Building Advantage: Management By Mistrust In Controlling Empowered Proventure Workers

Abstract

How can knowledge services direct and control their employees who must be empowered or given the autonomy to generate value-added solutions to customer priorities? This is a pressing question for managers of knowledge services. In this chapter, the conditions for empowerment are discussed, with the notion that the more discretion employees are given the more controls management has to impose for the organization to be effective. One of the radical ideas presented in this chapter is that employees should be managed and controlled by mistrust rather than a reliance on trust in knowledge services which, among other control mechanisms, entails peer control by other workers.