MediaSpace Wiki

Organizational Spr2006 Sess07

Agenda

• Collect Questions
• Lecture
• Answer Questions

• Fayol Continued
  • Balancing principles
    • conditions change
    • seldom to we use the same principle twice under the same conditions.
  • Today we call his approach Bureaucracy
    • Fixed division of labor
    • Hierarchy of offices
    • General rules covering performance
    • Rigid separation of work and personal life
    • Selection of personnel based on technical qualifications
    • View of employment as a career
  • Fundamental principles
    • Give everyone some experience of management
    • Teach everybody management theory
    • Eliminate red tape
    • Lateral (sideways or horizontal) communication
      • Fayol's Bridge
  • Don't blame the machine for the misbehavior of its participants.
• In classical management theories, people are simply parts of a machine
  • But they are more effective parts if they know what they are doing
  • Both approaches stress the importance of worker education

The Human Relations Approach

• Rooted in WWII cooperation between managers, the military, and academics
  • Beginnings of Organizational Communication Theory (Redding)
• But starts with some research done by Mayo
  • The Hawthorne experiments and effect
    • Experiments in improving productivity with lighting
    • An unexpected result.
      • Both experimental and control groups improved.
        • 112%
      • And they improved even under conditions where they shouldn't have
        • Once the effect was observed, they made lighting conditions worse
    • Analysis of this result led to the conclusion that people are
      • motivated by relationships
        • In this case relationships between employees and researchers
        • When employees felt their work mattered, they worked harder
      • complex
        • sensitive to group norms
        • possessing motives, values, and emotions.
      • swayed by group norms
        • willing to support the group
        • even when doing so is not entirely in their personal self-interest
      • not entirely rational in their decision making
        • influenced by emotions
        • motivated by feeling good about themselves and the organization they work for
          • Note that this sets up Organizational Identification
• Chester Barnard picks up this theme in pushing human relations
  • Organizations as cooperative systems.
  • The key to cooperation is in
    • Persuading individuals to accept a common purpose.
    • Building Morale
    • Building teams rather than bureaucracy
    • Creating happy workers
• Principles/Process
  • Supervisors should be friends and counselors to workers
  • Avoid micro-management. If the group can figure out ways to improve, its better
  • People should be periodically asked how they feel about the work, their supervisors, and co-workers
  • Humanistic supervision plus morale equals productivity
  • Those who don't respond to group influence should be treated with sarcasm
  • Workers should be involved in organizational changes
  • Do exit-interviews - work to minimize turnover
• But are happy workers better workers? The jury remains out.

Important theoretical elaborations/reactions

1. Leadership Style (Ohio State)
   • Good performance depends on good management leadership
   • That leadership entails two factors (Ohio State)
     • Initiating structure
     • Consideration
   • Job satisfaction has two components (Herzberg)
     • Reducing pain (decreases dissatisfaction)
     • Growing psychologically (increases satisfaction)
   • Think of this as a Human Relations carrot and stick
     • One which sets of Human Resources approaches
2. Irrational Decision-Making (Herbert Simon)
   • People attempt to make rational decisions
   • but are hindered by
     • the situation
     • lack of processing capacity
     • lock of knowledge about the consequences of actions
     • limited knowledge of alternatives
   • people satisfice: make acceptable rather than optimal decisions
   • deal with problems sequentially rather than in parallel
   • use existing solution inventories rather than seeking novel solutions
   • This sets up Systems approaches, including Weick, and ...
3. Institutional Theory (Philip Selznick)
   • Decisions by and about organizations are not always rational.
   • Differences between organizations are important
   • Organizations are something different than the sum of their participants.
   • The relationship between an organization and its environment matters
   • An institutions success depends on the relationships it builds with its community. (a public relations approach :-)
   • This sets up Stakeholder approaches to Organizations

The Human Resources Approach

• A step beyond Human Relations
  • The conditions that foster individual growth are also good for the organization.
  • Recommendation: Find ways to merge the goals of the individual with those of the organization.
• Organizations should seek to advance workers along Maslow's needs hierarchy

Important Variations

• ?McGregor's theory Y
  • Contrasted against the so called "Theory X"
    • People dislike and avoid work
    • Adequate effort entails coercion, control, and direction
    • People prefer direction, have little ambition, and prefer to be directed.
  • Theory Y asserts instead that
    • Work is as natural as play or rest
    • People will self-direct work to which they are committed
    • Commitment is a function of the rewards of achievement
    • People not only accept responsibility, but actively seek it.
    • Imagination and creativity are widely dispersed in the population.
    • In modern organizations, the potential of the individual is only partially realized.
• Likert's Participative Management
  • System I - exploitive/authoritative (Taylorism)
  • System II - benevolent/authoritative (Fayolism)
  • System III - consultive (Human Relations)
  • System IV - participative (the preferred Human Relations alternative)
• Human resources approaches, in general, favor self-managed teams.

• Group evaluation "index card assignment" due Monday
  • The managers of each group should complete the following survey online: http://express.perseus.com/perseus/surveys/1734848031/54afd5d.htm
  • The "employee" in each group should complete the following survey online: http://express.perseus.com/perseus/surveys/1734848031/d2919f3.htm

Group assignment for Monday

Pick one of the more interesting organizations as your object of study for the semester.

Task force assignment for Monday

Integrate the team recommendations.