Stewardship - Peter Block

Despite popular rhetoric lauding quality improvement, visionary leadership, and customer-driven enterprises, says the author, real workplace change has been superficial and limited. In response to such "cosmetic change," as he calls it, Block unveils radical new models of stewardship both for the organization as a whole and for the role of the individual within the organization. The company that has absorbed the concept of stewardship, he explains, will offer equity and partnership at all levels for its employees, while managers who identify themselves as stewards will hold themselves accountable to all those over whom they exercise power. To be a steward, he goes on, means claiming one's autonomy while, at the same time, surrendering the need to control. Thus the person who truly acts as a steward within an organization will choose service over self-interest, trusteeship over ownership, and self-management over control.;Block proceeds to demonstrate how every function within an organization would be altered by the concept of stewardship, describing the changes that would take place in job design, work flow, quality control, performance appraisal, pay systems, supervisory and leadership methods, and finance and human resource staff functions. In all of these, he says, the management of work and the doing of work will be integrated. The result that block depicts will be a fundamental redistribution of purpose, power and privilege in all areas of organizational life.