Organizational Management Term Paper

Introduction

Management of the organization is one of the most important issues not only for the good performance, but actually for the actual existence of an organization.

Although, management of an organization is a very wide notion that includes different levels (from a small company to the level of state, that is of cause also an organization) and different types or organizations (religious, charity, profit based etc.) there are still many common principles for all this organizations.

Hewer, companies are the most common organizations nowadays, so it is worthwhile to examine the general principles and specific occasions of management for this particular type of organization.

Company management: General principles

One of the most important lessons the management of the company has to learn is that manager always gets what he wants so fist of all he should think twice before deciding what are his desires.

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With the management system as the main source of decision making and determination of the direction the organization would go and employees and the main tool of achieving that results managers should be aware of the consequences their decisions would have. It is very similar to the fairy tails when the genie can make three wishes and very often the first wish brings the results that are fare from the supposed benefits. Unlike in the fairy tales, the management of the organization doesn’t have second and third wish to fix the consequences of the first one.

Changes and their necessity

Changes are the key to success of any organizations. It is necessary to estimate the extand to which the changes are required at the particular moment and it is even more important to apply the changes in the way that they won’t be resisted. According to Miller, 1986 fallowing factors resist to the changes:

• Social norms and expectations
• Fear of the unknown
• Group cohesiveness
• Vested interests in the status quo
• Networks of alliances
• Status uncertainty; perception of threats to one’s current skills, status, and autonomy
• Perception of a threat to people’s careers
• Ingrained habits

From the other hand, Klein presents factor that support changes:

• Significance of the problem
• Magnitude of the problem [that creates a need for change]
• Number of people perceiving the problem
• Importance of the people who perceive the problem
• Credibility of data identifying the problem

Need for Changes

The sad truth is that most of the companies need a crisis to realize that there is a need for changes. In many cases the company does not recognize the problem till it is too big. As the result, the company finds itself in the depth of the crisis and its often too late to do anything.
The proverb says: if you drop the frog in the boiling water it will jump out. The reason is – the frog recognizes the problem and deals with it. In the similar fashion the company should deal with any problem as soon as it appears.

It is the basic step for any change is the acknowledging of its necessity and this acknowledgement can be reached only though the perception of the problem. In case the problem wont be dealt with at once it would become more and more severe. If the water is not boiling and would be heated gradually the frog would boil without even realizing it. In the similar way many organizations realize the problem when they are all ready financially dead.

In this regard it is worth mentioning words of Tom Peters: If you have less than 100% of the market, someone likes the competitor’s product better than yours. The competitor’s 1% may become 2%, and then 3%. An overall loss of 0.25% might be a 20% loss in an important market niche. (Peters, 1987).

Paul Carroll, Wall Street Journal reporter, demonstrated in his article how IBM suffered of such a frog effect: IBM’s executives actually saw most of their problems coming, both in PC’s and the rest of the business. They — forecasted the changes in the market that would cripple IBM, but IBMers couldn’t quite bring themselves to do anything about those cataclysmic changes.

Approaches to changes

There are several approaches to the actual execution of the changes. Force-Coercion is the first one. According to this approach the implementation of the punishment-reword tactics helps to reach the necessary results. However, despite the strategy may work in the short term it does nothing but create the fear of punishment and desire for the reword. As the result, it can’t lead to any long term changes and for this reason it is poor. It may also antagonize people who otherwise would have accepted the changes.

Empirical-Rational approach offers the alternative to the strategy discussed above. Instead of using force, the strategy suggests that the initiator of changes should persuade other actors using rational thinking and evidences that the change is for good and they will benefit from it. It may take longer then implementation of the force, but as the result, the long-term changes will occur since people shell accept the change more easily understanding that they would benefit.

Finally, Normative-reeducative approach applies to the basis of any group – to its values and culture. As the result of changes in that values of culture (for example the creation of the corporative culture) the forces that support changes are generated inside the group as such.

Conclusions

The success of the company is highly dependant on the goals the management will set since in the end of the day those goals determine the direction the company is going.

At the same time the necessity of changes is an everyday challenge for every organization. As the result the organization should understand the value of changes and the necessity to deal with problems at one. So it would be useful to consider fallowing guidelines:

• Organization should be able to recognize changes. Use of data is extremely helpful here
• Don’t forget about the common barriers for changes
• Normative-reeducative, Empirical-Rational are more useful then the Force-Coercion since they are able to generate long-term effects
• It is useful to work with existing structures, culture and costumes
• To increase acceptability give people an opportunity to participate in the change, then it would be something they created.

Bibliography

Hannah More, Moses in the Bullrushes
Miller, 1986 Behavioral Rationality in Finance: The Case of Dividends, Journal of Business pp 19-26
Klein,(quot) The Art of Marketing The Wall of Strategy, retrieved June 22, 2006 from
http://www.ganesha.org/wos/managing.html
Peters, 1987, (quot) The Art of Marketing The Wall of Strategy, retrieved June 22, 2006 from http://www.ganesha.org/wos/market.html
Paul Carroll, 1993 In Big Blues- The Unmaking of IBM, Crown Publishers, Inc., New York September 15,