2011

MANAGEMENT & ORAGANIZATION

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ASSIGNMENT No. 1

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Q1 Organizational behavior is an important field of study. Discuss how this field of study helps the managers to face the managerial challenges and changes, in all types of organizations, by quoting plenty of examples. Who are Managers? A manager is someone who works with and through other people by coordinating their work activities in order to accomplish organizational goals. The changing nature of organizations and work has blurred the clear lines of distinction between managers and non-managerial employees. Many workers jobs now include managerial activities. Definitions used in the past may no longer work. Hence, an organizational member who works with and through other people by coordinating their work activities in order to accomplish organizational goals may be called a manager. However, keep in mind that managers may have other roles and work duties not related to integrating the work of others. You should be aware that managers may have a variety of titles and roles. They perform various jobs and duties and are responsible for higher profits and for great performance. Managers work in various departments and are employed by many types of organization. Managerial Roles In the old paradigm, managers primarily administer existing systems and maintain the status quo. In the new paradigm, managers challenge the status quo for strategic improvement to meet future demands. At the same time, they consistently execute existing systems to meet current demands. Authority In the old paradigm, managers impose authority from the top down via rules and policies. In the new paradigm, top managers still hold authority but they impose it by communicating a vision, enabling people wit systems, and empowering them to make the vision real. Focus In the old paradigm, managers focus on improving business results through the imposition of quotas and targets. They delegate responsibility, often without giving real authority to change broader systems that constrain results. In the new paradigm, managers focus on improving business results through improving the capabilities of systems. They focus on the means as well as the results, because they have retained responsibility for improving systems. Control In the old paradigm, managers control the organization through scoring individual performance, reviewing regular reports, and evaluating performance as either good or bad. In the new paradigm, managers statistically study variation to understand the causes of poor performance and make changes in systems to improve performance.

Means In the old paradigm, managers delegate the means of improvement to staff and subordinates who must figure out how t meet established targets. In the new paradigm, managers assume responsibility for the means of improvement. They lead improvement by staff and subordinates.

The seven biggest challenges faced by a manager.

1. Achieving a Stretch Goal The organization youre managing is responsible for something whether its performing a business process, supporting some other organization, developing a new product, or getting new customers. There are goals associated with your objectives, and if your organization is aggressive then those goals require more than the typical amount of effort. Its going to take some careful planning for you to figure out how to apply your organizations people and resources to achieve an aggressive goal. Youre going to have to motivate people, remove roadblocks from their path, and focus them on the things that are most important. Its a stretch goal, but you can achieve it maybe even surpass it. 2. Bringing Out the Best in Your Employees All employees have good days and bad days. Some of the causes are out of your control. But its important that you take steps to make as many days as possible good days. Here are some of the things that you can do:

Treat every employee with respect. If you have praise for the employee, give the praise in front of coworkers. If you have criticism for the employee, give it in private. For all but the worst underperforming employees, make sure that the praise happens much more often than the criticism. Help employees align their personal goals with their work goals. Talk with each employee about his or her personal goals: what they want to get out of life, where they want their career to go. To the extent possible, use this information to help you allocate work assignments. Provide a work environment that is appropriate for the work and conducive to employee well-being. A comfortable work environment makes your employees more productive.

3. Dealing with Underperforming Employees Not all of your employees will do their best. Some will have personal issues that interfere with their work. Technically its not your problem, but in reality any issue that contributes to an underperforming employee is your problem. Youll help employees cope with personal issues, youll provide motivation and counsel, maybe steer them to appropriate resources inside or outside your company. Youll carry your underperforming employees to a point, and then beyond that point youll have to ease them out of your organization. Youll be humane, but you have to balance the needs of the organization with the needs of the employees. 4. Dealing with Outstanding Employees Some of your employees obviously outperform the others. Thats good news for your organization, but it presents its own set of challenges. Outstanding employees need special treatment. You want them to keep doing an exceptional job but that usually means that youll have to pay them special attention. They need recognition for their talents and efforts. They need encouragement, training and guidance. And above all they need to know that they have a career path in your company, even if that career path takes them out of your organization. 3

5. Hiring the Right People No matter how happy your employees are, youll get occasional turnover. And if your organization is successful then youll often find that your budget and headcount will grow as you are assigned more and more responsibility. Either way, youll need to hire. Hiring is easy, but hiring the right person is extremely difficult. The trick in hiring is to get an understanding of how an employee will actually perform the work not just how the employee does in interviews. Interviews are seldom a good predictor of work and work habits, so going beyond the interview is crucial. 6. Responding to a Crisis No matter how much planning you do, things will go wrong. An employee will get sick at a critical time. A weather disaster will hit your facility and disrupt your plans. A crime will be committed maybe a theft or even something that harms an employee. Planning is a part of managing, but perhaps more important is a managers ability to change plans on the fly in response to changing conditions. When a crisis hits, you have to be able to deal with it calmly, quietly and without being overwhelmed by stress. 7. Continuous Improvement No matter how good your organization gets, it can do better. Theres always some type of improvement that can be made: a change in a process, a better working environment, better employee motivation, more focus on the essentials. If you ever get to the point where you honestly have no idea how to improve things further, then you should either (a) seek outside advice, or (b) look for another job. Theres always a better way, and you have to keep looking for it. Conclusion Management is complicated. It requires skill and motivation. But most of all it requires commitment the commitment needed to rise to these seven challenges

.2

Define personality and explain its Five dimensions with the help of examples around you. How perception and attribution affect behavior of individuals? (20)

Personality researchers have proposed that there are five basic dimensions of personality. Today, many contemporary personality psychologists believe that there are five basic dimensions of personality, often referred to as the "Big 5" personality traits.. The "big five" are broad categories of personality traits. While there is a significant body of literature supporting this five-factor model of personality, researchers don't always agree on the exact labels for each dimension. However, these five categories are usually described as follows: 1. Extraversion: This trait includes characteristics such as excitability, sociability, talkativeness, assertiveness and high amounts of emotional expressiveness. 2. Agreeableness: This personality dimension includes attributes such as trust, altruism, kindness, affection, and other prosocial behaviors. 3. Conscientiousness: Common features of this dimension include high levels of thoughtfulness, with good impulse control and goal-directed behaviors. Those high in conscientiousness tend to be organized and mindful of details. 4. Neuroticism: Individuals high in this trait tend to experience emotional instability, anxiety, moodiness, irritability, and sadness. 5. Openness: This trait features characteristics such as imagination and insight, and those high in this trait also tend to have a broad range of interests. It is important to note that each of the five personality factors represents a range between two extremes. For example, extraversion represents a continuum between extreme extraversion and extreme introversion. In the real world, most people lie somewhere in between the two polar ends of each dimension.

How were these personality factors determined?

The Big Five represents a taxonomy (classification system) of traits that some personality psychologists suggest capture the essence of individual differences in personality. These traits were arrived at through factor analysis studies. Factor anal ysis is a technique generally done with the use of computers to determine meaningful relationships and patterns in behavioural data. You begin with a large number of behavioural variables. The computer finds relationships or natural connections where variables are maximally correlated with one another and minimally correlated with other variables, and then groups the data accordingly. After this process has been done many times a pattern appears of relationships or certain factors that capture the essence of all of the data. Such a process was used to determine the Big Five Personality factors.. 5

Examples of Big Five predict about our behaviour

First, having a trait means reacting consistently to the same situation overtime, for example, being agreeable or cooperative means consistently going along with reasonable requests, but does not mean always complying with others wishes. Second, to respond consistently in the same situation people must have a capacity to respond to situational cues, that is to have the trait to be responsive to situations. For example, if someone purchases a house in the woods, they might want that hou se because of its secluded location. Third, behaving differently in a given situation does not mean there is inner inconsistency. For example, someone who likes to attend parties might not often do so because of a stronger desire to work. Generally speaking, low agreeableness and low conscientiousness can predict juvenile delinquency. Neuroticism and low conscientiousness can predict internalizing disorders (such as mental disorders). Conscientiousness and openness can predict school performance. Conscientiousness is also a general predictor of job performance, while other Big Five traits predict job performance in specific types of jobs. For instance extraversion predicts success in sales and management positions. High conscientiousness is related to better health and longevity, whereas low agreeableness and high neuroticism seem to be health risk factors. Extraversion is associated with leadership behaviour. Agreeableness is associated with behaviours such as helping others and donating to charity. Neuroticism is related to vulnerability and depression. Openness is related to behaviors associated with creative performance. Overall, traits are relatively poor predictors of single behavioural acts, but are better predictors of general trends of a persons behaviour. Looking at past behaviour of an individual may be the best predictor of future behaviour.

Perception & Attribution

What is Perception?
A person's mental image of the world. What you think IS (as opposed to "should be").

The Perceptual Process

Two key elements: attention and organization.

The Old Woman/Young Woman Illusion.

Attention
In any situation we only pay attention to a few things. Your mind unconsciously filters out most of what is going on around you. At some level, you mind is probably aware of a lot of things. Think about the people sitting next to you in a class. What are they wearing? What movements are they making (are they breathing?)? What do all the chairs look like? What's on the walls? What sounds are coming from outside? You're not really aware of all those things. Consider your own body. Are you aware of your pulse, breathing, feel of the chair under you, the feeling of your clothes on your body? How come my dog doesn't wake up if I start petting her while she's asleep, but if a car drives into the driveway she goes from sleeping to barking in less than a second? Her mind is filtering things. So what does grab your attention?

loud sounds: That's the principle behind fire alarms and telephones and alarm clocks bright lights and colors movement

What else determines what you will attend to?

context: at meal time, every one of my movements triggers a huge reaction in the dogs training: o police trained to spot certain things in cars or in people's behavior o psychologists wait for certain comments, or signs of certain problems o doctors run through whole laundry list of deviations from health state

Organization
Even when you do become aware of these things, there is considerable pre-processing that is done by brain before it reaches your consciousness. If you are watching a professor in class, do you see him or her raising 7

and lowering his arm in front of the blackboard, or do you see him writing on the blackboard? We see the world in terms of meaningful, functional units, not simple movements. When my mouth is moving and sounds are coming out, I am speaking. Animal perception is not like computer/machine perception. There is filtering and meaning all the way down to the simplest level. It is not like the eye is a video camera, and the brain then makes sense of the images. Instead, even the eye filters things. Perception is affected by knowledge -- by what the brain already knows. Knowledge is itself organized. For example, similar things are stored together. The mind also creates schemas, frames and scripts. After going to enough restaurants, you learn the pattern of how things go: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. (i) stop just the door and wait for someone to greet you (ii) you tell them how many in your party (iii) may be asked if smoking or non-smoking (iv) follow person to table (v) if fancy restaurant allow waiter to pull out seat for your, push it back in, lay napkin on lap . Etc.

All situations have behavioral norms that get internalized by participants so that they know what to expect. This is turn determines what they find to be unusual or special. For example, a person screaming and rolling on the floor is not a big deal in a mental ward, but it would be highly noticeable in a classroom. It's not just behavior its presence and absence of features: types of clothing, such as uniforms on waitresses in cocktail bars, color of walls in schools, size of hallways, sliding doors to porches, swinging doors for kitchens etc. Some schemas are cultural -- you learn them from others, from books, TV, institutions. Others are experiential -- from mundane, what happens at restaurants, to how to have a romantic relationship.

Perceptual Distortions
The fact that mind stores information in schemas which in turn are built from experience means that you can comprehend and recall situations extremely well. For example, one glance at a new restaurant and you understand the whole layout, because you understand restaurants in general. Another example is language acquisition by children. But schemas are also a source of errors, in particular false recalls of usual events and omission of unusual ones. Two interesting papers you can read: Schemas also facilitate and hinder learning. For example, experiments show that people have trouble memorizing who is friends with whom in a group unless the friendships are transitive: that is, if A is friends with B, and B is friends with C, then it is also true that A is friends with C. .

Attribution
Attribution refers to how people in situations like the workplace construct explanations of other people's behavior. People are not exactly rocket scientists: these explanations can be highly simplified and strongly biased. What is interesting and helpful is that people's biases tend to be systematic and predictable. For example, people tend to overestimate personal/individual causes (abilities, motives, morals) and tend to underestimate situational causes, like nature of the job, compensation system, the economy, luck, the percentage of the population who are young. For example, people attribute the state of the economy to the President. But scientific work on the topic suggests that Presidents have little effect on the economies during their tenure (but can have big effects on the economy years later). Another kind of bias occurs with the nature of a person's participation in a situation, and how it comes out. For example, if a student gets an A on a test, the student thinks it was because he or she is so smart. But if they get an F, it's because the teacher is a jerk, or the book is lousy, or some other reason. In general, people seem to think this way:

if my outcome is good (I become president of company), I'm responsible for it (my hard work, my brains) if my outcome is bad (I'm homeless), it's society's fault: I'm just a victim

Another basic principle is that people tend to attribute motives to people's behavior. So when people don't behave as you expect them to, you think they are doing it on purpose (usually, just to annoy you). In other words, people tend to assume a common understanding of a situation, but different motives and interests. They also tend to assume that other people do everything consciously: no oversight is truly an oversight, no inconsiderate action was just thoughtless.

Q. 3 Differentiate between groups and teams. What does the Levi Strauss experience (refer page 15 of your text book) tell us about the use of teams and their effectiveness? What is a Group? 9

A group is defined as two or more interacting and interdependent individuals who come together to achieve particular objectives. 1. Groups differ from mere aggregates of individual because the latter have no interdependence, interaction, or common goal. 2. Groups differ from organizations because the latter involve systematic efforts and are engaged in the production of goods and services. 3. Teamwork occurs when groups are able to work efficiently and effectively together to achieve organizational goals. There are a number of types of work groups 1. A formal group is a group officially planned and created by an organization for a specific purpose. a. A command or functional group is a formal group consisting of a manager and all the subordinates who report to that manager. 1) Each identifiable work group consisting of manager and subordinates is a command group. 2) A linking is an individual who provides a means of coordination between command groups at two different levels by fulfilling a supervisory role in the lower-level group and a subordinate role in the higherlevel group. 2. Informal groups are natural social formations that appear in the work environment. An informal group is a group that is established by employees, rather than by the organization, in order to serve group members interests or social needs. Informal groups are unplanned groups. a. An interest group is an informal group created to facilitate employee pursuits of common concern. b. A friendship group is an informal group that evolves primarily to meet employee social needs. Differences between Work Groups and Teams Teams definitely are forms of work groups, but not all work groups are teams. In fact, plain work groups are much more numerous than teams. Work groups function on three levels:

Dependent level Independent level Interdependent level

Here's the breakdown. Dependent-level work groups Dependent-level work groups are the traditional work unit or department groups with a supervisor who plays a strong role as the boss. Almost everyone has had some experience with this work setup, especially in a first job. 10

Each person in a dependent-level work group has his or her own job and works under the close supervision of the boss. The boss is in charge and tells the employees the do's and don'ts in their jobs. Helping each other and covering for one another do not occur often and do so mostly under the direction of the supervisor. In fact, most problem solving, work assignments, and other decisions affecting the group come from the supervisor. A dependent-level work group can perform well in the short term. But for the long run, because group members operate separately and mostly at the direction of the supervisor, such work groups don't seem to go anywhere. Maintaining the status quo and keeping operations under control are what they do best. Creating improvements, increasing productivity, and leveraging resources to support one another are quite uncommon with dependent-level work groups. Independent-level work groups Independent-level work groups are the most common form of work groups on the business scene. Like a dependent-level work group, each person is responsible for his or her own main area. But unlike the dependent level, the supervisor or manager tends not to function like the controlling boss. Instead, staff members work on their own assignments with general direction and minimal supervision. Sales representatives, research scientists, accountants, lawyers, police officers, librarians, and teachers are among the professionals who tend to work in this fashion. People in those occupations come together in one department because they serve a common overall function, but almost everyone in the group works fairly independently. If members of an independent-level work group receive the managerial guidance and support they need on the job, such a work group can perform quite well. Interdependent-level work groups Members of an interdependent-level work group rely on each other to get the work done. Sometimes members have their own roles and at other times they share responsibilities. Yet, in either case, they coordinate with one another to produce an overall product or set of outcomes. When this interdependence exists, you have a team. And by capitalizing on interdependence, the team demonstrates the truth of the old saying: The whole is greater than the sum of its parts. To call a group a team does not make them a team: wishing for them to work as a team doesn't work either. For a snapshot of the main differences between work groups and teams, take a look at Table 1. As you can see, work groups have a strong individual focus and teams have a strong collective focus. The individual is not lost on a team, but that person's work is coordinated to fit in with the greater good. Team concerns are much more focused on the outcomes of the overall unit rather than an individual's accomplishments. Table 1: Difference Between Work Groups and Teams 11

Work Groups Individual accountability Come together to share information and perspectives Focus on individual goals Produce individual work products Define individual roles, responsibilities, and tasks

Teams Individual and mutual accountability Frequently come together for discussion, decision making, problem solving, and planning. Focus on team goals Produce collective work products Define individual roles, responsibilities, and tasks to help team do its work; often share and rotate them

Concern with one's own outcome and Concern with outcomes of everyone and challenges the team faces challenges Purpose, goals, approach to work shaped by manager Purpose, goals, approach to work shaped by team leader with team members

Table 1 also indicates that teams meet more often than traditional work groups. Work groups may meet periodically, based on the manager's style, primarily to hear and share information. Teams, by comparison, do much more than communicate when they meet. Team meetings are forums for planning work, solving work problems, making decisions about work, and reviewing progress. In short, meetings are vital to a team's existence. . On a team, the manager or team leader frequently involves team members in helping shape the goals and plans for getting the group's work done may as well get them involved, they've got to do the work! But in other kinds of work groups, managers more commonly work with staff individually to set goals and determine assignments. Q. 4 Explain the following with the help of suitable examples: (20) (a) Types of Decisions (b) Bounded Rationality (c) Judgmental Heuristics (d) Strengths of Group Decision-making

Types of Decisions Decisions are very important part in life; we take decisions at every moment in daily routine. If we choose a TV program to watch among several programs it means we took decision about which program to watch.Decision is a choice made from available alternatives. 12

There are two types of decision: Programmed Decisions Non-programmed Decisions Programmed Decisions It involves situations that have occurred often enough to enable decision rules to be developed and applied in the future. These decisions are those that have been made persistently in the earlier period that managers have developed rules or guideline to be applied when certain situations are expected to happen. Programmed decision making is used when an inventory manager of mc Donalds decides to order beef patty stocks because the stocks are three-quarters empty. Programmed decisions making are a routine that you make every time so that the organization run smooth. Managers can develop rules and guidelines to regulate all routine organizational activities. Most decisions are related to daily activities. In programmed decision making there will be no error in the decisions because it is a routine and managers usually have the information they need to create rules and guidelines to be followed by others. But sometimes it can cause error but not of big kind. Programmed decision making are always used in daily routine to keep the organization running smooth. That is why they have rules and guidelines to make a decision. Non Programmed Decisions Non-programmed decisions are made in response to situations that are unique, are poorly defined and largely unstructured. Non-programmed decision making is used when mc Donalds are deciding to invest in new deep fryers. It is a non-routine decision making. This means it is made for big decisions that will affect an organization for a long time. This type of decision making does not need rules or guidelines to be followed because the situation is unexpected or uncertain. For example if mc Donalds plans to launch a new line of menu, they will have to make decision base on their intuition and reasoned judgments. Non-programmed decision has more chance of errors and difficult for managers to handle as it is inherently challenging. Managers must rely on their intuition to quickly respond to a urgent concern. Also these errors are of dangerous kind, they affect organization badly. For example if mc Donalds decided to invest in a new menu. Their customers did not like the new menu and they do not consume mc Donalds anymore. This will affect mc Donalds revenue and profit. on-programmed decision making are not always used but it will give impact to an organizations effectiveness. This decision is made on reasonable judgment and the circumstances if we proceed with the decision.

Bounded Rationality Bounded rationality is the idea that in decision making, rationality of individuals is limited by the information they have, the cognitive limitations of their minds, and the finite amount of time they have to make decisions. It was proposed by Herbert Simon as an alternative basis for the mathematical modeling of decision making, as used in economics and related disciplines; it complements rationality as optimization, which views decision making as a fully rational process of finding an optimal choice given the information available. Another way to look at bounded rationality is that, because decision-makers lack the ability and resources to arrive at the optimal solution, they instead apply their rationality only after having greatly simplified the choices available. Thus the decision-maker is a satisficer, one seeking a satisfactory solution 13

rather than the optimal one. Simon used the analogy of a pair of scissors, where one blade is the "cognitive limitations" of actual humans and the other the "structures of the environment"; minds with limited cognitive resources can thus be successful by exploiting pre-existing structure and regularity in the environment. Some models of human behavior in the social sciences assume that humans can be reasonably approximated or described as "rational" entities (see for example rational choice theory). Many economics models assume that people are on average rational, and can in large enough quantities be approximated to act according to their preferences. The concept of bounded rationality revises this assumption to account for the fact that perfectly rational decisions are often not feasible in practice due to the finite computational resources available for making them.

"Judgment Heuristic
A. Judgmental heuristics are principles or methods by which one makes assessments or judgments of probability simpler. B. These heuristic are often very useful but sometimes they lead to systematic errors.

. The representativeness heuristic A. An event is judged to be probable to the extent that it represents the essential features of the parent population or of its generating process. B. The heuristic is useful in inductive reasoning. For example, if we want to know how likely it is that Jones will pass the course we might consider the degree to which Jones represents that group of students who pass. C. The use of this heuristic can, however, systematically lead one to make poor judgements in some circumstances. 1. Sometimes the manner in which the object or event is represented makes one insensitive to the prior probabilities involved. 2. Sometimes the manner in which the object or event is represented leads one to ignore the basic rules of the probability calculus, e.g., that the likelihood of a conjunction is always less than the likelihood of each conjunct taken singly. 3. Sometimes the manner in which the object or event is represented makes one insensitive to the fact that small samples are less representative than large samples are. 4. Sometimes the manner in which the object or event is represented leads one to misconceive the outcome of chance. For example, some outcomes of a random selection are taken to "look more random" than equally likely alternatives. 5. Sometimes the manner in which the object or event is represented makes one insensitive to the fact that, in circumstances in which random events cluster around a mean or average, extraordinary events are likely to be followed by more ordinary ones (regression to the mean). People tend to think that extreme instances are representative of future instances.

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III. The availability heuristic A. One's judgement about the relative frequency of an event often depends upon the availability or accessability of objects or events in the processes of perception, memory or construction in the imagination. B. This heuristic is useful in inductive reasoning because (1) typically instances of large classes are recalled better and faster than instances of small groups, (2) likely events are often easier to imagine, (3) causal connections are repeatable and therefore more likely to be remembered. When the availability is associated with the objective likelihood of an event, this heuristic is trustworthy. C. The use of this heuristic can, however, systematically lead one to make poor judgements in some circumstances. 1. A class whose instances are readily available might appear to be more numerous than it is. 2. Events that easily come to mind might be judged more likely than they are. 3. The availability of certain information may be biased because one has had limited exposure to events of a certain kind, or because the events are more graphic, remarkable or noticable and attract more attention, or because one has stored the information in a particular fashion

Strengths of Group Decisions:

Group decisions help to combine individual strengths of the group members and hence has a set of varied skill sets applied in the decision making process.A major advantage of group decision making is that more information is brought to bear identifying and evaluating alternatives. The more diverse the group's composition, the more likely it is that creative ideas will be forthcoming. 15

1. Diversity: Varied cultures, age groups, gender, etc all add to the diversity of group which gives us varied perspectives and enhances the kind of ideas the group can come up with. 2. Varied experiences: There are difference in fields of experience and amount of experience and there differences in the life experiences and the kind of experiences people have had even with the same problem. This pool of experience can be a great advantage. 3. Enhanced memory for facts: An individual may forget a particular piece of information, but as there are a number of people involved here, there is the combined memory of all members to recollect data. 4. Greater Acceptability of decisions: As everyone has made some contribution to the decision, people tend to be more accepting of the decision. Also those who may not have contributed still support it as "the group" has come to this decision. 5. Error detection: When there are many people working together, mistakes and errors that may have accidentally gone unnoticed and had serious consequences are spotted by other team members. 6. Collective understanding: The members together come to a decision after much deliberation and discussions and so everyone has a better understanding of the course of action to be followed. 7. Less influence of bias: Individual biases can be challenged and individuals may have to recognize and eliminate them. 8. More creative solutions: With so many people involved, more creative and innovative solutions to problems may emerge than an individual may have been able to develop. 9. Shared responsibility: There are a number of people involved, so no one person has to shoulder the burden of work or of single-handedly making a decision. 10. Motivational effect: The group decision making may even have a motivational effect on the team if the team is a successful one. 11. Simplifies complex decisions: Many complex decisions can be made by the group decision making process which an individual may not have been able to tackle. 12. More information and knowledge are available 13. More alternatives are likely to be generated 14. More acceptance of the final decisions is likely 15. Enhanced communication of decision making may result 16. Better decision generally emerge

Q. 5 Explain the following, with the help of live examples from the organizations you work for: (i) Barriers to Effective Communication (ii) Determinants of Organizational Structure Communication Communication is key processes for any team attempting to improve quality Steering committees communicate priorities to employees. Members of problem-solving teams communicate among themselves and to their internal and external customers. For example, problem-solving teams often have to present their 16

recommendations to management. Self-managed teams have similar communication needs and often must communicate effectively across shifts. Communication within and across teams can also be enhanced by suing a variety of media. Many TQ teams use electronic mail and fax machines, but also benefit from such low-tech media as posters and graphs posted on the walls. As with many team processes, any specific recommendations are less important than the general idea of recognizing communication as a process that consists of a series of steps that can be improved. Barriers to Effective Interpersonal Communication 1. Filtering is the deliberate manipulation of information to make it appear more favorable to the receiver. a. As information is communicated up through the organizational levels, its condensed and synthesized, and those doing the condensing filter communication through their personal interests and perceptions of what is important. b. The more that organizational cultural reward emphasizes style and appearance, the more that managers will be motivated to filter communications in their favor. 2. Selective perception is when people selectively interpret what they see or hear on the basis of their interests, background, experience, and attitudes. 3. Emotions influence how a receiver interprets a message when it is received. Its best to avoid reacting to a message when the receiver is upset because he/she is not likely to be thinking clearly. 4. Information overload happens when the information we have to work with exceeds our processing such as 600 waiting e-mail messages in the inbox. a. Receivers tend to select out, ignore, pass over, or forget information when they have too much information. b. Active listening is listening for full meaning without making premature judgments or interpretations, and demands total concentration. c. Active listening is enhanced by developing empathy with the senderplacing yourself in the senders position. d. Emotions: The simplest answer is for a manager to refrain from communicating until he/she has regained composure.

4. Watch nonverbal cuesactions speak louder than words. b. Or, receivers may put off further processing until the overload situation is overstill ineffective communication. 5. Defensivenessengaging in behaviors such as verbally attacking others, making sarcastic remarks, being overly judgmental, and questioning others motiveshappens when people feel that theyre being threatened. 6. Languagewords mean different things to different people. a. Age, education, and cultural background can influence language use and definition given to words b. Jargon is specialized terminology or technical language that members of a group use to communicate among themselves. 17

7. National culture can affect the way a manager chooses to communi Overcoming the Barriers to Effective Interpersonal Communication 1. Use feedback. This feedback can be verbal or nonverbal. 2. Simplify language. 3. Listen actively.

Determinants of Organizational Structure

1. An organizational structure defines how job tasks are formally divided, grouped, and coordinated. 2. There are six key elements:

Work specialization Departmentalization Chain of command Span of control Centralization and decentralization Formalization

A. Work Specialization 1. Henry Ford became rich and famous by building automobiles on an assembly line, demonstrating that work can be performed more efficiently by using a work specialization strategy.

Every Ford worker was assigned a specific, repetitive task. By breaking jobs up into small standardized tasks, Ford was able to produce cars at the rate of one every ten seconds, while using employees who had relatively limited skills. In essence, an entire job is broken into a number of steps, each completed by a separate individual.

2. By the late 1940s, most manufacturing jobs in industrialized countries were being done this way. Management saw this as a means to make the most efficient use of its employees skills. 3. Managers also looked for other efficiencies that could be achieved through work specialization:

A. Work Specialization (cont.)

Employee skills at performing a task successfully increase through repetition. Training for specialization is more efficient from the organizations perspective. 18

It increases efficiency and productivity, encouraging the creation of special inventions and machinery.

4. For much of the first half of this century, managers viewed work specialization as an unending source of increased productivity. By the 1960s, there became increasing evidence that a good thing can be carried too far.

The human diseconomies from specializationboredom, fatigue, stress, low productivity, poor quality, increased absenteeism, and high turnovermore than offset the economic advantages. In such cases, enlarging the scope of job activities could increase productivity.

5. Most managers today see work specialization as neither obsolete nor as an unending source of increased productivity. Managers recognize the economies it provides and the problems it creates when carried too far.

B. Departmentalization 1. Grouping these jobs together so common tasks can be coordinated is called departmentalization. 2. One of the most popular ways to group activities is by functions performed. For example, a manufacturing manager might organize his/her plant by separating engineering, accounting, manufacturing, personnel, and purchasing specialists into common departments. 3. The advantage to this type of grouping is obtaining efficiencies from putting like specialists together. Functional departmentalization achieves economies of scale by placing people with common skills and orientations into common units. 4. Tasks can also be departmentalized by the type of product the organization produces.

Procter & Gamble recently reorganized along these lines. Each major productsuch as Tide, Pampers, Charmin, and Pringleswill be placed under the authority of an executive who will have complete global responsibility for that product. The major advantage to this type of grouping is increased accountability for product performance under a single manager.

5. Another way to departmentalize is on the basis of geography or territory.

The sales function, for instance, may have western, southern, mid-western, and eastern regions.

B. Departmentalization (cont.) 6. Process departmentalization is exemplified by Reynolds Metals aluminum tubing plant where production is organized into five departments. This method offers a basis for the homogeneous 19

categorizing of activities.

Process departmentalization can be used for processing customers as well as products. For example, at the state motor vehicles office you might find: a. Validation by motor vehicles division b. Processing by the licensing department c. Payment collection by the treasury department

7. A final category of departmentalization is by type of customer.

Microsoft, for instance, recently reorganized around four customer markets: consumers, large corporations, software developers, and small businesses. The assumption is that customers in each department have a common set of problems and needs that can best be met by having specialists for each.

8. Large organizations may use all of the forms of departmentalization that we have described.

A major Japanese electronics firm organizes each of its divisions along functional linesits manufacturing units around processes, its sales around seven geographic regions, and each sales region into four customer groupings. Rigid, functional departmentalization is increasingly complemented by teams.

C. Chain of Command 1. Thirty years ago, the chain-of-command was a basic cornerstone in the design of organizations. 2. The chain of command is "an unbroken line of authority that extends from the top of the organization to the lowest echelon and clarifies who reports to whom." 3. It answers the questions: To whom do I go if I have a problem? and To whom am I responsible? 4. Two complementary concepts: authority and unity of command.

Authority"the rights inherent to management to give orders and expect the orders to be obeyed." The unity-of-command principle helps preserve the concept of an unbroken line of authority. It states that a person should have only one superior to whom he/she is directly responsible.

5. Times change, and so do the basic tenets of organizational design. The concepts of chain of command have less relevance today because of technology and the trend of empowering employees.

C. Chain of Command (cont.)

A low-level employee today can access information in seconds that 30 years ago was available 20

only to top managers.

Similarly, computer technology increasingly allows employees anywhere in an organization to communicate with anyone else without going through formal channels. Cross functional and self managed teams and the creation of new structural designs make the unity of command concept less relevant

D. Span of Control 1. How many employees a manager can efficiently and effectively direct is an important question. 2. All things being equal, the wider or larger the span, the more efficient the organization.

Exhibit 15-3 illustrates that reducing the number of managers leads to significant savings. Wider spans are more efficient in terms of cost. However, at some point, wider spans reduce effectiveness.

3. Narrow or small spans have their advocates. By keeping the span of control to five or six employees, a manager can maintain close control. 4. Narrow spans have three major drawbacks:

First, as already described, they are expensive because they add levels of management. Second, they make vertical communication in the organization more complex. Third, narrow spans of control encourage overly tight supervision and discourage employee autonomy.

5. The trend in recent years has been toward wider spans of control.

They are consistent with recent efforts by companies to reduce costs, cut overhead, speed up decision-making, increase flexibility, get closer to customers, and empower employees. To ensure that performance does not suffer because of these wider spans, organizations have been investing heavily in employee training.

Centralization and Decentralization 1. In some organizations, top managers make all the decisions. This is highly centralized. 2. There are organizations where decision-making is pushed down to those managers who are closest to the action. This is highly decentralized. 3. Centralization refers to the degree to which decision-making is concentrated at a single point. A 21

centralized organization is inherently different structurally from one that is decentralized.

The concept includes only formal authority. The organization is centralized when top management makes the organizations key decisions with little or no input from lower-level personnel. The more that lower-level personnel provide input, the more decentralization there is.

4. In a decentralized organization, action can be taken more quickly to solve problems, more people provide input into decisions, and employees are less likely to feel alienated. 5. There has been a marked trend toward decentralizing decision making. For example, Sears and JC Penney have given their store managers considerably more discretion on what merchandise to stock.

A. Formalization 1. Formalization refers to the degree to which jobs within the organization are standardized. 2. A highly formalized job gives the job incumbent a minimum amount of discretion over what is to be done, when it is to be done, and how he or she should do it. Employees can be expected always to handle the same input in exactly the same way. 3. The greater the standardization, the less input the employee has into how the job is done. 4. Low formalizationjob behaviors are relatively non-programmed, and employees have a great deal of freedom to exercise discretion in their work. 5. The degree of formalization can vary widely between organizations and within organizations.

Common Organizational Designs A. The Simple Structure 1. The simple structure is characterized most by what it is not rather than what it is:

It is not elaborated. It has a low degree of departmentalization, wide spans of control, authority centralized in a single person, and little formalization. The simple structure is a flat organization; it usually has only two or three vertical levels. One individual has the decision-making authority. 22

2. The simple structure is most widely practiced in small businesses in which the manager and the owner are one and the same. ( 3. The strength of the simple structure lies in its simplicity. It is fast, flexible, inexpensive to maintain, and accountability is clear. 4. One major weakness is that it is difficult to maintain in anything other than small organizations.

It becomes increasingly inadequate as an organization grows because its low formalization and high centralization tend to create information overload at the top. When an organization begins to employ 50100 people, it is very difficult for the ownermanager to make all the choices. If the structure is not changed and made more elaborate, the firm often loses momentum and can eventually fail.

2. The simple structures other weakness is that it is riskyeverything depends on one person. Illness

can literately destroy the information and decision making center of the company.

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