authority, group
dynamics, leadership, coordination and governance have been derived from
Mary Parker Follett’s corpus. She had built the bridge between complexity
thinking and management almost four decades before the introduction of
nonlinear dynamics to scientific research. Although the actual terminology
of nonlinear dynamics was not employed in her postulations Mary Parker
Follett’s works provide profound insights for the field of management under
the prevailing global circumstances where the impact of repeated attempts
to design the ‘whole’ seems to have been neutralized since it is barely
enough to predict the outcomes of the upward-
causality from the
knowledge of the parts. A thorough analysis of her writings reveals that she
had accurately anticipated the problems associated with the contemporary
organizational settings as well as incorporating nonlinear dynamics into
management thinking. This conceptual paper intends to draw inspiration
from Mary Parker Follett’s works with special emphasis on the links
between her conceptions and complexity thinking in the field of
management.
Rereading Mary Parker Follett is like entering a zone of calm in a sea of chaos. Her work reminds
us that even in our fast-paced world – in which 18 months can constitute a high-tech product life
cycle and “15 minutes” a person’s assigned allotment of fame – there are truths about human
behaviour that stand the test of time. They persist despite superficial changes, like the deep and
still ocean beneath the waves of management fad and fashion.
Rosebeth Moss Kanter (1995)
Year: 2015 Volume: 4 Issue: 3
Journal of Business, Economics & Finance ISSN: 2146 - 7943
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1.INTRODUCTION
Organizations are supposed to constantly build new capabilities in order to be able sense
and respond to the shifting needs of their target markets in a hyper-competitive global
environment where any attempt to comprehend the nature of the emergent phenomena
turns out to be futile. Managers of twenty-first century are incapable to surmount the
number of variables involved and keep track of the interactions between them. This
situation evokes the infamous butterfly effect, which implies that a butterfly fluttering its
wings in South America can cause a tornado in Far East. This metaphor refers to how small
perturbations in the initial condition of a system might trigger unexpectedly major
changes afterwards. Over the last two decades, there has been a significant surge in the
number of studies in management field regarding the applicability of complexity principles
to organizational settings. This is plausible given the current level of interconnectedness
and interdependence in an integrated global economy. The high volatility of global
markets entails coping with the dynamics of continuous change. The ‘machine metaphor’
seems to have already fallen short given the prevailing conditions of global business
climate. It is the very reason why observations penned by Mary Parker Follett eight
decades ago worth to mention and ponder. Her postulations were flourished under the
heavy ideological climate of modernism and she anticipated way ahead of her time
approximately four decades before the inception of vigorous scientific research in
nonlinear dynamics. This paper intends to cast light on the conceptual linkages between
Follett’s ideas and the assumptions of complexity science based on her writings
inductively supportive of the operation of nonlinear dynamics within social world
(Mendenhall et.al., 2000). She had employed terms such as ‘self-organizing’, ‘interaction’,
‘diversity’, ‘evolution’, ‘novelty’, ‘experience’, which are not only associated with
complexity science, also acknowledged as the building blocks of innovation in
organizations. Her ideas on centrality of relationships, constructive conflict, power,
authority, control, leadership and co-ordination will guide managers along their struggles
to transform organizations into ecologies of innovation. In order to be able to grasp the
insight of her contribution and demonstrate how the assumptions of the complexity
thinking and her conceptions intertwine with one another, the next section intends to deal
with the assumptions of the modernist stream of thought by which early theories of
management were significantly influenced. The third section of the paper draws a general
framework of complexity thinking through introducing nonlinear dynamics at play in a
complex system. The fourth section reveals how Mary Parker Follett’s postulations overlap
the contemporary efforts to incorporate nonlinear dynamics into organizational studies
although she did not employ the actual terminology.
2.HAUNTED BY THE GHOST OF MODERNISM: MECHANISTIC VIEW OF ORGANIZATIONS
The modernist paradigm was predicated on scientific principles developed by Newton,
LaPlace and Descartes derived from the assumption that the natural state of a system had
to be reaching and sustaining an equilibrium so that the future states of a given system
and the behavior of the whole could be predicted (Dooley, 1997). Complex social
phenomena were viewed as being composed of variables that manifested linearity in their
relationships leading to a definition of organizational experiences from reductionist,
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deterministic, and equilibrium-oriented perspectives (Dooley, 1997; Mendenhall et.al.,
2000; Marion, 1999). Modernity had launched a new world of meaning in which society
valued rationality encouraging the implementation of efficiency oriented methods to
accomplish organizational goals (Lune, 2010). Wagner (2012) provides a definition of
modernity as ‘the belief in the freedom of human being – natural and inalienable, as many
philosophers presumed – and in the human capacity to reason combined with the
intelligibility of the word, that is, amenability to human reason.’
The reflections of modernist assumptions were conspicuous in the early theories of
management and organizations. McAuley et.al (2007) describes the three key aspects of
modernism: the modernist ontology, the modernist epistemology and the modernist
technologies. Modernists believed that the world was ordered and there were underlying
systems to be unveiled. Any system could be ordered and rationally structured. This called
for scientifically designed work processes to ensure ordered and systematic structures.
The best way to ensure rationality was to rely on calculation of relevant empirical data and
measurement of the variables to attain solid facts. The efficiency of outputs and
performance of employees were constantly measured and management’s timely
intervention was deemed necessary when discrepancy occurred between calculable
predictions and the actual outcome. Thus, there should be a management elite equipped
with techniques that enabled them to process information and to exercise rational control
over the members of the organization. The distinction between management and workers
assumed that the former would take all the major decisions concerning the methods of
production, while the latter would more or less passively conform to management’s
authority and accept their role in the overall production process (Sheldrake, 2003).
Modernist organization theories regarded actions as sequenced and actors behave
mechanistically in their endeavor to accomplish rationally declared ends to fulfill
organizational goals (Pettigrew, 1990). The tendency to hold reductionism, determinism
and equilibrium as core principles was prevalent in organizational and managerial studies
– indeed, all social science was influenced by this paradigm (Dooley, 1997). Wagner (2012)
portrays how the principles suggested by modernist stream of thought influenced the
development of theories in social sciences as follows:
These principles were seen as universal, on the one hand, because they contained
normative claims to which, one presumed, every human being would subscribe and, on
the other, because they were deemed to permit the creation of functionally superior
arrangements for major aspects of human social life, most importantly maybe the
satisfaction of human needs in market-driven, industrial production and the rational
government of collective matters through law-based and hierarchically organized
administration. Furthermore, they were seen as globalizing in their application because of
the interpretative and practical power of normativity and functionality.
Mechanistic approaches had their own limitations in spite of their relative success on
certain aspects of organizational operations (Morgan, 2006). First, a mechanistic way of
managing may render the organization incapable to adapt the changing circumstances in
its environment. Second, a mindless and unquestioning organizational structure may arise,
which stifles innovation driven managerial endeavors. Third, when the interests of those
working in the company do not overlap the goals the organization was designed to
achieve pernicious effects will be inevitable. Lune (2010), deriving from the Marx’s
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economic critique, mentions that ‘if our identities and efforts are kept separate from any
sort of goal or value to be found in the work then we are alienated from our labor’. The
rise of systems thinking and cybernetics depicted the limitations of the ingrained methods
trying to understand the whole through analysis of its parts. Cybernetics and general
systems theory emerged after World War II in favor of replacing reductionism with an
appreciation for modeling interactions instead of simplifying them away (Anderson, 1999).
General Systems Theory (GST) was developed during 1950s by Viennese theoretical
biologist Ludwig von Bertalanffy based on the idea that physical systems were considered
as closed systems, which was irrelevant to living systems, as such were open systems
(Merali & Allen, 2011). According to GST when systems confront disturbances, the cells in
the organisms (the subsystems in an organization) go through a series of change in order
to adjust to the new circumstances, thereby, maintain the system as a whole (McAuley
et.al., 2007). Cybernetics concentrated on mechanisms for control and co-ordination and
gave rise to management theories for organizational design and conceptualized feedback
loops between system components as regulating mechanisms for the system’s
performance (Merali & Allen, 2011).
However, GST and cybernetics, both, addressed deterministic dynamical systems, systems
where a set of equations determine how a system moves through its space from time t to
time t + 1 (Anderson, 1999). In the second half of the twentieth century, Herbert Simon’s
conceptualization of bounded rationality and Henry Mintzberg’s concept of emergent
strategy were conceded as milestones seeking perspicacious insights into dynamics of
interaction within the organization and between the organization and its environment
(Merali & Allen, 2011). Interconnectedness happened to be the key component impelling
markets in unforeseen directions. When all organizational actors are interconnected with
one another, in case feedback loops dampen out change decay might occur or if changes
keep reverberating throughout the system, then, chaos ensues (Anderson, 1999). Hernes
(2014) suggests that the frameworks commonly used in organization studies are not
capable of capturing the actual complexity confronted by the managers, rather ‘they
confine complexity by locating it within organizational boundaries, as if managers were
like Weberian officials trapped down in an administrative bunker, grappling more or less
competently with neatly parceled chunks of complexity.’
3.TRANSCENDING BEYOND TIME AND SPACE
… we presently find ourselves in a time of ‘interrregnum’ – when the old ways of doing
things no longer work, the old learned or inherited modes of life are no longer suitable for
the current conditio humana, but when the new ways of tackling the challenges and new
modes of life better suited to the new conditions have not as yet been invented, put in
place and set in operation.
The above quotation from Bauman’s (2000/2012:vii) pioneering work ‘Liquid Times’
depicts the zeitgeist of the times we are living in. The fluidity metaphor is usually
employed to go beyond the limits of unity, coherence and solids. Bauman (2000/2012)
uses ‘liquids’ - one variety of fluids - and ‘solids’ with reference to their relationship
between space and time. Behaviour exhibited by solids is a result of the type of bonding
that holds the atoms and their structural arrangements together, so here ‘bonding’ is a
term that signifies the stability of solids. Fluids, on the other hand, do not keep to any
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shape for long and are always prone to change it, so it is the flow of time that counts more
than the space they occupy. Bauman (2000/2012) considers fluidity or liquidity as relevant
metaphors in order to be able to grasp the essence of the present. Embracing this
metaphor entails to perceive what really exists is not things but things in the making. Such
shift from being to becoming is an important contribution of process philosophy to an
epistemology of fluids (Styhre, 2007).
Complexity is a reflection of fluid epistemology and concentrates on the dynamic
behaviour of complexly interacting interdependent and adaptive agents (Uhl-Bien et.al.,
2007). Complex systems consist of myriads of agents who interact with each other in
unpredictable ways; they are sensitive to changes in initial conditions; they develop
adaptive behavior to the changes in the environment; they oscillate between stability and
instability; and are characterized by emergent order (Plowman et.al., 2007). Complexity
arises when agents with different perspective and information interact with each other in
a mode of mutual influence causing the emergence of unanticipated novel outcomes
(Goldstein et.al., 2010). Technological advancements and the process of globalization is
constantly reshaping competitive landscape, exposing organizations to complexity (Hitt,
1998). We are going through an era of unprecedented global turmoil where seemingly
improbable, the unanticipated, and the downright catastrophic appear to occur with
alarming regularity (Chia, 2012). States and societies have become enmeshed in networks
of interaction fostering magnitude and intensity of the global flows (Held & McGrew,
2003). The extent of the network of interactions could be observed in the financial crisis in
Thailand in 1997, which first appeared as an isolated banking and currency crisis in an
emerging market country and soon generated global financial distress with severe effects
on markets (Keohane & Nye Jr., 2003). Events in any part of the world can have
consequences for developments in every other part of the world, as a matter of fact, the
Internet and other technologies have collapsed time and space (Rosenau, 2003). Merali &
Allen (2011) suggest that under the prevailing conditions of global business climate, any
attempts to design an organization to ensure structural stability is nothing more than an
intellectual construction with limited capability to encompass all interactions between the
agents (system components) given the constraints imposed by the modeller’s bounded
rationality. Embracing nonlinearity in organizational studies calls for adopting a new
mindset; a one that supersedes what has been imposed by machine metaphor (Figure 1).
In complex (adaptive) systems, the focus is no longer on discrete components, events or
systems, instead, interactions and networks that connect individual agents appear as the
indispensable quality of such systems (Hazy et.al., 2007). Chia’s (2012:115) argument puts
special emphasis on the need for incorporation of complexity into our way of thinking:
A complex, perpetually changeable, and inextricably interconnected world, however, calls
for complex, processual thinking: thinking that is concretely grounded in the intimacy and
immediacy of pure lived experience; thinking that acknowledges the reality of
spontaneous, self-generated social orders, entities, and institutions; thinking that accepts
and embraces the inherent messiness, contradictions, and ambiguities of reality and
thinking that overflows our familiar categories of thought.
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Figure 1. Key Assumptions of Mechanistic Systems and Complex Systems
Source: Hazy et.al., (2007)
Hence, organizations could be referred to as networks of social interaction in which
members of the organization are supposed to extract new meanings and solutions via
bottom-up structuration, moving the system to a more desirable level of competitiveness.
In nonlinear dynamic systems the causal relationships between independent and
dependent variables are replaced by symbiotic relationships where interdependent co-
evolution is the main driver of the emergence of innovative adaptive organizational
practices (Goldstein et.al. 2010). Due to the richness of information flow between the
agents, order is emergent, organic and unpredictable (Uhl-Bien et.al, 2007). Diversity
within organizations triggers evolution that eventually results in coming-into-being of
superior level processes enabling adaptability. Evolution seems plausible when dynamics
of interaction are fluid and diversity, tension and conflict are embedded in the thematic
patterning of communicative interaction (Stacey, 2001).
4. IDEAS AHEAD OF THEIR TIME: THE FIRST ENCOUNTER OF MANAGEMENT THINKING
WITH NONLINEARITY
While the early theories of management took the individual as the key focus of analysis
and worked outwards, Follett’s approach to the understanding of management was
recognizably different in nature from the dominant stream of thought. Unlike the
conventional scientific managers who based their ideas on the analysis of tasks via
breaking them down into their constituent parts and artificially reconstructing them, she
began with accepting the complexity of social situations and focused on the working group
and the need to integrate individual and group efforts within the productive whole
(Sheldrake, 2003). She placed relationships in the centre of her conceptualizations. Follett
argued that the fundamental organizational challenge is the ability to build and maintain
dynamic and harmonious human relationships. Her key concepts such as ‘coordination’,
‘constructive conflict’, ‘integration’ and ‘power with’ are all centred on human
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relationships and they are all concerned with ways of promoting a creative dynamic in
those relationships that is based on consensus (Child, 2013). A clear evidence of her
position against the mechanistic view of management imposed by modernism could be
observed: ‘the idea of mastering environment is unfortunate because we have carried it
over into social relations; it becomes our duty to conquer all external circumstances,
nature and other men too’ (Follett, 1924/2013: 119). Follett highlighted the need to shy
away from static expressions with an attempt to discern the difference between ‘being’
and ‘becoming’ and argued that “Integrated organism is unfortunate, for the organism is
the continuing activity of self-organizing, self-maintaining. We must be careful of the “eds”
because they lead to “wholes”, the wrong kind of wholes, the influence of the whole on
the parts” (Follet, 1924/2013:58). The logic of Gestalt movement in psychology devised in
Germany by Max Wertheimer and his associates Wolfgang Köhler and Kurt Koffka as an
objection to the artificiality of the structuralists’ study of consciousness (Tonn, 2003)
reverberated in Follett’s ideas about the role behaviour business organizations. The basis
of Follett’s thinking was the ‘whole man’ and, specifically, relations between the ‘whole
men’ within the groups (Wren & Bedeian, 2009). She clung on to the assumption that
whole is greater or different than the sum of its parts, which renders the reductionist way
of dealing with social phenomena irrelevant. Follett (1924/2013: 105-106) wrote:
This “total situation” is often looked at as a total picture; it is thought that you can get all
the factors if you examine the picture in sufficient detail. But a total situation is never a
total picture; it is a total activity in which the activity of individuals and activity of
environment constantly interweave. What the social worker tries to do is to bring about
the kind of interweaving from which it follows that further responses from individual, will
mean a progressive experience.
For Follett, behaviour was the manifestation of innumerable complex interactions
between an individual agent and the surrounding environment, thus, emerged out of intra
and extra organic stimulation because the behavioural function was continuously being
modified by itself (Mendenhall e.t.al., 2000). She argued that every social process had
three aspects, which were ‘the interacting’, ‘the unifying’ and ‘the emerging’ and pointed
out that ‘… our consideration of the interacting has shown us that the interacting and
unifying are one. Shall we now therefore consider the emerging? We have already done
that. Because the emerging is also part of the same process’ (Follett, 1940/2013: 198). Her
emphasis on interaction and emergence as complementary processes of effective conduct
in organizations is reflected in complexity thinking, which adopts that a complex system is
composed of interdependent, interacting subsystems and information about the
functioning of the system is distributed throughout the networks of connection (Goldstein
et.al., 2010). Her perspective regarding the interweaving of the agents with each other as
well as the interweaving of each agent and the entire organizational system, clearly defied
the decontextualized ideal of the Newtonian paradigm as could be seen in the following
statement: “I have been saying that the whole is determined not only by its constituents,
but by their relation to one another. I now say that the whole is also determined by the
relation of whole and parts. Nowhere do we see this at work than in business
administration” (Follett, 1940/2013:195).
In a complex system there is a vast amount of interacting agents each governed by some
rule or force, which relates their behaviour in a given time period contingently to the
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states of the other parts, thus, as individual agents respond to their own specific local
contexts in parallel with other agents (parts), qualitatively distinct new patterns can arise
as a consequence of upward causality (Maguire, et.al., 2011). According to Lichtenstein
(2014) emergence is a totally different category from transformation and change and
explains, “At the root of this difference is the fact that every case of organizational change
and transformation involves the modification of existing elements, an alteration of design
structures or internal processes or activity routines in the organization.” Follett’s
(1924/2013:62) description of ‘circular response’ taps into the very essence of nonlinear
dynamics and the role of emergence in an organizational setting:
Through circular response we are creating each other all the time…The most fundamental
thought about all this is that reaction is always reaction to a relating … In human relations,
as I have said, this is obvious: I never react to you but to you-plus-me; or to be more
accurate, it is I-plus you reacting to you-plus-me. “I” can never influence “you” because
you have already influenced me; that is, in the very process of meeting, by the very
process of meeting, we both become something different. It begins even before we meet,
in the anticipation of meeting.
Accurately speaking the matter cannot be expressed even by the phrase used above, I-
plus-you meeting you-plus-me. It is I plus the-interweaving-between-you-and-me meeting
you plus the-interweaving-between-you-and-me, etc., etc. If we were doing it
mathematically we should work it out to the nth power.”
Goldstein, et. al. (2010) calls this phenomena as ‘interaction resonance’, which signifies a
richness of information flow that is generated and maintained through interactions over
time. Follett’s conception of circular response stressed the importance of the dynamic
aspect of relationships and foreshadowed the concept of ‘structuration’, which Giddens
(1984) later developed (Child, 2013). Follett held that the reality of organizational
behaviour was in the interaction between subject (independent variable) and object
(dependent variable), in the activity between them; she viewed the relationship between
subject and object to be reciprocal and interdependent in nature, each being the function
of another (Mendenhall et.al., 2000). Follett further explained the circular response in the
following way: ‘My response is not to a crystallized product of the past, static for the
moment being; while I am behaving the environment is changing because the
environment is changing because of my behaving, and my behaviour is a response to the
new situation which I, in part, have created.’ (Follett, 1924, quoted in Child, 2013:79). For
Follett, relationships within social settings were continuous and integrative and the
process of circular response is an evolving one – a continuous dynamic process (Child,
2013). Interaction and adaptation are prominent dynamics of complex systems and causal
relationships between agents are described as symbiotic relationships referring to co-
evolution. When two agents interact (in an organizational setting) their unique
information and perspective generates difference, which eventually leads to unexpected
novel outcomes (Goldstein, et.al., 2010). Ergo, countless and continuous interaction leads
to the emergence of meaningful phenomena when there is diversity in the systems. The
greater the diversity in a given system the higher the potential these differences can be
amplified into emergent innovations (Goldstein, et.al., 2010).
In Follett’s system of thought, difference was articulated as an indispensable feature of
social systems because merging of differences in nature brought about new creation, and
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that new creations then merged with other differing creations to produce new creations.
(Mendenhall et.al., 2000). According to Gray (2012), in a healthy system both genes and
ideas need to cross-pollinate so that creative ideas emerge when different ideas and
concepts interact. Diversity is the source of adaptability, especially, at the micro-levels of
individual differences and group level heterogeneity (Goldstein et.al., 2010). Follett
(1940/2013) proposed that diversity paved the way to the emergence of novel solutions
and emphasized that ‘Instead of shutting out what is different, we should welcome it
because it is different and through its difference will make a richer content of life. The
ignoring of differences is the most fatal mistake in politics or industry or international life:
every difference that is swept up into a bigger conception feeds and enriches society;
every difference, which is ignored, feeds on society and eventually corrupts it’. Diversity
enables conflict, which she regarded as vital for “progressive integration and with the
emphasis placed upon novelty in the moment of synthesis, the critical moment of
evolution” (Follett, 1924/2013:118). Diversity involves tension and conflict.
Emergence of creative experience, for Follett, required active participation in events or
activities always in an effort to create something new (Tonn, 2003). Follett’s insight was to
recognize that the conflict was not necessarily pathological and a manifestation of failure,
rather it was the appearance of difference (Child, 1995). It was the only way for making
interaction resonance possible, which signifies a richness of information flow that is
generated and maintained through interactions over time (Goldstein et.al., 2010). Follett,
1924/2013 stressed the importance of emergence of new ways of doing business and
proposed that ‘The confronting of diverse desires, the thereby revealing of ‘values’, the
consequent revaluation of values, a uniting of desires which we welcome above all
because it means that the next diversity will emerge on a higher social level – this is
progress’. She underscored that unity (not uniformity) was our aim, and this could only be
attained through the integration of differences and pointed out the “as long as we think of
difference as that which divides us, we shall dislike it; when we think of it as that which
unites us, we shall cherish it” (Follet, 1918). Therefore utilization of conflict as a means of
integration of what is desirable in various viewpoints not only would serve to attract
attention to where it was urgently required, but the integration of previously differing
views could provide a valuable organizational dynamic (Child, 2013). Follett, extended her
view to include competitors as she defined them as “…our opponents are our co-creators,
for they have something to give which we have not” (Follett, 1924/2013:174). The way
Follett identified competitors is quite similar to the one suggested by Adam M.
Brandenburger and Barry J. Nalebuff in their seminal work ‘Co-opetition’ in which they
attempted to reconceptualised competitors as complementors with whom the
organizations create value in a cooperative process.
Follett’s approach to leadership is also congruent with that of postulated by complexity
leadership studies. Complexity thinking posits that leadership is not a linear event,
however, it is embedded in a complex interplay of numerous interacting forces and in the
network of relations (Uhl-Bien, et.al., 2007). Follett deprecated the idea of defining
leadership as a function of personal traits and noted that ‘the chief mistake in thinking of
leadership as resting wholly on personality lies probably in the fact that the executive
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leaders is not a leader of men only but of something we are learning to call the total
situation … includes facts, present and potential, aims and purposes of members of the
organization’ (Follett, 1949/2013:51). Within the framework of complexity leadership
theory leaders are reconfigured as enablers, who control only to the degree that they
build structures for inhibiting or redirecting ideas that are not aligned with organizational
mission or impair organizational abilities. Thus, both leaders and followers, which are
intertwined with each other, are responsible for the total situation and avert any potential
threat to its proper functioning. Leaders and followers in an organization ‘…are both
following the invisible leader – the common purpose.’ (Follett, 1949/2013:55). Complexity
approach in leadership studies posits that leadership is a continuous process and
engenders an organizational ecology in which qualitatively distinct phenomena emerge as
an outcome of interaction among the constituent agents. Follett (1949/2013:52) held that
‘the leader is one who can organize the experience of the group … when leadership rises
to genius it has the power of transforming experience into power… He must see the
evolving situation, the developing situation. His wisdom, his judgment, is used, not on a
situation that is stationery, but one that is changing all the time’. Complexity thinking, as
one of the prominent fluid epistemologies, refers to the shift from being to becoming,
from existence to in-the-making (Styhre, 2007), similar to that of liquidity employed by
Bauman (2000/2012). Follett (1924/2013:53) pronounced that ‘In business we are always
passing from one significant moment to another significant moment, and the leader’s task
is pre-eminently to understand the moment of passing. The leader sees one situation
melting into another and has learned the mastery of that moment.’ The leader should be
able to grasp the essence of the flow in time and space and have the awareness that the
whole is an evolving product of evolution. As mentioned above, novelty emerges as a
synthesis that occurs at the critical moment of evolution. This is clearly beyond mere
running a system with complicated dynamics but entails taking system plasticity for
granted. Hence, ‘the leader must understand the situation, must see it as a whole, must
see the inter-relation of all the parts’ Follett (1949/2013:52). Complexity leadership
approaches asserts a leadership style that fosters interaction, interdependency and injects
adaptive tension as well as acting as a catalyst to manage the entanglement between
bureaucratic and emergent function of the organization.
5.CONCLUSION
Mary Parker Follett’s defied ingrained approaches that had taken stationery condition for
granted and made assertive arguments regarding socio-organizational issues. Given the
proclivity of studies in the field of management that mainly demarcates organizational and
managerial matters within the framework of determinism Follett’s principles opened up
new avenues on the way to unveil the nature of nonlinear dynamics in organizational
settings. Without rejecting the need for utilizing quantitative means in organizational
decision-making processes she had put special emphasis on the aforementioned ‘things-
in-the-making’ (fluidity) and had drawn our attention to the fallacy of getting obsessed
with the so called cause-and-effect because ‘there is no result of the process but only a
moment in the process… On the social level, cause and effect are ways of describing
certain moments in the situation when we look at those moments apart from the total
process’ (Follett 1924/2013:60-61). In an era of ‘big data’ the amount of data generated
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have become colossal as companies capture trillions of bytes of information about their
customers, suppliers, and operations, and millions of networked sensors are being
embedded in the physical world in devices such as mobile phones and automobiles,
sensing, creating, and communicating data (Manyika, et.al., 2011). Hence, there is a strong
need to become a data-savvy organization, which is capable of extracting meaning from
the relevant and reliable data collected to achieve organizational ends. Knowledge
emerges as individuals and social settings interact to create meaning (Marion and Uhl-
Bien, 2011). Follett’s conception of ‘circular response’ reveals that the appropriate context
to be employed for analyzing data is determined in the continuous interaction between
the members of the organization. In complex systems ‘the agents in the system recognize
the meaning of a given exchange, and adjust their own behavior as their response to that
meaning within the system. As they do so the system changes: it is not the same system as
it was before’ (Lichtenstein and Plowman, 2009). Incorporation of complexity thinking into
management facilitates our understanding of Follett’s propositions about everlasting
issues in management. More insight is yet to come as we delve into her oeuvre.
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