Communal Decline: The Vanishing of High-Moral Servant Leaders and the Decay of Democratic, High-Trust Kibbutz Cultures.

This article discusses the question of connection between leaders' morality and the output performance of organizations; whether their morality can explain, through trust, continuity, and change of organizational cultures or not. An anthropological study of kibbutzim, whose innovative and adaptive cultures declined recently, found that past success was dependent on high-moral servant leaders who backed democracy and promoted high-trust cultures that engendered innovation by creative officers in some kibbutzim, which others imitated. However, conservatism of continuous leaders as heads of low-trust kibbutz federative organizations, which were ignored by customary kibbutz research, engendered oligarchization which rotation enhanced rather than prevented. While some authors grasp market, hierarchy, and trust as three types of social control that create plural forms, others see trust as an alternative to market and hierarchy. Capitalist firms tend to be hierarchic, low-trust, and coercive, while Israeli kibbutzim have preferred high trust and democracy.