The method to avoid 'traffic jams' at work,
August 25, 2006, 2D.
A road
trip through a big city with highway construction is a cause
of frustration and stress for many people. Big cities are
dependent upon their highway systems to move people in cars
quickly and efficiently through the town and into
surrounding areas. When roads are under construction, the
normally smooth flow of traffic gets congested, backed up,
and delayed. Many times, hurried drivers will try to find
shortcuts around the points of congestion. Some will exit
the highways before the construction zones and overburden
smaller streets that were not designed to handle heavy
traffic. In such cases, the normal flows of traffic on the
smaller streets also become severely disrupted.
It is
also common to see impatient drivers avoid merging into
crowded lanes in order to progress as far as possible in
less-congested closing lanes. Often, the worst traffic
congestion occurs in the area right before a lane closes and
all of the drivers are forced to merge into a single lane.
Once the merge is complete, traffic typically moves along at
a steady, but slower than normal, rate of speed. One would
think that if everyone merged when they first saw a “merge
ahead” sign, that traffic could continue without
stopping—the drivers who feel that they are exceptions to
the rules and merge at the last possible moment create the
traffic jams.
Max
Weber described an organizational phenomenon similar to the
highway transportation example. Weber wrote in the heyday
of the large, industrial organization. The thinking that
dominated organizational theory of that time centered on
efficiency and rationality—it was a time when organizations
were viewed as machines. As machines, large-scale
organizations had the abilities to perform repetitive
processes in quick and efficient manners. This was
accomplished by analyzing tasks, establishing
responsibilities, defining jobs, and creating workflows that
quickly moved work through organizations. To accomplish
work in the quickest and most efficient way, all work should
be organized and performed in the same invariant way.
Exceptions to given work processes create “jams” in the
system and slow down the productive capabilities of the
organization. He called this principle of organization,
bureaucracy.
Just as
highway systems are designed to allow large numbers of
vehicles to quickly move through a city, bureaucratic
organizations are designed to process large amounts of work
quickly and efficiently. They work best when they are free
of problems and when exceptions to rules do not arise.
People who drive significantly faster or slower than the
flow of traffic on highways create jams on roads. People
and customers who require faster, slower, or special service
from an organization likewise create blockages and stoppages
in organizations. When individuals feel that they are
special or exceptions to the rules of operation, they harm
the ability of the bureaucratic organization to work
efficiently.
The
bureaucratic organization is extremely rational and demands
attention to rules, impersonal interactions,
standardization, and authority. Although bureaucracy
typically has a negative connotation in our society, it is
still a valid model for structuring and processing work in
large and complex organizations.
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