James Seidman Organizational Theory

From the comparison made above, conclusions can be drawn by means of both theory and practice. There are many theories related to the functioning of public organizations. Some of these theories apply in our study and therefore provide explanations for the phenomena and patterns we discovered. Below these various kind of theories will be discussed.

According to the organizational behavior theory of bureaucratic politics by James Q. Wilson, even basic elements of administration are complex for public organizations, such as the academic institutions in our research, cannot control their broadly defined missions, nor can they unilaterally control other critical elements of management – revenues, personnel, and the means of production.

This also

On one hand, the institutional locations and relevant policies are different for the faculty and institute since they are located in different countries; for example the law of Nord Rhine-Westphalia causes the impossibility for the director of the institute to employ researchers with permanent contract, while the Dutch law allows the faculty dean to do so. On the other hand, the organizational structure differs; while the organizations are to a large extent comparable in terms of their functioning and large amount of students, one of the organizations is a faculty while the other is an institute belonging to a faculty. The director of the institute has less power than the faculty dean, since the director has a dean as superior, which has mainly more powers in terms of financial affairs, while the Dutch manager is a dean

In our study, it is clearly visible that the director and dean each take up a different role as a manager; while the director sees himself more as an intermediator, thus taking up the role as figurehead, the dean acts more as a leader, pushing forward decisions. The director adheres, obviously, to a more horizontal form of leadership, supported by the theory of Van Wart that this management style is suitable for well working teams which can be left alone. According to his theory, “good leaders reduce the need for formal leadership”. The dean, contrarily, follows a more classical management theory, according to which a manager ‘must assign and coordinate work, secure the necessary resources and information for the organization, communicate goals, align incentives for workers with those goals, and then can be held accountable for the results’. This classical management theory perfectly fits in Jacques’ advocacy of hierarchical management within organizations. Managerial hierarchy is, according to Jacques, the only effective way of dividing work, ensuring tasks are fulfilled and creating the environment in which employees in any organization layer can add value to the work of the people in the layer below them. The dean of organization red adheres to this theory by fulfilling his managerial role in a forward-pushing, leading way within the professional