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Creating an Innovative Organization:
Ten
Hints for Involving Frontline Workers
Endnotes (Part 4 of 4)
1. Galbraith argues, "organizations that want to innovate or revitalize
themselves need two organizations, an operating organization and an
innovating organization" (1982, 6). I, however, argue the opposite: in a
truly innovative organization, the operating divisions feel a real
responsibility to be innovative. The operating divisions do not merely
produce the firm's products or the agency's services; they share the
responsibility for designing new and better products and services and
for developing new and better ways to produce those products and
services. At the same time, not everyone in the organization is engaged
daily in completely redesigning his or her job. Most of the people spend
most of their time carrying out their job as defined by the last
innovation. My point is that the task of creating better ways to achieve
the organization's purposes is not that of only a few people; this
responsibility is in the job description of everyone.
2. Certainly the chief executive could have been repeatedly promoted
merely by avoiding any action that was incompetent or evil.
3. This assumes that innovative organizations can actually be created
and are not solely the result of some combination of external forces and
pure luck. The Western mind, however, rejects the suggestion that
external forces and/or pure luck are the sole factors that create
innovative organizations. Our Western assumption is that some person or
group within the organization took some actions that, perhaps combined
with outside forces and a bit of luck, helped to foster the innovative
organization. Indeed, we would hope that the actions of these leaders to
create an innovative organization were designed to exploit the external
forces and the luck.
4. An innovation that does not help the organization achieve its mission
is no innovation at all. We do not want the frontline workers at the
offices of the state division of motor vehicles to be innovative about
the fees they charge for drivers' licenses. We do not want the frontline
workers in the city's welfare offices to be innovative about who should
receive assistance checks. Innovation only makes sense within the
overall framework of the agency's mission and goals, though frontline
workers might well challenge that mission, and the agency's leadership
team certainly ought to give them a reasonable hearing.
5. Several of my colleagues have argued that, in creating an innovative
organization, the biggest challenge is not the frontline workers but the
middle managers who may feel threatened.
6. At BME, mechanics are responsible for providing their own tools.
Without cages in which to lock their tools, however, the mechanics were
continually having to buy new ones.
7. A focus on achieving purposes also serves to help protect people from
attacks on their mistakes. This will never provide complete protection
because some people will disagree with the mission and performance
measures. A focus on purposes does, however, provide a clear defense: We
were trying to achieve this goal, and I thought this might be an
effective way to do that. Obviously I was wrong, but I was trying to
accomplish my organization's mission.
8. The individual rewards of pay and promotion will still exist and can
undercut the emphasis on teams. In the public sector, however, salary
increases and bonuses often are extremely small. In an era of cutbacks
and flattened hierarchies, the opportunities for formal promotion to a
higher job classification (as opposed to an informal promotion to larger
responsibilities) are also limited. Consequently, the leadership of a
public agency can create an informal system of reward and recognition.
This system is completely separate from the formal processes imposed by
the personnel office and will override for most people in the agency any
motivational disincentives created by the formal structure.
9. The work standards could not, however, be deleted from the union
contracts. The citywide overhead agency that negotiated with all the
city's unions insisted on it.
References
Behn, Robert D.1991a. Innovation and public values: Mistakes,
flexibility, purpose, equity, cost control, and trust. Presented at the
conference on The Fundamental Questions of Innovation, Duke University,
Durham, N.C. (May 3-4).
_____1991b. Leadership counts: Lessons for public managers. Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Press.
_____1992. Homestead Air Force Base (a public-management teaching case
with sequel and teaching note). Durham, N.C.: The Governors Center at
Duke University, Terry Sanford Institute of Public Policy.
_____1993.
The myth of managerial luck: Success from an unlikely place.
Governing (November): 68.
_____1996. The Bureau of Motor Equipment (a public-management teaching
case with sequel and teaching note). Durham, N.C.: The Governors Center
at Duke University, Terry Sanford Institute of Public Policy,
forthcoming.
Galbraith, Jay R. 1982. Designing the innovating organization.
Organizational Dynamics 11, no. 1 (Winter): 5-25.
Golden, Olivia. 1990. Innovation in public sector human services
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Kanter, Rosabeth Moss. 1988. When a thousand flowers bloom: Structural,
collective, and social conditions for innovation in organizations.
Organizational Behavior 10:169-211.
Katzenbach, Jon R., and Douglas K. Smith. 1993. The wisdom of teams:
Creating the high-performance organization. Boston: Harvard Business
School Press.
Lawler, Edward E., III. 1988. Substitutes for hierarchy. Organizational
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Light, Paul C. 1994. Creating government that encourages innovation. In
New paradigms for government: Issues for the changing public service,
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Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
Maslow, Abraham H. 1943. A theory of human motivation. Psychological
Review 50 (July): 370-96.
Osborne, David, and Ted Gaebler. 1992. Reinventing government. Reading,
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State and Local
Government Review
©1995.
