I'll give it a try. Please bear in mind that I am no expert.
The Harzburg model (name after the town where the Academy was located) draws a lot of inspiration from german military leadership philosophies and civil administration principles. It's main idea is management by delegation of responsibility, and it promotes the idea that by giving an employee autonomy in his circle of responsability, employee engagement and initiative is promoted. It is a sharp deviation from authoritarian/patriarchic leadership styles that were still very common at the time of it's inception the 1950s.
Basis of the system are the
general leadership instruction to be issued by the chief executive level leadership and accurate
job descriptions, that clearly and unmistakenly define the responsibilities of every position. Job descriptions can be amended by negotiated goals. Within his area of responsibility the employee acts autonomously; the supervisor/manager may not (except to prevent immediate grave danger) interfere directly.
Employees have the duty to inform their superiors on relevant developments, risks, and irregularites and special occurences; to give their own subordinates all the information that they might need for their job; and to inform (laterally) every department/person in the enterprise that might be affected by a certain development. Every employee has the duty to
intensify his area of delegation, that is to constantly improve and innovate.
Managers have the same obligations versus their superiors (if they are in middle management); in addition, they have the responsability to decide all exceptional cases brought to them by their subdordinates. Managers also have to consult with their subordinates on all matters that might affect or be affected by their subordinates area of responsibility and take their subordinates contribution into account. (This goes as far as that the manager is even obliged to explain the reasons to his subordinate when he deviates from his subordinate's proposal.)
Managers are obliged to ensure, by means of
Dienstaufsicht (roughly: service supervison, a term directly taken from military and administrative law), that their subordinates stay within their area of resposibility when deciding matters themselves, that their subordinates respect company guidelines, rules and relevant (legal) regulation, that they bring forward exceptional cases to their superior; that they are qualified for their tasks, that they are the right people for the job (certain personality traits just don't fit with certain tasks, i.e. a management director without any creativity is in the wrong place); and to catch irregularities before they materialize as substantial damage or loss. Dienstaufsicht is done by means of spot checks and random samples (as opposed to total control practised by authoritarian leadership, where the manager needs to be informed about everything, i.e. by having all incoming and ougoing mail going over his desk).
To help managers with these, elaborate control plans and information maps should be and were developed.
This was a huge departure from traditional authoritarian leadership styles prevalent to date which had developed in the traditional crafts- and trades based economy, where the master was superior in skill and experience to his employees. Authoritarian leadership had become inadequate und unworkable for larger enterprises both for reasons of manager workload and qualification (a manager supervising specialists from different fields will not be competent enough in these fields to exert total control) and because it cut off any employee initiative.
The new economic leadership model should thus be more agile, more innovative, and allow the enterprise to adapt to challenges faster and more efficiently.
Over time, the Harzburg model was critisized for it's tendency to escalate bureaucracy (see the aforementioned control plans and infomation maps; in addition to that records of the controls should be kept in a "control file" for every employee). In practice, job descriptions, as the cornerstone of the model of leading by delegation of responsability, also proved increasingly resistant to change, leading to an ossification of enterprise structure - or, with more pragmatic people, you ended with an organisation in which factual responsibilities and actions did no longer match the job description, which lead to friction.
Also, the guideline that exceptional cases needed to be decided by the superior often lead to a contraction of the employees factual responsibility, who was only allowed to decide the most mundane and routine cases - which contradicted the system's original aims. From the 1980s onwards, bigger corporations started to shift to anglo-saxon management styles, most often Drucker's management by objectives.
Originally I had planned on just throwing you some links, but it seems that there really is not much literature in english (at least not online). There is a recent french book that brought the Habsburg model and it's creator back into public attention:
Libres d'obéir by Nicolas Chapoutot. Apparently, the author traces a direct line from 3rd Reich administration to modern management practices, which is why this book has received so much attention. I have not yet come to read it, so I can not give any opinion on this (I have the book sitting on my bookshelf waiting to be read, but I figured I started by reading some of the prime sources first).
