Student Association - a Leading Non-Profit Organization - Essay Example

The student association at grass-root, local, state and national level raises the pertinent issues that influence students’ personal and professional growth and helps create facilitating environment for their growth, both at individual level and professional level. Thus, the various inputs and outputs of student association become important imperatives that influence students’ personal and professional growth.

The major input of SA is uneducated youth or youth with low education whose prospects in the employment market could get significant boost through higher education. Another input for SA is the discriminatory practices as faced by students from diverse socio-cultural and economic background. The organization uses the inputs and evolves different mechanisms like running campaigns, creating awareness and taking issues to the local, state and national level so that equity in education can be implemented for the benefit of poor and the ethnic minority. The organization also promotes cross cultural understanding so that students and people at large learn to appreciate the values of other cultures and develop respect for culturally diverse populace. The main output of the organization is the accessibility to higher education for students cutting across the divide of race, culture, income, class, ethnicity and nationality. Thus, educated and professionally qualified students from diverse background become the major output for the student association.

Answer 2
Student Associations are important non-government voluntary organizations that broadly work towards the welfare of the students’ community. The goals of the student association are to ensure that students’ voice is heard at local, state and national levels; strengthen student government; expand access to higher education; promote diversity across the students’ community; ensure accessibility to education cutting across income, race, culture, class, and nationality; and conduct training for students’ leadership program so that they can be constructively engaged in achieving the goals and vision of the student association.

The human resource of the association comprises students’ governing bodies and volunteers who work for the association’s goals and objectives. The HRM of the student association not only defines its activities, policies, and practices but also ensures that SA’s objectives are achieved through the recruitment of skilled employees taken from within and outside the students’ community. The association’s human resource exploits human competencies through regular training and feedback systems so that it can constantly test new approaches in HRM for higher productive outcomes.

Student association follows a hierarchical organization structure with a centralized board and grass-root legislative and students’ activist groups that recruit members and motivate them to work for the welfare of the students at large. It has National President, Vice President, President, the corporate secretary, the financial officer, the outreach officer, the community/labor Liaison officer, and the grassroots legislative officer. The hierarchical structure ensures that various activities of the organizations and their responsibilities are divided across the structure so that inputs can be transformed into effective outcomes.

Technology has emerged as a vital ingredient of organizational work culture. The various facilitating mechanisms of work processes and managerial decision-making are used to convert inputs into outputs. They include not only the technological tools like computers, tablets, mobiles, etc. but also the organizational behavior, benchmark, and the grass-root level work that addresses the problems of the students and help resolve them through collective effort.

Answer 3
The most important area that student association needs to work on to improve its effectiveness is organizational behavior and culture; strong feedback system; and networking solution that exploits social media. Self-assessment criteria need to be incorporated within the broader framework of the organizational culture. Self-assessment broadly caters to the understanding of self and how can one improve and improvise one’s performance for higher productive outcomes. Internal and external environments become important imperatives that influence one’s behavior and consequently, one’s performance is influenced because teamwork is inherently linked to work culture within organizations. The various inputs of self-assessment that influence one’s behavior within and outside the organization are personal characteristics and perspectives towards gender, ethnicity, scientific background, official compulsions, or socio-economic parameters. They greatly serve as motivating factors because people tend to be energetic and highly motivated or bored, indifferent and sometimes alienated, or even downright hostile to their work colleagues that significantly influence their performance and productivity of the organization.

At the same time, external factors like facilitating learning environment, merit-based performance linked to incentives and bonuses, an organizational culture that constantly encourages their work performance and encourages cross-cultural understanding, etc. become critical issues for personal and professional growth. The external environmental factors become major challenges for the workforce and personal qualities like flexible attitude, fortitude, ability to think critically, etc. evolve as catalysts that help them to turn adversity into new opportunities for growth. Moreover, organizational culture ensures that the workforce is prepared for changes and provides ample scope of personal and professional growth also motivates employees to give their best.

Thus, various internal and external inputs influence human behavior. Indeed, the rational or irrational decisions of the individuals are subjective to one’s approach and understanding of the issue that broadly confines to individual’s choice and thereby his or her actions. If people are happy and satisfied, they tend to perform optimally and discontented employee adversely impacts organizational performance. Student associations should therefore address these issues for improving and improvising their performance outcome at levels of governance and activities.