HORIZONTAL ORGANIZATION AND LEADERSHIP: A GENERATIVE APPROACH FOR AN ETHIC DEVELOPMENT IN COMPLEX SYSTEMS

The growing complexity of our time urgently demands management culture to be innovated, as more and more effective solutions to organization problems are not found at the top, with the traditional managerial culture, characterized by systems, procedure and control. Research shows that 80% of change projects fail or do not reach the expected results and that the main obstacle is the lack of motivation. This depends on a rationalistic, reductive vision of people and organization, considered as two independent realities. The paper shows a new way the organization and workers have to be considered, as two realities that keep evolving with synergy, in an evolutionary systemic-complex vision. On the basis of this, an approach is proposed for organizational and people development which create spaces for trasversal connections and within them generate new processes and competences towards a horizontal, client oriented organization, where people can also find a place of self-development, thereby strengthening their responsibility and motivation. It is an action research and action learning approach developed within a CNR and IMO Foundation research project. It integrates a method to create a space for connections to generate horizontal processes and of a IMO methodology for leadership, which permits to generate new more responsible and aware behaviors, adding to the vertical dimension a horizontal one as well, characterized by dialogue, interactions and connections between the inner and outer world. This approach creates a new path for a responsible, ethic and sustainable development: the horizontal organizational and leadership path.