The effects of leadership and information technology on the organization in the global context

Citation

Kouzmin, A. (1999), "The effects of leadership and information technology on the organization in the global context", Journal of Management Development, Vol. 18 No. 3. https://doi.org/10.1108/jmd.1999.02618CAA.001

The effects of leadership and information technology on the organization in the global context

Alexander Kouzmin holds the Foundation Chair in Management in the Faculty of Commerce at the University of Western Sydney, Nepean, Australia. His research interests include organizational design , technological change, project management, comparative management, administrative reform and crisis management. He has published eight volumes of commissioned work. Among these are his edited Public Sector Administration: Newer Perspectves (Longman, Cheshire, 1983) and his co-edited (with Scott, N.) Dynamics in Australian Public Management: Selected Essays (Macmillan, 1990); (with Still, L. and Clarke, P.) New Directions in Management(McGraw-Hill, 1994); (with Garnett, J.) Handbook of Administrative Communication (Marcel Dekker, 1997); and (with Hayne, A.) Essays in Economic Globalization, Transnational Policies and Vulnerability (ILAS, 1997). He has contributed chapters to many national and international volumes and has published some 150 papers, including scholarly and review articles in more than 35 leading international refereed journals. He is on the editorial board of Administration and SocietyAdministrative Theory and Praxis, Journal of Management Development, Journal of Management History, Public Administration and Management: An Interactive Journal, Public Productivity and Management Review and Public Voices and is a founding co-editor of the international Journal of Contingencies and Crisis Management, published quarterly since 1993.

Nada Korac-Kakabadse is currently Research Fellow at the Cranfield School of Management. Previously, she was employed as a Senior Information Technology Officer with the Austalian Public Service's Department of Employment, Education and Training. She has worked for international organizations in Scandinavia, the Middle East and North Africa, as well as for the Canadian Federal Government. Her research interests include the strategic use of information resources and related organizational decision processes, information system dynamics, management best practice, organizational design, strategic decision support s<FJ>ystems and crisis management. She has a BSc in Mathematics and Computing, a Graduate Diploma in Management Sciences and a Master's Degree in Public Administration and PhD in management. She has also published in the Administrative Theory and Praxis, Information Infra-structure and Policy, Journal of Contingencies and Crisis Management Risk Decision and Policy and Science Communication. She is co-editor of the Journal of Management Development.

The effects of leadership and information technology on the organization in the global context

The interaction between leadership and information technology (IT), whilst already having had a significant impact on organizations in an increasingly globalized economy, is not well understood. Many of these impacts have unconsciously been allowed to happen, without planning and without compensatory changes to organizational design or culture. Certainly, the institutional dimensions to rapid adaptation of IT raises interesting issues for leadership during periods of acute change and acute stress. Arguably, one result has been that IT's potential for organizational improvements in the effectiveness, efficiency, flexibility and organizational actor's efficacy has seldom been realized - certainly not the latter capacity during a significant period of re-engineering and downsizing agencies and corporations as part of a global "imperative". The lack of management vision and even the organizational design implications of sophisticated IT comprehension is exemplified by many IT development failures which have been extremely costly to shareholder and stakeholder alike.

Managers in many organizations, in both private and public sectors, have felt the need for a better appreciation of, and planning for, IT but have been unable to comprehend the diversity and rate of change. Indeed, one could argue that through excessive change, providers of IT have "captured" management to the extent of managers acquiescing to an inevitability, both in the rate and extent of IT change. Organizations facing global challenges need to cease being passive "takers" of marketed IT and upgrades and begin to influence directly the specific dimensions to future IT developments within their organizations. There are many IT-aware practitioners sensitive to the longer-term organizational and institutional ramifications of systemic and frequent IT-driven change. The fact that such awareness often does not manifest itself in specific consultancy interventions may suggest that the default lies in organizational leadership.

Traditionally, leaders have been referred to as "captains of the ship" to denote "stewardship" in the task of balancing competing requirements and alignment of organizational goals with a diversity of human behaviour. Certainly, in the 1990s, with the information revolution and globalization being seen by many as inseparable, this stewardship has mutated into skills and abilities in designing and developing organizations - skills that require considerable creative insights and technical knowledge often absent in senior management structures that could be deemed as IT illiterate.

The information revolution of the 1990s is epic in its scale, moral in its significance and, to many, frightening in its consequences. The kind of IT employed influences patterns of inter-dependencies within organization and, hence, many of the central features of complex organization that belie the "lean and mean" prescriptions of supply-side economics.

One cannot underestimate the implications of a leadership default in understanding IT's transformational potential to structure and process. For example, the extent to which IT communication now dominates such default is best exemplified by alluding to the loss of face-to-face trust in organized capacity, very much under-valued within the revolution of networked organizations. Whilst IT development tends to be associated with the progressive and dynamic elements of globalization and change, the interacting leadership connection to IT might imply a less sanguine approach to the longer term and institutional dimensions to organizational life. Certainly, there needs to be more debate about the impact of IT on organizational dynamics, psycho-structures and social-contracts and, also, their needs to be a greater willingness to contest the manner in which much facilitation of the further development of IT occurs within organizations. The six essays brought together in this special issue of The Journal of Management Development are a small attempt to stimulate some of this overdue discussion.

Management literature suggests that the values of future organizations may suit women to a greater degree. Self-knowledge, building relationships, facilitation skills and empowering others are emerging as essential skills for all managers. These skills are increasingly identified as the central ingredients for successful executives - moving from the male autocrat of the 1970s, to the male communicators of today, then to the male or female leader/enabler of the future.

In this environment of change, Jenni Colwill and Jill Townsend argue that women are taking up more prominent leadership roles, notably in information technology areas of organizations. Yet there are few role-models for women. Many are still searching for appropriate expression of female values and behaviour in organizations. Their paper explores the impact women are having on their organizations, including studies which focus on information technology. They also look at whether traditional female values are a help or a hindrance in creating globally competitive organizations and conclude that a blend of traditional male and female values are essential to the success of organizations in a global context.

During the past 20 years, many international scholars have noted the relative decline of the advisory influence of conventional "think tanks" and the relative rise of management consultants and "ideological" groups. Alan Jarman presents an alternative formulation whereby an Australian Senate Committee concerning space-launch capabilities operated as a parliamentary "think tank". In so doing, it led to significant changes in policy processes within government, structure of both policy advice and operational agencies and, in part, informally coordinated the work of on-going official enquiries into more general space policy matters. The case study provides a rare example of the efficacy of the Senate as an instrument of both ex ante policy making and post hocgovernmental accountability in complex technology policy matters.

Elizabeth More and Michael McGrath outline a study, in progress, focussed on inter-firm cooperation through mechanisms of strategic alliances. The industry in question is the Australian telecommunications sector and the study concentrates on the relationships involving the three carriers - Telecom, Optus and Vodafone - and their first-tier "partners". The Australian telecommunications industry is a useful site for theory testing and development because of its degree of business concentration, the strategic relationships and networks involved and the role of government in encouraging alliances and networks, especially since the move away from a single government-owned monopoly-carrier environment.

The study aims to increase understanding of how such structural arrangements actually work - how they are formed, organized and managed over time. This will help one move beyond the current superficial rhetoric promoting such arrangements as the answer to industry ills. Simple assumptions about complex organizational structures and processes are inadequate in the 1990s.

IT development methodologies may be described as another bastion of rationalist, positivist, functionalist hegemony. Margaret Vicikers historically reviews IT development methodologies of the past 30 years. The major methodologies of the Classical Systems Life Cycle, Structured Systems Development, Data Modeling and, the more recently lauded, Object-Oriented Analysis are briefly reviewed in terms of their ubiquitously quoted evolution and maturation and the benefits they purport to offer IT specialists and managers, generalist management and user groups. This paper argues that, whilst it has traditionally been the case that such methodologies be compared on a case by case basis, it is, perhaps, time to step back from the traditionally reductionist, positivist approaches of IT and try another tack.

IT methodological development is considered here from a critical, anti-positivist perspective. Through this prism, the methodologies, instead of being contrastable, begin to look very similar: they all focus primarily on business processes, functions and/or data. The continuing examination of IT methodologies purely from a positivist paradigm ignores crucial organizational features: people and the more tacit aspects of organizations; for example, inter-personal communication, networking, individual and organizational learning abilities, politicizing, narcissism, sociological paradigmatic influences and workplace cultural issues. These are critical determinants of successful IT implementation and, yet, are largely ignored by current IT development methodologies which continue to mature and evolve along the same functionalist, rationalist, positivist lines, creating an IT "more of the same" syndrome. It is suggested that qualitative research methodologies be employed to assist in creating a new IT development epistemology to spare us from further IT implementation disasters.

Past research on electronic mail (e-mail) has established this information technology as an effective means for achieving intra- and inter-organizational co-ordination. Current research on e-mail has gone beyond the technical aspects of implementation to the non-technical, namely, the social aspects. Celia Romm and Nava Pliskin follow the current trend by considering the role of leadership in diffusion and implementation of e-mail. A case study, which describes the introduction of e-mail to a university community, is presented. The diffusion of e-mail was strongly supported by the charismatic president of this university on the assumption that it would strengthen a series of organizational changes initiated by him prior to the implementation. The diffusion process was, indeed, a technical success. It was, however, followed by a series of political events that undermined the leadership of the president. The discussion focuses on how leadership theories, particularly current theories on charismatic leadership, can explain the technical success of the project and its turbulent political side-effects. The conclusions outline implications for managers and information systems practitioners.

Finally, Nada Korac-Kakabadse and Alexander Kouzmin explore effects of IT on the eve of the third millennium and its ramifications for labour, organization, business and culture. IT is conceptualized as a catalyst for a period of seminal change within the global economy. The lack of IT awareness, social diversity and the need to tap the creative synergy of socio-cultural differences, through the better understanding of IT effects on culture, are highlighted.

A need for self-reflection and a critical examination of adopted management models, especially those within embedded ethnocentric contexts of shared beliefs, values and cognitive structures, are also explored. It is argued that organizations need to learn to manage cultural diversity. The need for the development of organizational ideologies that build on cognitive structures, culturally sensitized to diversity, is central to a generic strategy for managing increasingly culturally-diversified organizations comprising the globalized economy in the third millennium.

Alexander Kouzmin