KNOWLEDGE WORK AND THE FUTURE OF MANAGEMENT
TRADITIONAL APPROACHES TO MANAGEMENT
Thomas H. Davenport focuses his essay on the changing role of workers and managers in a workplace that increasingly relies on the creation and use of knowledge as opposed to tangible objects. From this perspective, Davenport maintains that the traditional role of managers is changing just as the role of knowledge workers differs considerably from the role of manufacturing employees.
According to Davenport, the traditional approach to management has viewed the management function as separate from other types of work. Managers are also traditionally able to view the work that is performed by their subordinates, leading to quantitative methods for evaluating that work, such as number of widgets produced in a given time, or the number of errors per thousand widgets.
Work processes could be modified and improved, but management activities were not subject to such analysis, in the traditional approach to management. Even recent re-engineering projects rarely focused on managers, but instead tried to apply traditional management techniques to new types of workers.
Managers were also expected to be able to perform the jobs that their subordinates performed, and better than the subordinates. Managers also instructed subordinates on how to perform their jobs, but rarely actually performed such work themselves except in extreme circumstances. There was also the pervasive attitude that management required a higher level of conceptual thinking than workers, and that management tasks were inherently superior to nonmanagement tasks.
According to Davenport, a new type of worker--the knowledge worker--will drive changes to the role of the manager in the twenty-first century. Knowledge is an invisible asset, and those who work with knowledge--either in its creation or its use--are working with an invisible and sometimes even intangible entity. This ...