Every organization
in the world has a formal structure that mainly provides direction and
distributes power among its members. Thus, different areas and positions in the
company’s structures hold not only different levels of power and
responsibility, but also risk. How risk has been transported from one structure
to another with less power is one of the main aspects of fairness among
employees of any given company.
Risk
management in companies has important impacts on the members of the structure, and
especially on the weakest ones. Day to day activities in managing uncertainty
in organizations and in facing different risk levels involve significant amount
of anxiety among workers. Anxiety management in every individual can have
unexpected responses which involve feelings like fear or anger due to
issues related to responsibility. Responses out of feelings based on anxiety in workforce setting
can provoke inconsistency in management directives or in employees’ reactions,
causing sometimes misuses of power in order to maintain the system’s order. Responsible
management and healthy environments are also vulnerable to anxiety responses
from team members.
In every
organization, the combination of anxiety, fear and power can sometimes create
inconsistent decisions when facing risk situations. Some personal experiences
and other people testimonies have agreed in how some managers delegate risk to
their subordinates without giving them the necessary amount of power and means
to conducts their tasks successfully. In other words, managers sometimes give
their employees a problem to solve without the required flexibility to react
differently as originally planned if necessary.
How come is
it possible to find a situation such as this one that sets one for failure?
People’s
experiences in this matter show evidence that in order to maintain the control
and status quo of the system, which involves
maintaining power and image levels, some managers set up for failure their
subordinates, trying to convince them of things that are not logical or true.
Some examples describe some managers convincing members from their team that
come from the best universities of the world that “studies are not important in
life”. Another example is convincing creative specialists that “they are not
creative, but technical”.
These
behaviours can be attributed to the fear of losing power within the
organization. It is also typical that chiefs and managers avoid their
subordinates to question their structure in order to align the team into an
informal system, which becomes the “true path” and also provides power among
them. The power of being informed about the boss’s plans plays an important
role in aligning the members of the informal structure.
