Rosabeth Moss Kanter in Her 2004 Interview Essay

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Rosabeth Moss Kanter

In her 2004 interview "Changing Organizational Structures," Harvard Business School Professor Rosabeth Moss Kanter discusses her view of the relationship between organizational structures and human behavior in terms of how productivity can be improved when the human nature of employees is fully acknowledged by corporations. Moss Kanter sees corporate organization as something that can negatively impact the very human desires of employees: as she notes, "innovation is a central activity that needs to be encouraged everywhere, to fulfill the human drive for improvement and to solve problems that limit opportunity" (Puffer 2004, 101). However it is possible that Moss Kanter is far too generous in her assessment of the "human drive for improvement." A glance at some specific organizational designs may in fact suggest that "less is more" might be a better approach, especially in the salutarily oligarchical business climate of the early 21st century.

Moss Kanter notes that "widespread use of the term 'human resources' did not occur until the early 1980s" suggesting that the term itself is part of a particular historical moment. She also suggests earlier in the interview that the historical moment followed upon the productivity crisis of the 1970s, with the belief on the part of some (including herself) that the "structure of the old industrial bureaucracy might just be a cause of the failure to reach full potential in terms of productivity" (97-8).

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Moss Kanter sees this as a top-down effect, whereby the homogenized class of white men in managerial positions were neither representative nor sensitive to the integration of women and minorities into the workplace. To a certain extent, all of Moss Kanter's prescriptions have been implemented as a matter of common sense: to use a salient example from the 21st century, although Google employs a standard hierarchical business structure, their institutional ethos deliberately offers flexibility to employees in developing their own creative initiatives without nagging supervision, with Google's famous "70/20/10" rule of what percentage of employee time should be devoted to assigned tasks, new projects, and irrelevant parerga (Manimala and Wasdani, 2013).

Yet we might question the wisdom of permitting nearly a third of employees' time to be devoted to self-generated new ideas when a corporation is not Google, and in a position to recruit employees most likely to come up with valuable ideas. A corporation built on standardization and franchising like McDonald's would be frankly destroyed if employees….....

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