Bureaucratic leadership and strategic decision-making at the Department of Trade, Industry and Competition

Abstract

The relevance of bureaucratic leadership has long been a subject of heated debate among academics and businesses alike. A review of the literature found that bureaucratic leadership entails time-intensive — and often time-wasting — rules and procedures within a rigorous and painstakingly slow framework (Hamel & Zanini, 2017; Bishu & Kennedy, 2020; Mustanir et al., 2019; Berkowitz & Krause, 2020). Employees operating within a bureaucracy are given little choice in how they perform their work. The purpose of the study is to assess the relationship between bureaucratic leadership and strategic decision-making within the Department of Trade, Industry and Competition (DTIC). The researchers employed an explanatory sequential mixed-method research design, conducted across two phases. Phase 1 was a quantitative study comprising an online survey and phase 2 was a qualitative study based on data collected from in-depth interviews. The study found that strategic decision-making at the DTIC is a time-consuming and onerous process and that strategic decisions were not made by the organisation’s bureaucratic leaders, but were relegated to a political level, thus limiting the effectiveness of the DTIC’s operations. To ease this tension in the relationship between bureaucratic leadership and decision-making, the researchers recommended adopting a hybrid leadership framework to engage all levels of management and leadership in the DTIC.