A Teleonic Management Framework for Organizations

The hierarchical organization (HO) that has provided the prevailing model for business management for most of this century has been challenged repeatedly during the last 20 to 30 years. Matrix Management (MM), Total Quality Management (TQM), and Business Process Reengineering (BPR) are just three in the long line of approaches that have been suggested to remedy some of the problems with HO. Although these approaches have showed great promise, they either have been abandoned (MM), are on their way out (TQM), or are experiencing serious problems (BPR) in a large number of organizations that have tried to implement them. Yet many of these organizations have managed to make these approaches work. It is suggested in this paper that the main reasons for the failures do not lie in the models themselves, each of which have considerable merits, but in the absence of an overall theoretical framework, within which the various models could be validated and amalgamated. The authors are of the opinion that teleonics (proposed by Jaros and Cloete, 1987) could serve as the basis for such a framework, which could thus be called the Teleonic Management Framework (TMF). [PUBLICATION ABSTRACT]