DECODING THE NEW RULES
Today it is fascinating to watch that system crack under its own weight in the advanced industries, in the services, the professions, and many government agencies. The fact is, growing multitudes of us today have more than a single boss.
In Future Shock I pointed out that big organizations were increasingly honeycombed by temporary units like task forces, interdepartmental committees, and project teams. I termed this phenomenon “ad- hocracy.” Since then, many large companies have moved to incorporate these transient units into a radically new formal structure called “matrix organization.” Instead of centralized control, matrix organization employs what is known as a “multiple command system.”
Under this arrangement, each employee is attached to a department and reports to a superior in customary fashion. But he or she is also assigned to one or more teams for jobs that can’t be done by a single department. Thus a typical project team may have people from manufacturing, from research, sales, engineering, finance, and from other departments as well. The members of this team all report to the project leader as well as to a “regular” boss.
The result is that vast numbers of people today report to one boss for purely administrative purposes and another (or a succession of others) for practical get-the-work-done purposes. This system lets employees give attention to more than one task at a time. It speeds up the flow of information and avoids their looking at problems through the narrow slit of a single department. It helps the organization respond to different, quickly changing circumstances. But it also actively subverts centralized control.
Spreading from such early users as General Electric in the United States and Skandia Insurance in Sweden, the matrix-style organization is now found in everything from hospitals and accounting firms to theU. S. Congress (where all sorts of new, semiformal “clearinghouses” and “caucuses” are springing up across committee lines). Matrix, in the words of Professors S. M. Davis of Boston University and P. R. Lawrence of Harvard, “is not just another minor management technique or a passing fad … it represents a sharp break … matrix represents a new species of business organization.”
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