Читать книгу Reframing Organizations - Lee G. Bolman - Страница 66

Human resource requirements have also changed dramatically in recent decades. Many lower‐level jobs now require higher levels of skill. A better‐educated workforce expects and often demands more discretion in daily work routines. Members of Gen Y and Gen Z (born between roughly 1980 and 2015) typically expect better pay and more favorable working conditions than their predecessors. Increasing specialization has professionalized many functions. Professionals typically know more than their supervisors about technical aspects of their work. They expect autonomy and prefer reporting to professional colleagues. Trying to tell a Harvard professor what to teach is an exercise in futility. In contrast, giving too much discretion to a low‐skilled McDonald's worker could become a disaster for both employee and customers.

Dramatically different structural forms are emerging as a result of changes in workforce demographics. Deal and Kennedy (1982) predicted early on the emergence of the atomized or network organization, made up of small, autonomous, often geographically dispersed work groups tied together by information systems and organizational symbols. Drucker made a similar observation in noting that businesses increasingly “move work to where the people are, rather than people to where the work is” (1989, p. 20). The Covid‐19 pandemic forced almost everyone who could to work from home, intensifying this trend.