Starfish and the Spider the Spider Can

Starfish and the Spider The spider can represent the traditional centralized organization. It is a creature that has eight legs coming out of its bodies and a number of eyes on its head that can see in any direction. If you cut off a spider's head then it will die similar to an organization with a traditional structure and a centralized leader. However, in contrast, a starfish operates much differently. The starfish represents more of a decentralized organization because its body is largely decentralized itself.

Instead of having a centralized head, the starfish has a neural network that does not have a centralized command. If you cut off a starfish's leg then it survives just fine; it can even grow a new one. Both of these models work well in nature as well as in the business world in different circumstances. However, there are some opportunities to use the strengths of each model in a hybrid form.

This analysis will discuss some of the advantages and disadvantages of these models as well as the opportunities to combine various features into a new creature or method of leadership. Traditional Leadership The traditional leadership model has been challenged by increasing complexity that has arisen in globalized markets fueled by technological achievements. One way that companies have responded is to attempt to standardize their business processes in order to be able to reproduce operations through a centralized command.

This approach has also been aided by the use of technology and advanced ERP systems that can account for complex systems in real time. There are many factors that can account for successful standardization. For example, one factor that affects a firm's competitiveness in such an arrangement is how well knowledge transfers in an organization across international borders (Tsai, 2001). However, there can be many barriers to knowledge transfer that include language and cultural differences.

Another study has identified that the absorptive capacity of knowledge transfer is correlated with the employees' abilities and willingness to learn (Minbaeva, et al., 2003). Therefore, there is also a motivational dimension to standardization that can prevent the effectiveness of a centralized command structure. Much of the spider model seems to operate on the exchange values in leadership or transactional leadership. Transactional leadership is defined as an exchange relationship between the managers and the employees who are all focused on meeting their own self-interests and fulfilling their organizational expectations.

Transactional leadership consists of monitoring, controlling, and motivating employees through economic incentives and other types of exchange incentives (Bass, 1985). One popular form of transactional leadership is management by exception in which a manager will monitor performances and only take corrective actions when a problem is noted. This allows a manager to be able to monitor a large number of employees from a centralized leadership structure. The Starfish The starfish model takes an entirely different approach to leadership.

The starfish doesn't have a head or one centralized organ that is responsible for leading the rest. Rather it consists of a neural network that distributes power equally through a decentralized network. More and more organizations are trying to overcome the challenges of standardization by reversing the trend and localizing leadership. Some have even allowed customers to have an input into the leadership process and others have essentially crowdsourced essential business functions. Craigslist is commonly sited as a modern example of the starfish form.

Founded by Craig Newmark in 1995, craigslist is now in 35 countries and more than 175 cities around the world and the site attracts three billion page views a month. According to Newmark, "The way craigslist runs is that people who use it post, and if they find something inappropriate they flag it for approval. So in a very day to-day kind of way, the people who use the site run it (Brafman & Beckstrom, 2007)." There is no centralized power structure that monitors the users content or tells them what to do.

Instead much of the success of Craigslist has come from users making their own decisions and monitoring the system themselves. Harnessing the power of crowds has many advantages over the work of an individual or an organization with a centralized power structure. For example, a crowd can work together to complete task that would take any one individual many years to complete such as the case with the monitoring of content on Craigslist. A crowd can process enormous amounts of information through each individual contribution.

For example, it has been estimated that each day people around the world spend 600 years collectively playing Angry Birds and this collective effort could potentially be turned to more rewarding work (Johnson, 2012). Sebastian Seunga professor of computational neuroscience at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is attempting to harness the power of a crowd to build a "connectome" which is a map of the vast number of connections in the brain that underlie vision, memory, and disease (Johnson, 2012).

They have created a game that lets players help map the brain by filling in colors that help create a map of the neural processes in the brain. The work of the users helps create a data map of different slices of a brain image that have been taken with an electron microscope and it has been estimated that even with a computer program it could take one individual a thousand years.