An Accountability Puzzle. Organizations, Organizational Governance and Accountability

Abstract

The external expectations of organizational accountability force organizational leaders to find solutions and answers in organizational (and information) governance to assuage the feelings of doubt and unease about the behaviour of the organization and its employees that continuously seem to be expressed in the organizational environment.

Organizational leaders have to align the interests of their share– and stakeholders in finding a balance between performance and accountability, individual and collective ethical approaches, and business ethics based on compliance, based on integrity, or both. They have to integrate accountability in organizational governance based on a strategy that defines boundaries for rules and routines. They need to define authority structures and find ways to control the behaviour of their employees, without being very restrictive and coercive. They have to implement accountability structures in organizational interactions that are extremely complex, nonlinear, and dynamic, in which (mostly informal) relational networks of employees traverse formal structures.

Formal processes, rules, and regulations, used for control and compliance, cannot handle such environments, continuously in ‘social flux’, unpredictable, unstable, and (largely) unmanageable. It is a challenging task that asks exceptional management skills from organizational leaders. The external expectations of accountability cannot be neglected, even if it is not always clear what is exactly meant with that concept.

Why is this (very old) concept still of importance for modern organizations?

In this book, organizational governance, information governance, and accountability are the core subjects, just like the relationship between them. A framework is presented of twelve manifestations of organizational accountability that every organization has to deal with. An approach is introduced to strategically govern organizational accountability with three components: behaviour, accountability, and external assessments.

The core propositions in this book are that without paying strategic attention to [1] the behaviour of employees and managers and [2] to information governance and management, it will be extremely difficult for organizational leaders to find a balance between the two objectives of organizational governance: performance and accountability.

Keywords: Organizational Governance, Information Governance, Accountability, Organizational Behaviour, Employee Behaviour, Records Management, Enterprise Information Management, Archives

JEL Classification: D21, D23, D80, M15