TASK 1
Helgaton Ltd. is just like any other organization. It has hierarchies, structures, manpower, conflicts and other characteristics that are found in other organizations. Organizations as structures of action have approaches which focus on the circumstances determining the actions of individuals in organizations. A great deal of organization theory has been criticized for its normative bias; for its individualistic analysis of the members of organizations; and for embodying an inadequate analysis of how wider relations of power and control in society affect and are affected by organizations (in other words for concentrating mainly on the internal exercise of managerial authority and attempts to subvert it) (Marshall, 1998).
Organizations are shaped by their culture, which include assumptions, values, norms, organization members, and their behaviors. They are also shaped by characteristics, which include strategies, technologies, structures, and processes. Where there are people and technologies, there are organizations. There are four key elements that define organization: (a) people and their roles within the organization; (b) the purpose of the organization; (c) the work activities; and (d) a person's working relationship with the organization (Spohn, 2005).
Using state-of-the-art design and manufacturing technologies, many companies have gotten better at meeting customers’ needs, responding to changing markets, and producing higher-quality products. This is actually a characteristic of many other organizations, not only those belonging to the pharmaceutical industry. They have reduced paper flow, prototyped products quickly, shortened cycle times, linked supply lines electronically, created virtual inventory and companies, and given customers more choices.
The world that organization theory seeks to analyze and describe has changed in some important ways. Four of the more significant changes are (a) the increasing externalization of the employment relation and the development of the "new employment contract," (b) a change in the size distribution of organizations, with a comparative growth in the proportion of smaller organizations, (c) the increasing influence of external capital markets on organizational governance and decision making, and (d) increasing salary inequality within organizations in the United States, compared both to the past and to other industrialized nations (Pfeffer, 1997).
This age dependence of organizational mortality holds even when size is controlled--it is not the case that age dependence occurs simply because new organizations also tend to be smaller and smaller organizations disappear more frequently, although there is a liability of smallness.
Smaller organizations have more difficulty raising capital, face diseconomies of scale in dealing with government regulations, and face problems in attracting labor in competition with larger organizations, because they cannot offer the career prospects and stability of larger organizations (Pfeffer, 1997).
Control has been a major theme in organizational studies since it began more than 100 years ago and continues to be prominent in numerous literatures relevant to organizations, including culture and socialization, rewards and incentives, and leadership. Control has a hierarchical emphasis to it, but many of the decisions in organizations occur through processes of interpersonal influence that rely on power and negotiation rather than on formal systems and authority (Pfeffer, 1997).
Control in organizations is also exercised through individual, interpersonal influence, in which those in roles of authority motivate and direct others to act as they would like. This interpersonal influence is often called leadership (Pfeffer, 1997).
Organizations are of course composed of individuals who are working interdependently to produce some good or service. Even holding aside issues of incentives and motivation, the very fact of interdependence requires coordination to ensure that activity results in the efficient production of the organization’s output. What would happen in an automobile plant if there were no social controls of any kind to determine when people would start work and what they would do? Almost certainly there would be chaos. Coordination and control are necessary, and how to achieve these ends efficiently and, in some formulations, humanely, are fundamental organizational issues (Pfeffer, 1997).
The control process begins with recruiting and selection, in which organizations try to find individuals who already possess necessary skills and attitudes that make them good prospects for being productive (Pfeffer, 1997). Uncovering who is a good employment prospect and possesses the requisite qualities is inevitably an uncertain undertaking. One cannot always directly observe motivation, diligence, or intelligence. Consequently, in the recruiting process, organizations frequently rely on signals or proxies for the underlying quality being sought.
An understanding of the organization life cycle and the associated management imperatives could aid entrepreneurial founders through the uncharted course of firm growth. The life-cycle literature suggests that organizations evolve in a consistent and predictable manner (Chandler, 1993). Scholars have argued that as firms move through various stages of growth, differing problems must be addressed, resulting in the need for different management skills, priorities, and structural configurations. While numerous theories and models have been proposed in an effort to explain the life-cycle process, there has been remarkably little effort to validate these empirically. On the whole, life-cycle stage definitions remain vague and general, making application to specific cases difficult.
TASK 2
a. Compare the different approaches to management and theories of organisation
John Burroughs’ previous position was as a production controller at Wesco, a large pharmaceutical company, where he had responsibility for some thirty production staff and four supervisors, all women. His new job at SKB needs him to take charge of a product development unit composed mainly of research orientated chemists and pharmacists. The unit was small, comprising ten staff in all, of whom five were considered as very bright research workers with good career prospects in front of them, two were junior researchers just out of university, and three staff were people who had spent time in either production or sales environments.
b. Discuss different leadership styles and the effectiveness of these leadership approaches.
John Burroughs must design a strategy based mainly on group intervention. Three most popular group intervention techniques are group diagnostic meetings, team building meetings, and role analysis. Group diagnostic meetings are usually held by “family groups” in the organization (Burroughs and his men). The group should then identify problems confronting them and decide which are most crucial. An outside consultant could be hired to facilitate the discussion. Team building meetings seek to build a better functioning team. Group processes such as communication, decision-making, and problem solving are target areas for improvement. All team members should participate in the discussion and decisions must be reached by consensus. Role analysis techniques are designed to reduce the uncertainty and confusion surrounding the employees’ task assignments and responsibilities or roles.
c. Explain the different motivational theories and their application within the workplace.
Herzberg developed this theory from his research in the 1950’s when he and his associates conducted interviews on the problem of attitudes with two hundred engineers and accountants who worked for eleven different companies in the Pittsburg area. Herzberg asked his subjects to tell about the times when they especially liked their jobs and listed the incidents that they mentioned. Then he asked the same people to tell him about the times when they strongly disliked their jobs and, again, he listed the circumstances they mentioned.
After the data gathered from the interviews were analyzed, Herzberg concluded that people have different categories of needs that were essentially independent of each other and which affect them in different ways. He classified these into two groups; the first group he termed Motivation Factors. These factors were found to be important in motivating employees to superior performance and in improving productivity. The findings indicated that when the employees felt good about their jobs they were motivated to work because they found the job challenging and satisfying with the expectation of accomplishment and rewards (Maidani, 1991).
Later in the 1950s and 1960s, psychologists began to focus on the role of motivation in the work place, specifically in the areas of job satisfaction and job performance resulting in a variety of equity-based orientations as that of Adams (Drillings & O’Neil, 1994). J. Stacey Adams asserts that when people work in exchange for pay, they tend to think of their contribution to the job (inputs) in relation to what they get for working (outcomes). Inputs are anything workers perceive as deserving of a payoff such as education, experience, skill, job effort, and seniority among many other things. Outcomes on the other hand, refer to factors individuals see as payoff for their invested efforts. Examples are pay, fringe benefits, job status, seniority benefits, and job perquisites. If a person feels that, in comparison to others, what he or she is giving to the organization is equal to what is being received, equity exists.
d. In view of your answer to c. above, how would you suggest that Burroughs re-thinks his leadership strategy? You should consider the relationship between motivation theory and the practice of management.
We cannot expect people to leave their evolved behavior at the door when they enter the work environment; gossip, dominance, harassment, and status seeking behaviors permeate organizations and create conflict, intimidation, and jealousy. These behaviors cannot be eliminated, but they can be understood and considered when creating organizational policy. When considering one's position in an organization, it is advantageous to be socially intelligent, which can be thought of as being skilled at social networking, knowing whom to trust, and being able to form powerful relationships.
When considering many of the socio-spatial aspects of the office environment, for instance, communication, status, cohesion and space demarcation, it is evident that a distinction is being made between the objectives of the individual to be both a separate being, and a member of a group. Therefore, it can be suggested that potentially there is a further important facet with at least two elements: distinct individual or self, and member of a group. Within an organization there is likely to be a third element, the organization itself (Donald, 1994).
REFERENCES
Chandler, G. 1993. Tightening the Life-Cycle Construct: A Taxonomic Study of
Growth Stage Configurations in High-Technology Organizations. Entrepreneurship: Theory and Practice.
Donald, I. 1994. The Structure of Office Workers’ Experience of Organizational
Environments. Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology.
Hoctor, J.J. & Thierauf, R.J. 2003. Smart Business Systems for the Optimized
Organization. Praeger.
Marshall, G. 1998. Organization Theory, A Dictionary of Sociology, Oxford
University Press.
Pfeffer, J. 1997. New Directions for Organization Theory. Oxford University
Press.
Spohn, M. 2005. Organization and Leadership Theory: An Evolutionary
Psychology Perspective. Journal of Evolutionary Psychology.
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