What Makes a Virtual Organization Work: Lessons From the Open-Source World
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 work. If those trends continue, managers will increasingly face a workforce of volunteers — at least in spirit if not in fact.
How will the traditional management tasks of motivating and directing employees have to change in the face of these new realities? One way to answer that question is to examine an example of an economic enterprise that acts in many ways like a voluntary organization: the open-source software movement. Open-source software, such as the Linux operating system, is licensed as a public good — in other words, it is essentially given away for free. And many open-source software products are built, at least in part, by people who are neither employees nor contract workers and who receive no direct compensation for their participation. Nevertheless, open sourcing has become an increasingly popular way of doing business in the software world, and many entrepreneurs and investors are making considerable money from companies involved with open-source software. (See “About the Research.�
References (28)
1. P.F. Drucker, “Management’s New Paradigms,” Forbes, Oct. 5, 1998, 152–177.
2. E.S. Raymond, “The Cathedral and the Bazaar” (Sebastopol, California: O’Reilly & Associates, 1999).
