MIT Sloan Management Review

Leadership and Organizational Studies, Management of Technology and Innovation

 

What Makes a Virtual Organization Work: Lessons From the Open-Source World

By M. Lynne Markus, Brook Manville and Carole E. Agres

October 15, 2000

Today’s workforce increasingly consists of de facto volunteers. The open-source software movement — propelled in large part by volunteer programmers —suggests ways to motivate and direct knowledge workers.

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In his 1998 article “Management’s New Paradigms,” Peter F. Drucker argues against the traditional view that the essential managerial task is to tell workers what to do.1 In fact, managing a workforce increasingly made up of knowledge workers has very different demands. Managers today, Drucker tells us, must direct people as if they were unpaid volunteers, tied to the organization by commitment to its aims and purposes and often expecting to participate in its governance. They must lead workers instead of managing them.

Drucker’s view of knowledge workers as volunteers seems to be on target with today’s economic, business and workforce trends. A number of industries have seen the breakup of large traditional organizations and the emergence of new, networked organizational forms, in which work is conducted by temporary teams that cross organizational lines. With a booming economy, there is a shortage of skilled labor, exacerbated by an aging population and fewer new workforce entrants. High-tech companies in particular are facing a war for talent, while people increasingly value personal time and autonomy over greater income and advancement. Consequently, companies seek to harness the talents and energies of dispersed “communities of practice.” At the same time, a record number of knowledge workers are self-employed freelancers, and more people choose periods of less than full-time... To read the complete article, login or sign-up using the form below.

 
 

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