The advantages of bureaucracy:
- Clear division of work with boundaries to responsibilities.
- Formal (written) rules and procedures resulting in predictability.
- A well-defined hierarchy of authority.
- Appointments to posts based on technical competence.
- Formal (written) documentation of actions and decisions.
- A bureaucratic control system is a strategy based on the internal labor market and the winning of employees’ commitment through the prospect of long-term career advancement including job security, pension packages, and training & development.
- Bureaucracy helps HRM in recruitment, performance appraisal, and other systems
- A bureaucratic system adds to the overall running and efficiency of a business and its employees.
In a bureaucratic system, each employee of the organization knows precisely what their duties are within the organization, and therefore many tasks will be performed a lot quicker and more efficiently. The clear-cut rules set by bureaucratic systems also enable the organization.
The disadvantages of bureaucracy:
- Emphasis on control can prompt rigidity of behavior and defensive routines. Division of tasks and responsibilities can elevate departmental goals above the whole system, resulting in sub-optimizing behavior.
Minimally acceptable standards can become transformed into targets and behavioral norms. Rules and procedures can become ends in themselves. A bureaucracy was used to command and control.
- One important strand in the driver against bureaucracy has been the ideological shift that urged the primacy of the market.
- There is a shift from internal labor market techniques to external methods.
- Throughout the world, many large companies are still bureaucracies. The primacies of the market along with de-regulations have put pressure on large companies.
