Communication · Executive Insight Brief · 227
The boss left. The rules did not.
Concertive Control reveals how empowerment can relocate authority into peer norms identity expectations and locally enforced rules
Premise
Self-managing teams do not eliminate control. They can move it from a visible supervisor into the values, identities, norms, and rules members create and enforce together. Concertive Control helps executives see this relocation of authority. Participation may increase discretion while also producing stronger peer scrutiny and standards that feel legitimate because the team helped define them.
The lineage requires precision. Tompkins and Cheney articulated concertive control in 1985, while James R. Barker provided the landmark 1993 longitudinal field account of the mechanism developing in self-managing teams. The executive issue is not whether teamwork is inherently coercive. It is whether shared values have hardened into binding expectations that people can no longer question without appearing disloyal.
What the model is: Concertive Control in Knowledge →
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- FamilyTool
- CategoryTheories & Explanatory Models
- DomainVoice, Silence & Power
What these mean
Editorial orientation · Family
Tool
In this series, Tool names the editorial family primarily used to act on, examine, measure or organize communication. It includes instruments, methods, practices, protocols, codes and institutional arrangements. Membership does not certify effectiveness, portability or safe use in every setting.
Editorial orientation · Category
Theories & Explanatory Models
Explains how or why a communication process works by relating mechanisms, conditions or variables. Its value is an account that can guide inquiry into what produces an outcome, rather than a name for the outcome alone.
- KnowledgeConcertive Control
- Key conceptCommunication Norm
- Key conceptSocial Loafing