A teleonic management framework for organizations

The hierarchical organization (HO) that has provided the prevailing model f or business management for most of this century has been challenged repeate dly during the last 20 to 30. years. Matrix Management (MM), Total Quality Management (TQM), and Business Process Reengineering (BPR) are just three i n the long line of approaches that have been suggested to remedy some of th e problems with HO. Although these approaches have showed great promise, th ey either have been abandoned (MM), are on their way out (TQM), or are expe riencing serious problems (BPR) in a large number of organizations that hav e 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 rea sons for the failures do not lie in the models themselves, each of which ha ve considerable merits, but in the absence of an overall theoretical framew ork, within which the various models could be validated and amalgamated. Th e 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 ca lled the Teleonic Management Framework (TMF).