Organisational Behaviour and Helping Hands - Essay Example

Helping Hands Question no An organizational structure defines how jobs, tasks are formally divided, grouped and coordinated. These are six key elements that managers need address when they design their organization's structure. These are work specialization, departmentalization, chain of command, span of control, centralization and decentralization and formalization (Daft, 2001). The essence of work specialization is that, rather then an entire job being done by an individual, it is broken down into number of steps, with each step being completed by a separate individual. Departmentalization of jobs (common jobs grouped together) on the basis of function, services, geography and customer, could be done by the organization. Chain of command includes authority and unity of command. Span of control in the number of subordinates a manager can efficiently and effectively directs. Centralization is the degree to which decision making is concentrated at a single point in the organization. Consistent with the recent management efforts to make organization more flexible and responsive, there has been a marked trend towards decentralizing decision making. 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 from those who make the decisions that affect their work lives. Finally formalization refers to the degree to which jobs within the organization are standardized. If a job is highly formalized, then the job incumbent has a minimum amount of discretion. . When formalization is low job behaviors are relatively non-programmed and employees have to freedom to exercise discretion in their work. In the County general hospital, reorganization of the structure of the administration teams within each department has to take place. To date, administrative staff within each department had reported solely to an administrative manager. This is simple kind of functional structure where all the 7 departments have been classified on the basis of functions. In this system chain of command is in straight line and have centralized decision making. The strength of functional departmentalization lies in putting like specialists together, which minimizes the number necessary while allowing the pooling and sharing of specialized resources across services. Its major disadvantage is the difficulty to coordinating the task of diverse functional specialists so that their activities are completed on time and within budget. Service departmentalization on the other hand exactly the opposite benefits and advantages. It facilitates coordination among specialties to achieve on time completion and meet the budget targets. Furthermore, it provides clear responsibility for all activities related to a service, but with duplication of activities and costs. The matrix structure attempts to gain the strengths of each, while avoiding their weaknesses (Anderson, 1994). The strength of the matrix lies in its ability to facilitate coordination when the organization has a multiplicity of complex and interdependent activities. The direct and frequent contacts between the different specialists in the matrix can make for better communication and more flexibility. Information permeates the organization and more quickly reaches the people who need to take account of it. It facilitates the efficient allocation of specialists. When individuals with highly specialized skills are lodged in one functional department or service group, their talents are monopolized and under used. The matrix achieves the advantages of economies of scale by providing the organization with both the best resources and the effective way of ensuring their efficient deployment. The major disadvantage of the matrix lies in the dual command chain. This results in confusion and ambiguity, role conflict and more stress to workers. But over the past decade, senior managers are working with new structural options that can better help their organizations to complete/perform effectively. Teams are now extremely popular means around which to organize. Work activities. A team based structure attempts to combine horizontal and vertical coordination through structuring people into cross functional teams often build around processes (Forrester and Drexler, 1999). The primary characteristics of the team structure are that it breaks down departmental barriers and decentralize & decision making to the level of the work team. Team structures also require employees to be generalists as well as specialists (Kaeter, 1993; Mullern, 2000). Team structures basically complement the other structures. In large organization, where different forms of structure have been used, team structure has been used to gain flexibility. Team based structures provide diversity to the jobs. So keeping in view the benefits of matrix structure and team based structures county general hospital started the process of restructuring the organization. Under the new structure, administrative staffs were organized into teams which supported all staff within a particular area of each department. The administrative staffs were to be responsive to whomever was in charge of that area; it could be an administrator, or it might be a senior nurse, a consultant, or one of the many Professions Allied to Medicine (PAMs) that operate within a large general hospital. The aim of this was to increase the responsiveness of administration to the needs of the departments as a whole, rather than the needs of administrators. In addition, and in order to improve flexibility, administrative staffs were rotated around different areas within their Department on a three month rotation. But the reorganization has not been very successful which was evident that after 4 months the SAS meeting some staffs have serious apprehensions about the new structure like "This is a disaster!" said Joanne, the SAM for Accident and Emergency. "No-one knows what they are doing from one day to the next. Now the admin staff knows even less about how the place runs than the medics do! Since the last round of admin staff rotations our unauthorized absence levels have gone up 20% and three of my best senior admin officers have handed in their resignations. In a crisis management area like A & E this uncertainty is killing us. I'm worried it might be killing some patients too." Some says that it's not bad and some opined that it's very early to comment on its success or failure. "Oh the rotation system isn't too bad" chipped in Connor, SAM for Geriatrics, "the problem we have is the reporting responsibilities. The junior admin staffs are getting pulled in six different directions at once". Daphne's rather cut response". OK so the rotation system has taken a bit longer to bed in than we expected but we always knew there'd be some teething troubles. Now that the rotations are properly sorted, surgery has been running really quite well. So we can observe that there are several responses about organizational changes. It's a general question within the organization that "which is the best suited structure' Frequently structures evolve as the organization moves from one stage the growth to the next. The external and internal environment affects structural design in different ways. For instance, an organization which faces a stable environment may use a functional structure since there is less need for interdepartmental coordination, communication and innovation. On the other hand, a volatile environment demands a rapid response capability, flexibility and quick decision making. Such demands can be better met by the creation of a divisional or a matrix type structure. To that extent Bill, the Admin Director puts up the problem as "Well I can see that this type of flexible system might be more or less effective depending on the type of work your department is involved in". "Let's give it a couple more months to bed down properly and then review it. We always said that 6 months was the minimum that would be needed to make a fair assessment". In sum, it could be said that there is no one absolutely correct way to organize and organizational design has to be based on the particular needs of the organization at a given time organizations to look at the organic model which looks like the boundary less organization. Its flat uses cross hierarchical and cross functional teams, has low formalization, processes a comprehensive information network and involves high participation in decision making (Rogers, 1989). Now to maximize employee performance and satisfactions, individual differences such as experience, personality and the work task should be taken in to account as well as national culture influences the preference for structure too needs to be considered. Question no. 3. Motivation is one of the most basic and frequent concept discussed at the work places in spite of the fact that managers continue to search for innovative ways to motivate their employees and that a significant proportion of today's workforce seem to be unmotivated we actually know a great deal about how to improve employee motivation. We shall define motivation as the process that accounts for an individual's intensity, direction and persistence of efforts toward attaining goal (Mitchell 1997).The three key elements in the definition are intensity, direction and persistence. Intensity is the element most of us focus on when we talk about motivation. Efforts that are directed toward and consistent with the organizations goals is the kind of effort, we should be seeking. Finally, motivation has a persistence dimension. This is a measure of how long a person can maintain their effort. Motivated individuals stay with a task long enough to achieve their goal. In the County general hospital we could observe that there is widespread de-motivation among administration staff. As the Jack, SAM in Radiology observed "Admin staffs don't feel like they are valued by either the hospital or the public. When they do deal directly with the public it's usually because they have to explain why things have gone wrong and then they just have to take a verbal battering. While they don't often get the physical abuse faced by the Accident and Emergency nurses, at least A & E nurses also get thanked by both patients and relatives on a regular basis too. This is our chance to show the admin staff that they are appreciated. Where they help out above and beyond the call of duty, it should be recognized, and not just with a tacky certificate. They should get something of real value to them. So they started with rewarding administrative staff through monitory benefits as Jack has proposed like "Well, I was thinking some kind of benefit to the value of maybe 200. This could contribute towards a weekend break at a health spa, or return flights for 2 to Paris, or Marks and Spencer vouchers, or a subsidized night out for the section they work in, or any number of things. The one thing we can't do is to give cash as that gets us into tax problems." This reward proposal has been taken by the administrative staff rather positively. Now we will discuss some motivation theories so that we can have a proper view of county general hospital motivational reward schemes. Various theories have been evolved over the years. Maslow's hierarchy of needs theory, McGregor's theory of X and Y, Herzberg's two factor (motivation-hygiene) theory, Clayton Alderfer ERG (existence, relatedness and growth) theory, McClelland's theory of needs (need for achievements, need for power and need for affiliation), Cognitive evaluation theory, goal-setting theory, reinforcement theory, equity theory, Expectancy theory etc. In recent time, McClelland developed theory of needs (McClelland, 1961). The theory focuses on three needs: achievement, power and affiliation. Basically these three needs drive the persons to excel. Some people have compelling drive to succeed. Similarly, cognitive evaluation theory is allocating extrinsic rewards for behavior that had been previously intrinsically rewarding trends to decrease the overall level of motivation. Historically, motivation theories generally assume that intrinsic motivations such as achievement, responsibility and competence were independent of extrinsic motivation such as high pay, promotions, good supervisor relations and pleasant working conditions. Reinforcement theory is behaviorist in its approach and argues that of reinforcement conditions behavior. Currently, one of the most widely accepted explanation of motivation is Vector Vroom's expectancy theory (Vroom, 1964). Although it has its critics, most of the evidence is supportive to the theory. Expectancy theory argues that the strength to act in a certain way depends on the strength of an expectation that the act will be followed by a given outcome and on the attractiveness of that outcome to the individual. In more practical terms, expectancy theory says that an employee will be motivated to exert a high level of effort when he or she believes that effort will lead to good performance appraisal, that appraisal will lead to organizational reads such as a bonus, a salary increase, or a promotion, and that the rewards will satin the employees' personal goals . The theory therefore focuses on three relationships effort-performance relationship, performance-reward relationship, & reward-personal goals relationship. Expectancy theory helps explain why a lot of workers aren't motivated on their jobs and do only the minimum necessary to get by. In summary, the key to expectancy theory is the understanding of an individuals goals and the linkage between effort and performance between performance and rewards and finally between rewards and individual goal satisfaction. As a contingency model, expectancy theory recognizes that there is no universal principle for explaining everyone's motivation. In addition just because we understands what needs a person seeks to satisfy does not ensure that the individual perceive high performance as necessarily leading to the satisfaction of these needs. Some critics suggest that theory has only limited use, arguing that it tends to be more valid for predicting the situations in which effort-performance and performance-reward linkages are clearly perceived by the individual. Because few individual perceives a high correlation between performance and rewards in their jobs, the theory tends to be idealistic. If organizations actually rewarded individuals for performance rather than according to such criteria as seniority, effort, skill level and job difficulty then the theory's validity might be considerably greater. At the County General Hospital the initial two months, similar tales of exceptional performance had emerged from A &E and Radiography. The publicity generated by the award had been good for morale generally and even some of the medical staff had commented on what a positive contribution admin staff could make. But the last reward has not gone well to some of the administration staffs. This situation created a peculiar position. At one direction some staff opposed the rewarding of Brenda as the whistleblower and on the other hand some staff as well as administration manager accepted and even proposed the reward for Brenda. Now this controversial situation more or less has negative impact on the motivation of staff. In reward policy, any organization must take utmost care in rewarding anyone because perception of fairness is the sole criteria for motivation of staff. If staff perceives that rewarded person is worth rewarding then only he/she will be motivated otherwise it will de-motivate them. To improve the perception that only people worth of rewarding will be eligible for reward county general hospital devised a well thought plan for nomination and selection of the person for reward. Nominations were to be accepted from any member of hospital staff, patients or their families (although no self-nominations were accepted). The details of each nomination were checked out by an SAM from a different department and the decision as to who won the award was to be made at the first SAS meeting each month. So apart from stray incidences of disagreement generally this reward policy in county general hospital has been taken positively by the administration staff. But selection committee has to analyze and then decide carefully that who has to be rewarded otherwise this system will demoralize the staff more than motivate them. After taking a closer look to different models of motivation theories we come to the conclusion that if jobs provides employee the choice, competence, meaningfulness and progress then the employees may be motivated enough to do the jobs. Reinforcement theory enters our model by recognizing that organization's rewards reinforce the individual's performance. If management has designed a reward system that seen by employees as 'paying off' for good performance, the rewards will reinforce, encourage and to continue good performance. Rewards also play the key part in equity theory. Individuals will compare the rewards (outcomes) they receive from the inputs they make with the out come - input ratio of relevant others and inequities may influence the effort expended. Reference: 1. Anderson, R.E., (1994). Matrix Redux, Business Horizons, Nov-Dec, Pp.6-10. 2. Daft, R. L. (2001), Organizational theory and design, 7th ed. Cincinnati OH: South Western. 3. Forrester, R. and A.B. Drexler (1999), A model for team based organization performance, academy of management executive, august, PP. 26-49. 4. Kaeter, M. (1993), The age of the specialized generalist, training, Dec., PP-48-53. 5. McClelland, D. C. (1961), The achieving society, New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold. 6. Mitchell, T. R. (1997) Matching motivational strategies with organizational contents, in L.L. Cummings and B.L. Staw (eds.) Research in organizational behavior, vol.19, Greenwich, CT: JAI press, PP. 60-62. 7. Mullern, T. (2000), The team based structure ion the business process: the case of Saab Training systems in A. Pettigrew and E. Fenton (eds.) the innovating organization, sage, chapter8. 8. Rogers, L.E. (1989), Interaction patterns in organic and mechanistic systems arcading of management journal, Dec, PP.77-82. 9. Vroom, V. H. (1964), Work & Motivation, New York, John Wiley. Read More