Organisations with many middle layers are claimed to select for people who treat all situations as political, because object-level competence stops being legible above a certain height.
The argument is that in a deep hierarchy nobody above a certain level can observe the work, so evaluation falls back on relationships and impression, and the people who rise are those who optimised for that. Jackall's fieldwork among managers supplies the observations; the sequence generalises them into a theory of which organisations become mazes and why.
In practice
- A firm where the fastest route up is visibility rather than output has told its staff what to optimise.
- A layer of management that cannot assess the work assesses the presentation of it, and is not being lazy.
- Possible explanations
- The proposed explanation is observability: above a certain level nobody can see the work, so evaluation falls back on relationships and impression, and people who play that game well rise, which changes who is available to promote next.
- In its favour
- Jackall's ethnographic study of American managers documents the pattern in detail, and the mechanism is consistent with research on promotion under unobservable performance.
- Against it
- The extension was published on a blog rather than in a reviewed literature, the claims about how common such organisations are rest on selected accounts, and the middle layers it blames also exist in organisations that function well.
- Standing
- Published on a blog rather than in a reviewed literature, and spread by linking. A long blog sequence extending Jackall's ethnographic Moral Mazes, which is the researched source. The extension's strong claims about selection and about which organisations qualify are not tested.
- Subject
- Organizations & Bureaucracy
- Essay
- Why organisations learn, harden and decline