Understanding Holacracy As An Organizational Structure For Modern Organizations

Traditional structures vs. modern structures

Explain Flat organization or self-managed organization.

An effective organizational facilities management and clarifies roles and responsibilities, relationships, levels of authority and supervisory or reporting lines. To satisfy the objectives, organizational channel endeavors of its employees in unified direction and establish means of allocating responsibilities/resources and control under arrangements referred as structure.  By the reviewing structure of the organization, a  manager will be able to specify which human, technical and financial resources are available, how they should be allocated and which resources needs more attention to recover. One recent development in the organizational structure is being centralized and organic where each authority is distributed and every team is self-organized. The aim of this report is evaluate the importance of Holacracy as an organizational structure for the 21st century organizations and to explore how Holacracy would impact the organization. According to Propfe (2015), Holacracy can be characterized by overlapping circles, so that teams can come together to accomplish tasks.
Traditionally, hierarchical structure have provided control and centralized decision making. Such structure served well in the past, managing people in a most clear and efficient way, allocating resources and getting work done. However, one of the trade-offs for these efficiencies is frequently resistance to change- layers of hierarchy become restricted from lower levels and in this context, a number  of viable alternative management structures emerging in organizations across the world.  In the high profile case like Zappos (a US based online clothing shop and shoe), Holacracy structure has been implemented where power of management hierarchy were removed and instead distributed across an organization.
Here in this research, the researcher will provide a brief literature review to understand the importance of Holacracy organizational structure in managing modern organization along with its implementation consequences. Developing the research questions, the researcher will follow a methodology by incorporating several tools and techniques. By developing a Gantt chart, the researcher will estimate a timeline to accomplish the task maintaining a structured approach.

An effort given towards accomplishes the common goal is all about organizational and thus, structuring it effectively is a critical factor for the business success. According to Sakalas and Venskus (2015), organizational structure signifies how a particular tasks are divided, allocated and coordinated in organizations. Based in the specific roles and responsibilities, the authorities are delegated and assigned. By a proper design of organization, managers evaluates six core elements which are involved in decision making: “Work specialization”, “Departmentalization”, “Chain of command”, “Span of control”, “Centralization and decentralization” and “Formalization”.  Organizations commonly adapt five core structures of organization: Flat structure, Hierarchical structure, Flatter structure, Flatarchies and Holacracy structure.
By following the layout of a pyramid, every employee in an organization is subordinate to someone else under the hierarchical structure of organization. Here the authority and level of responsiveness are being valued and employees perceive level of leaderships within an organization. Hanks (2015) however, contradicts that rivalry between departments may inflame as each department makes decisions its individual interests rather than the organizations as a whole.

On the other hand, the structure of flat organization supervises staffs less while promoting their enhanced involvement in the decision making process. According to Lemons (2015), this form of structure elevates the levels of responsibilities of employees in the organization, However, Foster (2016) argued that flat structure restricts the long-term growth of organization because a generalized approach has been taken while delegation of authorities instead of specialized approach.
 
In case of the Flatter organization, managers tend to foster greater communication between employees. This can be considers a less bureaucratic approach however, the roles of various departments can also be imprecise to certain extend in case of flatter organization (Khan 2015).
On the contrary, Flatarchies considers a dynamic organizational structure. According to Shafritz, Ott and Jang (2015),Flatarchies lies between hierarchical and flat organizations. Under this structure, company generally operates within an existing structure however often allow employees to suggest and then run with new ideas. Several literatures identifies as convenient structure where a modern treatment of approach has been taken in decision making of an organization.
The word Holacracy is a derivative of holon focused on autonomy rather than defined tasks, roles or job titles. The design of Holacracy was developed by Brian Robertson a software engineer, in 2007. By enforcing more efficient way of working, the Holacracy is also characterized by corporations doing away with managers, job titles and having consensual decision making. Robertson has taken the idea which was borrowed from W.L. Gore, who was pioneered this in the period of 1950’ at The Morning Star Company. During the period, Holacracy-like structure was developed as an alternative to a top-down hierarchical, organizational design. According to Sawada (2015), Holacracy is a new approach of running a corporation that removes power from the management hierarchy and distributes it across transparent roles. Several modern organizations have shown their interest in Holacracy considering an effective organizational structure and mention the following attributes:
 
Flexible Organizational Structure (with clear roles and accountabilities)
 
New format of meeting (action-driven and eliminating analysis)

More Autonomy to Individuals and Teams (Gets opportunities to resolve issue individually and cut through bureaucracy)

Unique decision making Process (Evolve continuously the structure of organizations)
 Under the Holacracy organizational structure, teams or circles are being decentralized and featured individual work in precise functions or projects. Each circle runs democratically and transparently specifying details and procedures on how things are managed and how long decisions are being made. Circles are focused on tasks that required to be accomplished, drawing of those with particular skills and allowing individuals to be flexible. Once an assignment needs more staff, jobs can be re-distributed or more hires can be made.
 
Hussain and Huganir (2016) opines “within Holacracy, everyone is seen a leader”. Under this approach, an organizational effectiveness is being enhanced because individuals become entrepreneurs in their specialist circles and are given the power to change the organization. This approach is effective because people have a clear understanding about their roles and responsibilities and corporations tend to expand organically. An effort is made to make everything explicit and employee has become core decision makers in each area. Thus, the authorities are being distributed and superior execution of programmatic work processes being executed. In holacratic organizations, issues are resolved by individuals after identifying the problems by writing them down and resolving them systematically. According to Hunter (2015) Holacratic organization gives the opportunity to work under the clear environment by removing extraneous variables so that people can focus only on work. By this self-organized approach, decision making is encouraged and a looking for concern is discouraged. As per the opinion of Thurshika and Andrew (2016), roles are segregated and individuals are assigned and reassigned to jobs at the time of project initiation. For example, Stirman’s organization, a medium owned by Twitter has embraced the Holacratic working style a shave Zappos, a retailer of shoe. By following this approach, both the organizations has successfully empowers individuals by allowing their own decisions and thus, choices were beneficial for the organizations. Since then both the organizations receives positive feedbacks due to produces solutions to problems fast. However, there are much criticism has been found in the literature mentioning that “too much focuses on work, it often missed out the actual individuals and not the task that required to be completed” (Weigelt and Miller 2013). On the contrary, Propfe (2015) suggests “people have multiple roles in Holacracy, often works in different teams and those role descriptions are constantly updated by the team who are actually doing the operation”. Thus, Holacracy allows people a lot of freedom to express their creative talents and the corporation have the opportunity to take advantage of those skills which never unfolded before by any of the above mentioned organizational structure.
 
Under the traditional structure, companies assigned a job to each individual where people often find difficulties because job descriptions are imprecise, often irrelevant and rarely updated. In contrast, roles are definite around the work instead of people and updated regularly by the approach of Holacracy. Furthermore, authority is truly distributed whereas managers loose delegated authority under the conventional organizational structure. Under Holacracy, every team self-organizes whereas the traditional companies are rarely revisited and mandated from the top. Moreover, rules are visible in Holacracy organizations and each employee is bound by the same rules.
By the above discussion, this can be said that the work under Holacracy is more structured those conventional organizational structures. The teams of organization have the authority to decide internally how to provide the best results. With full of operational freedom, this replaces the conventional hierarchy with a series of “interconnected but autonomous teams”. Thus, these increase operational capabilities of organizations.

Synthesizing multiple sources to present the unique argument, research questions are designed by the researcher. It further investigates the rationale of the research topics. Based on the research questions, the research methodologies have been designed and helped to explore the end research outcomes. In this research study, the following research questions are developed by the researcher:
How does Holacracy create influence to organizations?
What are the advantages and disadvantages of the Holacracy organizational structure?
How does Holacracy structure being designed by the organization?
What are the difference between Holacracy and traditional organizational hierarchy?
The above mentioned research questions evaluates the importance of the Holacracy in the modern business organizations. By answering these questions the researcher can determine its impact and understand the implementations approach.

The methodology of research is all about the systematic process used to collect information and data for decision makings. There are different tools and techniques are used in the research methodology sections such as surveys, interviews, publication research and other research techniques. Based on the research methodology technique the researcher will identify suitable data collection methods to explore the research topic. Here it is important to select an appropriate research design method for exploring the research topic more effectively and efficiently. The researcher will come across three types of research designs for examining the effectiveness of Holacratic organization structure. These three methods are explanatory, exploratory and descriptive. By the method of exploratory research, the researcher will focus on the discovery of ideas and insights an opposed to collecting statistically accurate data. The exploratory research design will highlight the importance of Holacratic organizational structure, potential challenges, alternative course of actions and prioritizing areas that require statistical research. On the other hand, descriptive research will explore the detail analysis of the research topic. This descriptive method allows the researcher to know about the nuisances regarding the research topic. Lastly, the explanatory research method is quantitative in nature as well as preplanned and structure in design. However, the exploratory research design is the most effective research design method for extensive research of the topic of the discussion and this method will also be used in this research study.
There are two approaches are used in the research study: inductive and deductive. This study will follow the inductive approach as it evaluates relevant information and specific data which will explore to get the desired research outcome. Here the researcher will come across various theories for investigating the topic of the research in a comprehensive manner. For this research several data, practitioner’s guides will be explored so it is quite justifiable for the research to take the inductive approach.
5.0 Gantt Chart:

Research Process:
The research process is a systematic approach to accomplish the research work within the schedules timeframe (Pickard 2012). By the following the fundamental steps, the research will get the research outcome. In this study of the research, the researcher primarily selects the research topic. In this context, the researcher will select the Holacratic organizational structure to evaluate its impacts and other implementation details related to this research topic. After this, the researcher will develop thee research aim and objectives to articulate the research outcomes. Based on this, the entire study will be structured. In addition, the research needs to develop research questions depending on the objectives. The research outcomes hypothetically analyzed the situation and all the detailed versions will be incorporated in this research study. In the third step, the research conducts a detailed literature review by incorporating several theories relating to the research topic. By evaluating several observations, explanations and previous studies, te research gather a detailed knowledge about the research topic. For doing the extensive research, various, books, journals, online studies, articles will be used by the researcher. However, more data will be required for detailed analysis and these data collection method is required to be selected in order to analyze the corresponding consequences such as advantages and difficulties associated with the implementing Holacratic approach within the organization. Therefore, the fourth stage would be to incorporate the appropriate data collection. There are two types of data can be collected in the research study: primary and secondary. In this research, however, the primary data will be collected by conducting the survey questionnaires. In the next stage, the gather data will be analyzed and evaluated. After the data analysis, the research will accomplish the task and the final results will be obtained. However entire research process needs to be followed and a systematic approach shall be taken seriously.

Data Collection and Analysis method:

Holacracy as an organizational structure

Success of conducting research depends over the outcomes that are gained by the researcher at the end of the research (Palinkas et al. 2015). In that case a sufficient data needs to be collected and analyzed. There are two types of methods are available to gather data at the result of the research such as primary and secondary data collection method. To explore the primary data, the data regarding the research topic or relevant to the research topic will be accumulated from the proposed respondents and key professionals. By “observing methods”, “in-depth interview” and “survey through questionnaires” are the common approaches to collect data through primary data collection process. Most of the researcher prefers this approach because a direct communication with the respondents will be established which will help to reach at the result of the research. On the other hand, data collection on the basis of previous data and various research scholars articles is all about secondary data collection method. However, the best practice approach needs to be selected by the researcher considering the research topic. In that case, several types of approaches include case study, documentation review, previous projects, and articles and so on. Under this method, the research further can exploit the information which is available on company websites.
In this research study, the researcher will explore both primary and secondary data to accumulate sufficient information so that this research gets the enough resources for evaluation. In the primary data collection section, the researcher will conduct the survey questionnaires and in-depth interviews.  The practitioners or adapters of Holacratic organization structure will be chosen as the research respondents whose response will be collected and recorded. Bu reviewing previous data and information, on the other hand, will be collected to gather more and more knowledge regarding the research topic. 

Data analysis consists with qualitative and quantitative methods (O’Leary 2013). Here in this research, a mixed method will be analyzed. Data reliability and accuracy will be enhanced by utilizing both qualitative and quantitative data. Accumulating data from the management people of Australian organizations will be accumulated by the qualitative research. On the other hand, personal interviews will be arranged to conduct the qualitative research (Taylor, Bogdan and DeVault 2015). Here 50 management people from different designations will be selected as proposed responded and their responses will be analyzed. In this way, the researcher will get the number of favorable and unfavorable responses.
8.0 Expected Research Outcomes
After exploring the ranges of data and information, the expected research outcomes will be developed. By extensive data collection and research analysis procedures, the researcher will be able to provide the brief knowledge if Holacracy. This will help to understand the impacts and practicing approaches under the Holacracy organizational structure. Furthermore, the practitioner will be able to understand relevant challenges regarding the implementation of Holacracy structure from the conventional hierarchy. By considering ethical approaches, the company will get the ultimate benefits of Holacratic work culture and enhance the organizational efficiencies. Within Holacracy, the researcher would identify issues by having consensual decision making.

References:

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