“The best place to be”: managing control and employee loyalty in a knowledge-intensive company

Using a case study of an integrated information technology services firm, the author examines how the interplay between culture, structure, and leadership is managed in order to build control and employee loyalty. The author focuses on the salient features of the case, namely that a high-profile culture combines with a low-profile leadership and with minimal structuring to create a vibrant and loyalty-generating organizational environment. The author proposes that these processes are effective because they reinforce one another. It is their articulation, not their existence, that acts both as an unobtrusive control mechanism and as an employee loyalty–generating process, fulfilling the needs of both the organization and its professionals.