Organizational Worldview on Human Nature - Essay Example

Personal Organizational Worldview and Assumptions about Human Nature al Affiliation People tend to construct their vernacular theories about the world around them as they grow in age. The ideas powerfully determine their individual behaviors inside organizations. My experience shows that managers tend to act according to the organizational cultures and treat people as per their understanding of motivation. The cultural heterogeneity concept assumes that although a large organization can have a dominating culture that expresses senior management’s central values, it can have subcultures. Its spatial separation, departmental designation, and professional occupations may outline a set of subcultures. The work groups may have a local set of values that significantly differ from the dominant culture. Many organizations related to health care, engineering, artists, and researchers have adopted the heterogeneity assumptions. The distinctive work paradigms and the demands of the occupations can easily marginalize the employees from the central organization. As a result, the workers try to cope with everyday frustrations and preserve their distinctive identity. They do so by working intensively together under a subculture (Bratton et al., 2010). The cultural heterogeneity affected my behavior as a doctor with a certain health organization. For example, we could collectively interpret the dominant value of providing the best possible care service to patients. However, the various professional groups frequently delivered care in a way different from the espoused value. Each group had a different interpretation from others of what best care means. For doctors, for instance, we interpreted it as eradicating the cause of the disease. On the other hand, occupational workers believed that it delivering care is helping patients to achieve improved life quality and greater mobility. These differing subcultures frequently clashed with one another and the central culture. Another theory, the symbolic- interactionist perspective, views organizational world as the all its members’ interactions put together. It assumes that culture is a vehicle that carries shared meaning (hence symbolic). It is brought about by the face-to-face encounters (hence inter-actionist) of workers and managers as they engage in daily workplace activities (Bratton et al., 2010). Thus, the organizational actors construct the culture, and then the networks of symbols and meanings among workers and managers reproduce it. Studying language, space, action, observable artifacts, beliefs, and values of the organization can thus help in analyzing the organizational culture. In the realm of shared artifacts, framed photographs, paintings, mission statements, and sculptures manifest culture. Symbolic interactionism also asserts that managers and employees may use language and emotions in their communications to make social action possible. As a health worker in a particular organization, the managing director, and other top managers used to pack their cars at prescribed spaces inside the compound. However, together with other employees, my parking space was outside in the street. The parking space thus portrayed a culture that valued hierarchy and status. In meetings, managers could frequently give an account of a dramatic historical event of the organization. They desired to create a shared meaning of how they expect workers to deal with present problems. Additionally, the organization valued shared actions of acceptance, recognition, conflicts, and severance. As a result, after becoming a manager in the organization, I could, for instance, invite a hardworking worker to an office party. I also publicly awarded the employee of the month, attend to a disciplinary hearing, and dismiss some workers to emphasize unacceptable behaviors. Yet still, according to conflict perspective, there is an assumption that conflict is a fundamental part of organization world as members strive to control scarce resources (Bratton et al., 2010). Critical theorists insist that conflict be a central concept in discovering the development of values, beliefs and norms to sustain the senior manager’s control. The perspective tries to understand organizational culture by placing it in the context of capitalist relations of control. Karl Marx, a conflict theorist, noted that social elites construct ideas. The creation of ideas is intertwined with material interaction and work-related activity of people. Conflict theorists agree that social elites apply a non-material element of culture, that is ideology, to shape perceptions and behaviors in other social classes. For example, the elites created an idea that an unfettered market can best point out the economic priorities of the society. Public discourse ends up supporting these perceptions, because of lack of alternatives. Conflict assumptions of cultures put emphasis on continual tension, resistance and conflict between differing groups in the organization. The stress on a structured antagonism between the labor and capital focuses on motive-the ‘how’ of workers’ commitment and the ‘who’ of power. In the organizational world, the basic assumptions concerning the human nature are often seen in the way workers and managers are viewed. There are assumptions that humans are rational economic actors (Schein, 2010). The assumption that monetary recognitions were the only incentives dominated the early perspectives on workers motivation. However, new series of social assumptions postulate the desire to relate well with peers motivates employees. They assert that economic self-interest is not the only essential motivation of humans. The primary evidence for these assumptions emanated from studies of restriction of output. It showed that employees preferred a reduction of their take-home pay rather than breaking a norm of balancing work and meeting people. In addition, employees tend to pressurize rate busters to work less hard and earn less to maintain the basic pattern of a fair day’s work. Another set of assumptions is that employees are self-actualizers (Schein, 2010). Managers need to give them challenging and exciting tasks to provide self-confirmation and valid outlets for the maximum use of their efforts. Maslow and some other theorists postulate that human needs exist in a hierarchy. An individual will first satisfy needs at a lower level before observing those in the upper levels. Humans will have economic motives if they are in survival mode. Social needs will take dominance after the fulfillment of survival needs. Satisfying social needs in turn ushers in self-actualization needs. McGregor noted that within this broad framework, managers held a significant second-layer of assumptions about their employees (Schein, 2010). Ineffective managers tended to hold on to Theory X- the beliefs that people are lazy and hence needs economic incentives for motivation, and constant surveillance to maintain hard work. Theory X that assumes that employees are intrinsically in conflict with their employers. On the contrary, effective managers hold on to Theory Y- people are self-motivated and hence need new challenges and channels for their talents, not controlled. Theory Y holds that employers can design organizations that match employee needs to the organizational needs. Although insufficient monetary incentives are “demotivators”, increasing the financial incentives would not increase motivation. Instead, new challenges that utilize a person’s talents would do so. Most current set of assumptions are that human nature is complex and malleable (Schein, 2010). Human nature varies, and such variability reflects changes in the life cycle. Motives may thus change and grow as people mature. The variability also suggests that as social conditions change, people can learn new motives that new situations pose. Such variability forces organizations to come up with some consensus on their assumptions since management practices and strategies reflect those assumptions. Assumptions concerning human nature form the basis of both the control and incentive systems in many organizations. Managers thus need to share the assumptions to avoid confusion and practices. McGregor also pointed out that the malleability of humans often makes them respond adaptively to the assumptions that are held about them. Managers who share Theory X experience this problem- the more they control workers and treat them as untrustworthy, the more likely the workers will behave according to those expectations. The manager then feels vindicated but fails to discover that the employee learned the behavior and did not suggest intrinsic human nature. The problem can be severe to an extent of creating organizational pathology within the organization if the Theory X manager has personality problems (Schein, 2010). The Mata Hospital was among the Theory Y propelled organizations that I have met. Managers viewed individuals as good health professionals, who would perform their services responsibly. They handsomely rewarded employees’ hard work. They gave employees challenging tasks that utilized their talents and allowed room for some mistakes. They publicly rewarded the best performers and gave them more challenges. As a doctor, I always wanted to operate a team. The hospital paid my hard work by assigning me a team of nurses and few doctors. It challenged my talent and enabled me grow in the field. On the contrary, a certain organization’s manager was ineffective, in that he ascribed to theory X. He mostly rewarded faithful employees with only pay rise, allowances, and other monetary incentives. He always had a high control system, but he downplayed the importance of nurturing the incentives systems. Any mistake did not go unpunished. Workers had to do more work than what they had expressed upon being employed. He never realized the importance of fulfilling self-actualization needs. Together with many other employees, I got discouraged and quit the organization. Managers need to find the right way of encouraging a proper culture that will make every stakeholder valued in the organization. They need to understand that other than extrinsic and monetary incentives, people require intrinsic incentives to feel motivated. References Bratton, J., Forshaw, C., Callinan, M., Sawchuk, P., & Corbett, M. (2010). Organizational Culture. In Work and Organizational Behaviour: Understanding the Workplace (2nd ed., pp. 336-342). New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Schein, E. H. (2010). Human Nature, Activity, and Relationships. In Organizational culture and leadership (3rd ed., pp. 144-146). San Francisco: John Wiley & Sons. Read More