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A striking feature of Jaques' work is his “no nonsense” attitude to the “manager‐subordinate” relationship. His blunt account of the origins of this relationship seems at first sight to place him in the legalistic “principles of management” camp rather than in the ranks of the subtler “people centred” schools. We shall see before long how misleading such first impressions can be, for Jaques is not making simplistic assumptions about the human psyche. But he certainly sees no point in agonising over the mechanism of association which brings organisations and work‐groups into being when the facts of life are perfectly straightforward and there is no need to be squeamish about them.

This paper aims to investigate the relationship between a CEO's ability and authority with firm performance. The authors used a sample of 127 Iranian listed firms for over seven years, from 2011 to 2017.

The authors used data envelopment analysis (DEA) to evaluate managers' abilities, and the authors used business strategies to gauge authorities. Also, the methods of Fama–French and Herfindal–Hirschman were used for 889 firm-year observations.

The results show that managers' ability based on return on assets can affect firm performance, and skilled managers can improve performance.

In Iran, managers' abilities and other variables can impact it has been studied. Still, no study has been conducted on managers' strength and their level of authority with the presence of supervision on them.

This article addresses why movements towards less-hierarchical organizing may be unsustainable within organizations.

Eschewing hierarchy may prove sustainable if alternative forms of management are acceptable to both employees and managers accountable for those employees’ performance. Developing alternatives means dealing with the fundamentally contradictory functions of coordination and control. Through a qualitative case study of a manufacturing company that removed first-line supervisors, this article analyses how issues of control and coordination were dealt with formally and informally.

Removal of the formal supervisor was followed by workers’ and middle managers’ efforts to informally reconstruct hierarchical supervision. Their efforts to deal pragmatically with control and coordination were frustrated by formal prescriptions for less hierarchy, leading to contested outcomes. The article identifies upward and downward pressures for the hierarchy’s reconstruction, undermining the sustainability of less-hierarchical organizing.

This study is limited by the use of cross-sectional data and employees’ retrospective narratives. Future research on the sustainability of less-hierarchical organizing should preferably be longitudinal to overcome these limitations.

Unless organizational changes towards less hierarchy engage with issues of managerial control and upward accountability, they are likely to induce pressures for hierarchy’s reconstruction.

The article offers an original approach to the classical problem of eschewing hierarchy in organizations. The approach allows us to explore the interrelated challenges facing such restructuring, some of which are currently unacknowledged or underestimated within the literature.

Many bureaucracies still exist, and not just in the public sector. Increasingly, however, we would argue that they are more likely to evolve towards polyarchic forms because of the growing centrality of stakeholder resistance, especially that which is premised on empowerment of key employees. We suggest that managerial responses to this resistance are transforming bureaucracies through process of accommodation: upper echelon managers invent responses to contentious acts and voices so as to reintegrate ‘resisters’ while rewarding them for contesting decisions in a cooperative way. Understanding these processes help us understand why traditional bureaucracy is currently transforming itself as a result of the emergence of new forms of resistance in the workplace.

Revisits works considered as foundational to management theory and practice. Argues that Taylor, Fayol and Follett work to legitimize management as a body of knowledge, as a practice, and as a profession ‐ and further, as a utopian resolution of conflicts between workers and managers. Methodology is based on techniques of textual analysis and thus also discusses the contribution of such approaches to management history and the relationship of this analysis of Taylor, Fayol and Follett to contemporary themes in management theory and practice.

The call for cuts and streamlining in health organizations has resulted in middle managers having more responsibilities. The main aim of this study is to explore and understand the way middle managers in Swedish health care organizations handle multiple obligations and continuous challenges.

Middle managers in health organizations were interviewed in an open‐ended, interactive mode. The transcribed interviews were analysed using grounded theory as the method of study.

The participating managers started their careers as nurses or physiotherapists and they describe their experiences of transition in role taking and transformation of earlier approaches to work assignments. An understanding of a process of managerial development is identified. During this process, the subjects are going from “being prepared” to “defining limits”, from “action” to “wait‐and‐see”, gradually regaining self‐respect and establishing authority, all to attain a non‐negotiable managerial integrity.

The findings can be used to support first line managers in health care, who often leave their positions in the early stages of their managerial career, as well as middle managers in their managerial development.

The development of managerial integrity, with support from findings in in‐depth interviews, has not been described until now.

This article is drawn from a research project which explored the under‐representation of women in the management of social services departments in the late 1980s. The theme explored here is a subset of that particular research. It focuses on the way in which women spoke about their roles, the power associated with them, and about their experiences in occupying them. The author considers the nature of women’s experiences of occupying positions which in terms of their hierarchical location would be considered “powerful” and argues that women as senior managers present a challenge both to the occupational status of management and to the structures of power in a patriarchal society. It is argued that these challenges are minimised, not only by excluding women from management roles, but also by denying them the legitimate authority which would be expected to be associated with their role.

The processes of management control in a variety of formal settings within a small engineering company are examined in this second of a series of articles. The range of arguments commonly used by workers in order to challenge managerial authority is focused on. Resistance was based around a series of legitimising principles, such as efficiency, profitability, precedent, ethics and morality. Whilst use of these arguments may influence the subsequent behaviour of management in a committee, it may not enable them to “win” the issue.

The purpose of this paper is to seek to contribute to the field of workplace play by introducing the notion of social ludic activities (SLAs) as a specific form of play in organizations.

The conceptualization of SLAs is built upon insights from the practice and organizational play literatures.

SLAs can be deployed not only for productively engaging with work but also as an instrument to resist authority, boycott work or challenge firm contingencies. The particular enactments of SLAs may be influenced by how employees perceive and interpret the organizational climate (i.e. corporate culture, management style, job design and task complexity, and intra-firm interactions) in which they are embedded.

The recognition that emergent forms of play may be conducive to the generation of valuable outcomes without managerial intervention can save managers’ time and efforts required for dealing with potential employees’ resistance. Taking advantage from spontaneous manifestations of play implies understanding the logic of players and creating favorable corporate contexts for the emergence of SLAs rather than attempting to interfere in the natural experiences of flow.

SLAs are conceived as an alternative form of organizational play that is a priori unselfconscious and emergent, inherits autotelic and rational dimensions from prior views of play, draws upon practice insights, and represents the employee perspective.

This paper suggests that as the focus on ‘leadership’ has intensified over recent years, the quality of management in both public and private sectors has diminished. The two phenomena may be linked. Our capacity to run things properly and to manage people in a dignified and productive way has been trammelled by an over‐emphasis on the behavioural and a consequent under‐emphasis on authority, role clarity and task. The managerial vacuum thus created has been filled, imperfectly, by executive coaching and a range of other ‘learning and development’ stratagems. In the real world of complex systems, management and leadership are merely opposite sides of the same coin.