Having recently wrapped up the inaugural run of 📍Collaborative Leadership, we are pleased to share Programme Director, Michael Y. Lee's latest paper on decentralising authority for organisational success. In his paper, he shows decentralization is not merely a one-time structural change but an ongoing collective process that requires navigating through obstacles that drives an organisation towards traditional hierarchy. Interested in finding out more about this cutting-edge leadership model? Mark your calendars and save your seat for the next programme session! 📅 23 – 27 June 2025 | 5 days | Fontainebleau, France 🔗 https://inse.ad/clp #INSEAD #INSEADExecutiveEducation #Leadership #decentralised #organisational
For those interested in organization design, leadership, and distributing authority in organizations, I have a new research paper in Administrative Science Quarterly that examines how organizations can decentralize authority. Decentralizing authority is increasingly seen as an important way for organizations to adapt to contemporary market conditions and employee expectations. Yet, most decentralization efforts fail and revert back to traditional hierarchical or rank-based authority structures. We know A LOT about the reasons that decentralization efforts fail--leaders failing to give up control, subordinates failing to take up their new authority, the legal structure of firms means that authority always legally resides at the top, etc--but we know surprisingly little about how to overcome these structural and psychological forces. Part of the reason we haven't generated much insight about this problem is that most research on decentralization has treated it as a static end state imposed top down by designers. Instead, I treat decentralization as a dynamic, ongoing and contested process, where in some moments, workers step in and enact their authority and leaders step back, while in other moments, workers and leaders revert back to hierarchical patterns of subordination and control. Leveraging an 18-month ethnographic study of an organization that tried to decentralize authority, I found that successful moments of decentralized authority emerged from interconnected practices that did two things: 1) They established and focused collective attention on the boundaries of authority. In practice, this looked like publicly codifying the authority in each role. This "bounding of authority" empowered workers while constraining managers. 2) They depersonalized the attributions of authority such that authority was perceived to come from someone's codified work role (what they did) rather than from their personal qualities (who they were). This "grounding of authority" provided a sense of equal treatment even as some people held more authority than others. Notably, these practices, while effective, were difficult to sustain because of the complexity of decentralized authority and the fact that these practices were cognitively and temporally demanding. A few insights that i think practitioners and scholars can take from this study: 1) Successful decentralization is an ongoing journey that is never finished. 2) Successful moments of decentralization are supported by more not less structure. These structures establish clear boundaries that help ensure authority is distributed in reality. 3) Successful decentralization is not just about distributing authority. It may also require depersonalizing and democratizing the basis of authority. To learn more about the study and findings, you can access the paper here (it's open access):