Beyond The Professional-Bureaucratic Conflict In Organizations

Abstract

Departmentalization in organizations is hypothesized to allow educated professionals to function freely of mechanized organizational rules, while at the same time allowing nonprofessionals to use mechanized organizational rules. We show how this collective(departmental)-level approach maintains the traditional inverse relationship between professionalism and the use of mechanized rules and how this relationship also applies at the group and person levels of analysis. The results from data of 138 individuals of 43 work groups in 7 departments in a company showed that the relationships among the three variables hold at the individual, group and departmental levels simultaneously, which indicates a cross-level effect. These results suggest that the relationships among variables at the individual level reflect the effects of group level and the relationship at the group-level reflect the effects of department-level. This study presents results that replicate a set of previous findings for these ideas and extends this approach to multiple levels of analysis.