1. Introduction
The Professional Bureaucracy is a highly decentralized structure, both in the vertical and horizontal dimensions. A great deal of power over operational work resides at the base of the structure, with the professionals at the operational core. Often each works with his own clients, subject only to the collective control of his colleagues, who trained and taught him in the first place and thereafter reserve the right to censure him for improper practice.
The power of professionals stems from the fact that their work is not only too complex to be supervised by managers or standardized by analysts, but their services are typically in high demand. This gives mobility to the professional, allowing her to insist on having considerable autonomy in her work.
Why do professionals bother entering organizations ?:
They can share resources, including support services, Organizations bring professionals together to learn from each other, and to train new recruits,
To get clients, Clients often need the services of more than one of the same kind, It allows clients to be transferred between them when the initial diagnosis proves to be incorrect or the client's needs change during execution.
2. The Administrative Structure
The Professional Bureaucracy is a highly democratic structure, at least for professionals in the operational core. Professionals not only control their own work, but also seek collective control of the administrative decisions that affect them. Control of these decisions requires control of the midline, which professionals achieve by ensuring that it is made up of "their own."
The administrative structure itself relies largely on mutual adjustment for coordination. Thus, link devices, although not common in the operating core, are important design parameters in the midline. Task forces abound and especially standing commissions; and some B. Professionals even use the matrix structure in administration.
Because of the power of their operators, they are sometimes called "collegiate." Some professionals like to describe themselves as inverted pyramids, with professional traders at the top and managers at the bottom to serve them.
What frequently emerges in Professional B. are parallel administrative hierarchies, a democratic bottom-up hierarchy for professionals, and a second mechanical top-down bureaucratic hierarchy for support staff.
Research indicates that a professional orientation toward service and a bureaucratic orientation toward disciplined compliance with procedures are opposite approaches to work and often create conflicts. Therefore, these two parallel hierarchies are kept quite independent of each other.
3. The Roles of the Professional Administrator
The professional administrator performs a number of roles that give him considerable indirect power in the structure.
First, the professional manager spends a great deal of time handling disturbances in the structure. The pigeonhole process is imperfect and leads to jurisdictional disputes among professionals.
Second, professional managers, especially at the top levels, serve roles at the fringes of the organization, between professionals on the inside and stakeholders on the outside: governments, client associations, etc.
Third, the professional becomes dependent on the effective manager. The professional faces a dilemma: do the administrative work himself, in which case he has to resign in time to practice his profession; or leave it to administrators, in which case you must give up some of your decision-making power.
We can conclude that the power in these structures flows towards those professionals who want to dedicate efforts to doing administrative work instead of professional, especially those who do it well. But that, it must be emphasized, is not the power to let go: the professional administrative maintains its power as long as the professionals consider that it effectively serves their interests.
The formulation of strategies in the professional bureaucracy:
This theme perhaps best illustrates both sides of the power of the professional manager.
Strategy takes a different form in these types of organizations. Because your products are difficult to measure, it is not easy to agree on your goals. Thus the notion of strategy (a single integrated decision guideline, common to the entire organization) loses much of its meaning in the Professional Bureaucracy.
Given the autonomy of each professional, it is logical to think in terms of a personal strategy for each professional, in reality each one chooses their own product-market strategy.
But each professional does not choose their clients and methods at random, they are significantly restricted by professional standards and the skills they have learned. In other words, professional associations and training institutions outside the organization have an important role in determining the strategies that the professional follows. Thus these strategies are instilled in professionals during their formal training and are modified as changes arise.
The strategies of the Professional Bureaucracy are largely the responsibility of individual professionals within the organization as well as associations outside it.
There are degrees of freedom that allow each organization within the profession to tailor basic strategies to its own needs and interests.
Most of the strategic initiatives are proposed by the operational nucleus, that is, by the »professional entrepreneurs».
But what is the role of the professional administrator in all this?
The professional depends on the administrator to help him negotiate his projects through the system. But the administrator's power goes beyond this help to the professional, it also seeks to alter the organization's strategies to make them more effective, although in these particular structures (from the bottom-up), the administrator cannot impose his will on the operating core professionals. Instead, you must rely on its informal power, and apply it subtly.
Conditions of the professional bureaucracy
Configuration type:
This type of configuration appears when the operational core of an organization is dominated by professional workers who use:
- procedures difficult to learn, yet well defined
Ambient:
The above determines an environment:
- Complex
Requires the use of difficult procedures
They are learned through extensive formal training programs
- Stable to allow these skills to become well defined (standardized).
Age and dimension:
They are factors of less relevance, and there may be larger or smaller organizations, larger or smaller.
In this type of organization, the transition between simple structure and professional bureaucracy takes a short time, skilled employees bring the standards to the organization (difference with B. Mechanics)
Technical system:
- Not highly regulated, Not highly automated
Due to resistance to the rationalization of work, which would lead to B. Mechanics
For the need for freedom at work
It is not Sophisticated: Because this would lead the professional to depend on a multidisciplinary group to work (Adhocracia)
Grouping Criteria
The markets of the Prof. Bureaucracies are frequently diversified (groups of professionals from different specialties come together to serve different types of clients), and guided by Hypothesis 11 (chapter 6) such diversity of markets encourages the use of client criteria for the grouping of professionals
Types of professional bureaucracies:
- Dispersed Professional Bureaucracy: when the markets of this type of organization are geographically dispersed. Bureau-adhocracy: Simple Professional Bureaucracy: when the direction of professionals is developed by a strong, sometimes autocratic leader. (as in simple structure)
Power:
Professionalism is a popular word today and as a result, the Professional Bureaucracy is a fashionable structure, mainly because it is quite democratic.
4. Some Issues Associated With Professional Bureaucracy
The professional bureaucracy is democratic, it spreads power directly to its workers, especially professionals, and provides them with autonomy, freeing them from the need to coordinate closely with their peers and the people and policies that this implies. Thus, the professional is linked to an organization and yet is free to serve his clients in his own way, restricted only by the rules of his profession.
As a result, professionals tend to emerge as highly motivated and responsible individuals, dedicated to their work and the clients they serve. Here the technical and social systems can function in complete harmony.
Furthermore, autonomy allows professionals to hone their skills, free from interference. By repeating the same programs over and over, reducing the uncertainty until they are almost perfect.
But in these same characteristics of democracy and autonomy lie the major problems of the professional bureaucracy. Because there is virtually no control over work other than that of the profession itself, no way to correct deficiencies that the professionals themselves want to overlook.
Coordination Problems
The professional bureaucracy can coordinate effectively in its operational nucleus only by standardization of skills. Direct supervision and mutual adjustment are resisted as direct infringements on the autonomy of the professional. And the standardization of work processes and products are inefficiencies for complex work with poorly defined products. But the standardization of skills is a weak coordinating mechanism, which cannot cope with many of the needs that originate in Ô_ professional bureaucracy.
There is a need for coordination between professionals and support staff. For the professional it is resolved by giving the orders. This traps staff members between the vertical power of the line of authority above him and the power of the professional police at his side.
There is also a problem of coordination between professionals. Professional bureaucracies are collections of individuals who come together to use common resources but who also want to be left alone.
As long as the typecasting process works, this is possible. But this process can never be so perfect that the customer's needs don't fall through the cracks of the various standard programs. Needs that fall outside of or overlap categories tend to be forced (artificially) into one category or another.
5. Innovation Problems
In these structures, important innovation also depends on cooperation. Existing programs can be refined by individual specialists. But newcomers often cut through existing majors (requiring a reorganization of lockers) and thus call for interdisciplinary efforts. As a result, the refusal of professionals to work cooperatively with others results in innovation problems.
The professional bureaucracy is an inflexible structure, well adapted to producing standard products but inadequate to adapt to the production of new ones. All bureaucracies are set up for stable environments; they are performance structures designed to refine programs for predictable contingencies; they are not problem-solving structures, designed to create programs for needs that have never been met before.
The problems of innovation in the professional bureaucracy have their roots in convergent thinking, in the deductive reasoning of the professional who seeks the specific situation in the general concept. This means that new problems are forced into old lockers.
The solution of innovative problems requires inductive thinking, it is in fact the inference of various general concepts or programs from particular experiences. This type of thinking is divergent, it breaks with the old routines and norms instead of perfecting the existing ones and this goes against everything that the professional bureaucracy is designed to do.
Not surprisingly, the professional bureaucracies and associations that control the profession tend to be conservative, vacillating bodies, and that change comes slowly and painfully after much political intrigue and maneuvering on the part of innovators.
As long as the environment remains stable, the professional bureaucracy remains smooth
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