Organization and Management_theories Essay

Organization is a complex and intricate framework whose nature, behavior, effects, consequences and incidents are broad and ambiguous. It is not automatically comprehensible and manageable as any person dealing with it remains uncertain of what the organization is all about. This is so simply because the behavior, conditions and status of the organization is contingent or dependent upon individual members. Hence, one must first have to determine the basic traits, behavior, disposition, aims, and positions of each member before one can truly have the rudimentary idea of an organization which could guide and lead towards its dealings for a better and more effective management policies. Managing an organization requires a basic framework, plan, strategy or principles on how the manager will deal to his or her subordinates. These framework, plan, strategy or principles should be possessed by the manager, and should be well defined with a sense of concreteness and direction, before he or she can deal with his or her subordinates. The success of the manager’s plan or the fulfillment of his or her objective is basically determined on how efficacious and sustaining is his methods of management towards the subordinates. The manager must devise and establish such a framework, plan, strategy or principles which would best fit to the basic structure and environment in which he is managing, and one that is acceptable, favorable and bearable by all subordinates. This paper concerns the need for a manager to have an instrumental and conceptual knowledge in everyday practice. This includes the assessments of various frameworks critically analyzing some management and organizational methods and theories that may be utilized and applied as a management policy. The manager may not contend only to use one method, but resort to various methods could before practical and efficacious in reaching for the intended output. The manager therefore, must possess a sound and rational discretion, this being the condition sine qua non, in order for him to make use of the various management theories and methods which he may deem fit, convenient and effective within the premises and circumstances of the establishment or enterprise which he or she is managing or dealing. Critique on the Classical Models The classical thinkers like Plato waxes some ideas though profoundly and abstractly laid down in his The Laws and The Republic. He advanced the idea that a leader must necessarily possess a general idea of everything to the extent that he or she must know the basic function of each unit in the community. Plato would suggest that managers must be acquainted to his or her subordinates, especially their strengths, talents, skills, ability and capacity so as he may designate and assign them to such a job where such subordinate or member of the community is best fitted and productive. The explicit theory of the one best way to organize is normally ascribed to the â€Å"classical† theorists, notably Frederick Taylor and Max Weber, but it is, as we have seen, much older, even if it then only concerned social organization. Taylor’s model sprang from factory production and Weber’s from the offices of public administration, but they had a lot in common—notably a reliance on standardization of work, control of quality, fine-grained division of labor, and a strict hierarchy. They both strongly believed that the organizational models they proposed would prevail and eventually supplant all others because they were the most efficient. Weber’s interest was not in organization per se, but in the role it played in politics and economics in general. His discussion of bureaucracy therefore centered on its legal and political ramifications, as well as its part in the general rationalization of society—a result of the growing hegemony of rational means-ends relations. Weber viewed bureaucracy as the epitome of this development, working with supreme efficiency, and believed it would supersede all other organization forms. In Weber’s eyes, this development was not necessarily in humanity’s interest—on the contrary, he saw in the efficiency of bureaucracy a frightening potential to lock us into an â€Å"Iron Cage† of machine-like existence. With Weber’s own definition of sociology in mind, it is difficult to understand how he could be so sure of the inevitable and total domination of a single organizational structure. In that definition, he bases sociology squarely on an understanding of individual action and interaction, based on individuals’ subjective understanding of their situation and the purpose of their own actions (Fivelsdal 1971). Supra-individual concepts such as structure, function, and system are rejected as causes. One should think that human variation would make room for more than one structural form, and at least that its grim advances could be blocked by a pervasive tendency among disgruntled individuals to choose (for subjective reasons) other solutions. Henri Fayol and later Luther Gulick and Lyndall Urwick emphasized formal authority and the role of direct supervision (Mintzberg 1979), but the spirit of their work was the same as Taylor’s. You might even say that they were not really presenting theories of organization at all, but recipes—indicating the best solution for every type of activity, just as Plato did in the meticulous details of The Laws. The early theorists’ belief in the existence of final, superior solutions and their inescapable triumph can be viewed as an expression of their times—of the rapid progress of science and technology; the immense success of the mass-producing factory, the general increase in rational attitudes; and a rather naive belief in the simpleness of human affairs and their resemblance to physical systems. Buckley (1967) has suggested that such theories represented a continuation of the â€Å"Social Physics† the central notion of which was that man was a physical object, a kind of advanced machine; that behavior and social relations were subject to natural laws of the same kind as the laws of physics; and that man and society could be analyzed and managed accordingly. In politics and history the Marxian visions of inevitable social transformations embodied much of the same spirit, even if the underlying analysis was more sophisticated. The belief in the rationality and inevitability of things was thus a reflection of the contemporary beliefs in progress and technology, and the notion of the one best solution also appeals to our natural thirst for simplification—a faith in a â€Å"one best way† is much more reassuring than the acknowledgment of a bewildering array of optional solutions. As such, this view lingers on today—both in the minds of managers and in the offerings of consultants. Implied in this view is a notion of technological determinism—if there is a one best way of organizing, there must also be a one best way to utilize any new tool. Such a one-to-one relationship between a tool and its optimal use means that the tool itself will, by necessity, have strong bearings on organizational design. It is quite obvious that Taylor included tools and machinery in his designs for factory organization, and that the properties of those tools and machines were important determinants for the design of jobs and the relationships between them. The connection may not seem just as plain when we look at Weber and his theories of bureaucracy—there do not seem to be so many tools in use. However, the most important organizational tool in history (at least before the computer) has probably been the art of writing, and Weber’s bureaucracy is explicitly based on written procedures and written information. In other words, if bureaucracy is the one best way to organize administrative work in a literate society, and it presupposes the use of writing, the properties of writing (as a tool) must be regarded as one of the most the most important determinants of bureaucratic organization—maybe even the most important. In Scott’s (1987) classification of theoretical schools, both scientific management and Weber’s theory of bureaucracy are closed, rational system models. They presuppose that organizational actors are fully rational in all their decisions, that they always strive to achieve the organization’s expressed goals, and that the structure and functions of an organization are independent of its environment. Simon’s Bounded Rationality In the development of organization theory, the belief in the â€Å"one best way† and the closed, rational model of organizations (Scott 1987) gradually came under attack after World War II. One of the early attackers was Herbert A. Simon, who developed a new theory of decision making, opposing the reigning concept of unbounded rationality in organizational and economic matters. Simon attacked both the economists’ image of â€Å"economic man† and the â€Å"rational manager† of the earlier management theorists. Although he seemed to accept the notion that there was an objective, theoretical â€Å"best way† in a given set of circumstances, he denied the possibility of finding this solution in practice. Simon’s great common-sense realization was that humans operate with limited information and wits in an exceedingly complex world, and that they have no choice but to simplify, to operate with a bounded rationality, to satisfice—not maximize. The basic realization of an objective â€Å"best way† is not a practical possibility, even if it may exist in theory. The objective, practical goal of organizational members is therefore never to find the optimal solution (even if they may think so themselves), but to find one that is good enough for their ends—which usually also means good enough for the organization to survive. It also follows that there must be many such solutions, and that different people and different organizations will more often than not choose different solutions. Scott (1987) also classifies the theory presented in Administrative Behavior as belonging to the closed, rational system model. This seems a bit unjust, since several passages in the book discuss interactions with the environment (for instance, the discussions in Chapter VI, â€Å"The Equilibrium of the Organization†) and fully document that Simon does not believe that an organization is an island to itself. However, the theory of decision making that is developed in the book largely treats organizational decisions as something internal to the organization, and this may perhaps merit Scott’s classification. Because the environmental connection is more pronounced in the book coauthored with March (March and Simon 1958), the theory presented there is classified by Scott as belonging to the open, rational system models. These models represent organizations as predominantly rational systems, but they recognize that organizations are continuously dependent on exchanges with their environment and must adapt to it to survive. Transaction Costs Analysis Another approach in the open, rational systems category is the transaction cost analysis developed by Williamson. However, Williamson’s interest in organizational structure centers on questions of organization size and the degree of vertical integration. He argues that the cost of exchanging goods or services between people, departments, or organizations will decide whether or not a function will be incorporated into the organization. The primeval, â€Å"natural† state of business activities can be seen as a situation with individual producers exchanging goods and services through the market. If markets or tasks (or both) grow so complex that the cognitive limits of the producers become overloaded or if the transaction costs increase for other reasons, there will be a pressure to increase the level of organization in order to overcome these difficulties. Applied on the current situation, this implies that existing organizations will try to internalize transactions if they believe they can execute them more efficiently than the market or if they become so complex that market-based solutions become intractable. For instance, an auto manufacturer will develop or buy its own dealer network if it believes it can sell more cars or fetch a bigger profit that way; an aluminum producer will buy into bauxite mines if it believes that this will shield it from dangerous price fluctuations. Technology has a part in transaction theory insofar as it changes transaction costs in the market, inside the organizations, or both. Since information technology has a great potential for changing the conditions for coordination—both within and between organizations, it should be of great interest to the transaction cost perspective. The Several Best Ways: The Human Relations Movement The human relations school brought the individual and the social relations between individuals into focus. People in organizations were no longer seen only—not even mainly—as rational beings working to achieve the goals of the organization. It was discovered that they were just as much driven by feelings, sentiments, and their own particular interests—which could be quite different from what classical theory presupposed. Moreover, the new studies also showed that there was an informal structure in every organization, growing from the unofficial contacts people in the organization had with each other. This informal structure could be just as important as the formal one for predicting the outcome of decision-making processes—sometimes even more important. There were a number of main themes investigated by the different approaches within the human relations school, and most of them are still actively pursued by researchers. The most basic is the insistence on the importance of individual characteristics and behaviors in understanding organizational behavior. This easily leads to an interest in the effects of different leadership styles, as well as in the effects of race, class, and cultural background. Formalization in work is strongly repudiated on the grounds that it is detrimental to both worker commitment and psychological well-being, and participative management, job enlargement, or, at least, job rotation is prescribed. In fact, human relations theorists have always been eager to promote changes in organizations to produce what they see as more humane work places, and they claim that the less formal, more participative organization will also be the most productive. It is not unreasonable, therefore, to criticize at least the most ardent proponents of these views for prescribing â€Å"one best way† solutions just as much as the classical theorists (Mohr 1971). With their emphasis on humans and their psychological and social properties, the human relations theorists were not especially interested in tools and technology except as a source of repressive formalization. However, even if we might say that they inherited a belief in optimal solutions from the classical theorists, their theories implied that it was human needs and qualities, and not technology, that dictated the optimal organizational forms. In other words, it was in their view possible to design and operate organizations principally on the basis of human characteristics, and thus thwart what others viewed as technological imperatives. Woodward Among the new research projects were Woodward’s pathbreaking studies of a number of manufacturing companies in the southeast of England in the 1950s (Mintzberg 1979, Clegg 1990), in which she showed how three basic production technologies strongly correlated with a corresponding number of organization structures: Bureaucratization increased as one went from unit or small batch production via large batch or mass production to continuous-process production. First, this discovery led to renewed faith in technological determinism: there now seemed to be not one best way to organize, but rather a best way for each class of production technology—in Woodward’s case, unit production, mass production, and process industry. The Multitude of Ways: Sociotechnics In England a group of researchers developed a distinct framework, which in addition to â€Å"action† approach, they also proposed that â€Å"the distinguishing feature of organizations is that they are both social and technical systems† (Scott 1987, p. 108). The core of the organization represented, so to speak, an interface between a technical system and a human (social) system. This implied that, in order to achieve maximum performance in an organization, it did not suffice to optimize only the technical or the social system, nor to search for the best match between existing technological and organizational elements. The goal should be a joint optimization of the two—creating a synergy that yielded more than could be achieved simply by adding the two together. Their preferred organizational solutions emphasized co-determination, internalized regulation, and workgroup autonomy. They also discovered that changes at the workgroup level did not survive for long without compatible changes in the overlying structures—a discovery that was also made in a series of experiments with autonomous workgroups in Norwegian industry in the 1960s, inspired by the Tavistock group and directed by the newly founded Work Research Institute in Oslo (Thorsrud and Emery 1970). During their projects they also learned that the environment impinged on intra-organizational activities to a much larger degree than they had anticipated. Sociotechnics, for me is here taking a position that is particularly relevant for information technology, even if sociotechnics was established as a theoretical framework before computers started to make themselves felt to any significant degree. When working with information technology in organizations, it is of utmost importance to be aware of the intimate interdependence between the computer-based systems, the individuals using them, the manual routines, and the organizational structure. Any serious attempt to optimize the use of information technology must acknowledge this reciprocity. It is therefore quite remarkable that sociotechnical theory has remained so much out of fashion for the last decade, just the period when the use of computers has really exploded. One reason may be the general lack of interest in information technology that has plagued the social sciences overall; another is that those who were interested within the sociotechnical tradition tended to be drawn toward research on the cognitive aspects of computer use, especially the (literal) user interfaces of computer systems, neglecting the overlying question of the broader interaction of humans and computer systems in structural terms.