Reconsidering the Moral Dimension of Managerial Authority: A Review and an Integrative Research Agenda

Managerial authority is a fundamental concept within organizational and management research, often understood as a defining feature of organizations. However, far-reaching questions have been raised about its legitimacy as well as its effectiveness as a mechanism of coordination under modern productive conditions. Moreover, there are substantial disagreements concerning its function, characteristic activities, and basis of legitimacy, yet no comprehensive review of this notion exists. We perform such a review, focusing especially on issues of legitimacy and function and how they are related to the moral dimension of managerial authority. In our review, we identified two distinct approaches to managerial authority, namely bureaucratic theories and efficiency-based theories, each involving several variations (five and three, respectively). Drawing together themes from our review, we argue further that, given the many challenges facing managerial authority in a contemporary context, there is a need for an integrative theory of authority that both identifies complementarities between the differing dimensions of authority and attributes a fundamental role to the moral dimension. We outline such a theory and a related research agenda.