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0.1 Organizational behavior
A sloth, a building, a drone: each is a concrete object and can be easily identified. One difficulty attending the study of organizations is that an organization is not as readily visible or describable.
Exactly what is an organization such as a business concern? It is a building? A collection of machinery? A legal document containing a statement of incorporation? It is hardly likely to be any of these by itself. Rather, to describe an organization requires the consideration of a number of properties it possesses, thus gradually making clear, or at least clearer, that it is.
The purposes of the organization, whether it is formal or informal, are accomplished by a collection of members whose efforts or behavior are so directed that they become coordinated and integrated in order to attain sub-goals and objectives.
All of us at some point or another have had the experience of watching another person do something or behave in a certain way, saying to ourselves, "She acts as if she thought, ... " and then filling in some supposition about the way the other person looked at things.
Simple as the statement "She acts as if she thought ... " may be, it illustrates two important points.
First, what the person thinks she sees may not actually exist.
They could act as if changes in methods as an attempt by management to exploit them.
As long as they had this attitude or belief, any action by management to change any work method would be met, at the very least, with suspicion and probably with hostility.
The second point is that people act on the basis of what they see.
In understanding behavior, we must recognize that facts people do not perceive as meaningful usually will not influence their behavior, whereas the things they believe to be real, even though factually incorrect or nonexistent, will influence it.
Organizations are intended to bring about integrated behavior. Similar, or at least compatible, perceptions on the part of organizational members are therefore a matter of prime consideration.
One of the first things we must recognize is that in learning about things we not only learn what they are, that is, that the round white object is for football, but we also learn what these things mean, that is, football is a sport that the USA men's team don't get and their woman counterpart have master perfectly.
Upon receiving a signal (sight of football) we perform an interpretative step by which a meaning is attached to it.
Many of these "meanings" are so common and fundamental in our understanding of the world that we fail to note them except under unusual circumstances.
One way these meanings are brought home to us is by meeting people from countries different from our own; many of the meanings which things have come from our culture, they are things all people within the culture share.
These common interpretations of things help enormously in communicating, but they sometimes make it difficult to set factors in perspective so that we can really understand the reasons for behavior.
We all, have certain things (stimuli) to which we are sensitized and that when these appear we are instantly alert and eager to examine them.
There are other stimuli of relative unimportant to us to which we do not pay as much attention and may, in effect, actually block out.
One way of viewing this subject is to suggest that we have thresholds or barriers which regulate what information from the outside world reaches our consciousness.
On some matters the barriers are high and we remain oblivious to them, but on others which are quite important to us we are sensitized and, in effect, we lower the barrier, permitting all the information possible concerning these matters to reach our consciousness.
Related to this idea of sensitivity and selectivity is a phenomenon that might be called resonance.
Through experience and what we see ourselves to be, the understanding of a particular item of information may be very similar to that of others.
It is explained this way: since all the people inside a group look upon themselves as peers, they know what a change on the individual means in annoyance and inconvenience.
They can easily put themselves into his shoes and, once having done so, probably feel almost as disturbed as he might be.
One property of the images formed of the world around us is that they are reasonable, or internally consistent.
For instance, we may look at some draw on a page and see a rabbit. One portion along these lines might suggest a duck, but we do not have an image of something half rabbit and half duck.
If our first impression was a duck, we may never notice that a portion looks like a rabbit. We seem to tune out the elements that do not fit.
Organizations that posses the capacity to deal adequately with conflict have been described as follows:
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They posses the machinery to deal constructively with conflict. They have an structure which facilitates constructive interaction between individuals and work groups.
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The personnel of the organization is skilled in the process of effective interaction and mutual influence (skills in group leadership and membership roles in group building and maintenance functions).
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There is a high confidence and trust in one another among members of the organization, loyalty to the work group and to the organization, and high motivation to achieve the organization's objectives.
Confidence, loyalty, and cooperative motivation produce earnest, sincere, and determined efforts to find solutions to conflict. There is greater motivation to find constructive solution that to maintain an irreconcilable conflict. The solutions reached are often highly creative and represent a far better solution than any initially proposed by the conflicting interests.
The essence here is that out of conflict will come a new synthesis superior to what existed before and perhaps superior to any individual point of view existent in conflict.
Conflict, resting in part on different perspectives of what "ought" to be, is one of the avenues for opening new directions for the organization or one of the ways of moving in new directions. This is not only useful but also vital for organizational survival. The question, therefore, as we view conflict is not, "How to eliminate it?" but, "Is it conflict of such a type and within circumstances where it will contribute to rather than detract from organizational interest?"
Whether a conflict is good or bad for an organization, whether a conflict can be made useful for an organization, depends not so much on manipulating the conflict itself as on the underlying conditions of the overall organization. In this sense, conflict can be seen as;
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a symptom of more basic problems which requires attention
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an intervening variable in the overall organization to be considered, used, and maintained within certain useful boundaries.
Adaptation frequently proceeds through a new arrangement developing informally, which, after proving its worth and becoming accepted, is formally adopted. The first informal development, however, may be contrary to previously established procedures and in a sense a violation or a subversion of them; or the informal procedures may be an extension of a function for internal political purposes.
If the process had given instruction to report immediately on completion of the task, this instruction facilitates linking the completed act with the next one. Through an information transfer, we call this a programmed link.
The supervisor node may detect that something is wrong through another control cycle. It can then take corrective action by including or adding into this programmed link or perhaps by attacking on the more difficult problem of human apathetic attitudes and motivation.
Organizations have progression of goals which result from a division of work.
A subdivide goal becomes the task of a process contained within a specialized organizational unit.
This nesting of goals is contained as part of the core organizational means-ends chain.
Needless to say, the hierarchy of control loops which are connected with the progression of goals may be handle in number of ways, regardless of how the elements are allocated, the important factor is that all elements must be provided for in some way. Hence, our model supplies an extremely useful tool in analyzing complex control situations by telling us what basic functions bust occur and in what sequence, even though initially we have no idea as to where or how they are executed in the organization.
The feedback loop containing information about organizational performance and conditions leads to definition of sub-unit goals or standards. It's important to show how a situation in one area could lead to modifications in a number of units at higher levels.
This even result in reformulating the basic goals of organizations. Feedback is essential to adequate goal formation.