Durable decentralization: How democratic deviations allow organizations to temporarily centralize while preserving commitments to decentralization

Organizations that have committed to decentralize authority can face situations where temporary centralization of decision-making is useful or necessary. However, centralization risks undermining an organization’s perceived commitment to decentralization, threatening a loss of employee motivation and commitment or worse, a crisis of legitimacy. Leveraging a comparative case study of four organizations with explicit prior commitments to decentralize authority, all of which centralized authority during the COVID crisis, we identify a process by which organizations can deviate from decentralization commitments while keeping those commitments in place. This process, which we call “democratic deviations”, involves leaders and workers collectively authorizing centralization and then leaders enacting that centralized authority with openness and transparency. In three of our four cases where this process was present, workers evaluated centralization as consistent with decentralization commitments and continued to enact their own decentralized authority. However, in one case, centralization occurred implicitly through leader fiat and was then enacted opaquely by leaders, a process we label “monocratic deviations”. In that case, workers evaluated the organization as abandoning its decentralization commitments, and they began to abdicate decentralized authority even beyond what leaders intended. Through this study, we develop a theory of the structural antecedents and processes of durable commitments to decentralization, prompting a re-evaluation of the assumed fragility of decentralization, and identifying the presence and importance of deeper levels of decentralization. More broadly, our theory suggests how organizations can make temporary, but substantial, deviations from their commitments while keeping those commitments in place.