Friday, June 12, 2009

Discuss the factors fostering and impeding organisational change.

Discuss the factors fostering and impeding organisational change. Identify the specific factors fostering and hindering change in your organisation or an organisation you are familiar with and suggest some methods to cope. Briefly describe the organisation you are referring to.


Bureaucratic procedures involve much paper work and routing through proper channel causing inordinate delays and frustration. The procedures are nevertheless valued, perpetuated and multiplied for their own sake as also to pass the buck to others in the chain of hierarchy as far as responsibility for failures go. The negative aspects of bureaucracy's can however be overcome if the individual need and organizational goals are properly reckoned. Whatever the progress in the thinking about and in the actual working of modern organisations, bureaucracy has remained an integral and concomitants feature. There is no use wishing it away. There is every need to understand it better and cope with the need for order and orderly procedures, and point to hierarchy, specialisation, structure, order and certainty among others as essential features of organisations.
Among the several proponents of the Administrative theory, the earliest and significant contribution came from Henri F Fayol, a French industrialist, in 1916. The 14 principles that capture the essence of the administrative theory could be summarised as follows:
Division of work: A division of work or specialization gives higher productivity because one can work at activities in which one is comparatively highly skilled.
Authority and responsibility. Authority is the right to give orders. An organisational member has responsibility to accomplish the organisational objectives of his position. Appropriate sanctions are required to encourage good and to discourage poor performance.
Discipline. There must be respect for and obedience to the rules and objectives of the organisation.
Unity of command. To reduce confusion and conflicts each member should receive orders from and be responsible to only one superior.
Unity of direction. An organisation is effective when members work together toward the same objectives.
Subordination of individual interest to general interest. The interests of one employee or group of employees should not prevail over that of the organisation.
Remuneration of personnel. Pay should be fair and should reward good performance.
Centralisation. A good balance should be found between centralisation and decentralisation.
Scalar chain. There is scalar chain or hierarchy dictated by the principle of unify of command linking all members of the organisation from the top to the bottom.
Order. There is a place for everything and everyone which ought to be so occupied. Equity. Justice, largely based on predetermined conventions, should prevail in the organisation .
Stability of tenure of personnel. Time is required for an employee to get used to new work and succeed in doing it well.
Initiative. The freedom to think out and execute plans at all levels.
Espirit de corps. "Union is strength " Fayol further explained- about the importance of planning, organising, coordinating, and control in organisation. These aspects have been further developed by subsequent writers like Earnet Dale, Herbert G Hicks, Chester I Bernard, Lyndall F Urwick and many others. It is however not proposed to review the contribution of each of these writers here.
The principles of management enunciated under the administrative theory stream of thought have the potential to comprehend and cope with the growing complexity in ortanisations to an extent in the sense that they seek to bring order,
provide structures relationships in channeling activities and processes and usher an element of certainty in actions though, of course, a maze of rules, regulations, policies, practices, etc. But the real problem is whether and to what extent they really serve as definite principles. For example, concepts such as centralisation, decentralisation and delegation suffer from superficiality and over-simplification. Several of the principles occur in pairs and there is little in theory to indicate which is the proper one to apply. Another basic problem here is that it views ortanisations as power—centered and do riot provide for underpinning the elements of a democratic form of Organisation.
Scientific Management
The third stream of classic school of thought is the scientific management. The ' principles scientific management were first developed around 1900. Among the pioneering proponents of the principles of scientific management, particular mention should be made of Frederick Winston Taylor, an engineer by profession. Whereas bureaucracy and administrative theory focused on macro aspects of the structure and processes of human ortanisations, scientific management concerned itself with micro aspects such as physical activities of work through time-and-motion study and examination of men-machine relationships. Unlike ,in the other two, the scientific management laid emphasis on activities at shop floor or work unit level than management and based its inductive reasoning on detailed study and empirical evidence. In juxtaposition the principles of bureaucracy and administrative theory were formed by synthesising experience and observation with abstract reasoning.
Taylor's principles of scientific management could be considered as an improvement over the contributions in the other two streams of thought in as much as he tried to use the engineer's discipline to reduce personal factors, randomness and rule of thumb decision-making. Though Taylor too had his share of critics and criticism, his contribution'to modem management and use of scientific methodology for decision-making and management practices are profound.
For Taylor, scientific management fundamentally consists of certain broad principles, a certain philosophy, which can be.applied in many ways, and a description of what anyone man or men may believe to be the best mechanism for applying these general principles should in no way be confused with the principles themselves.
Taylor described the following four principles of scientific management:
1. Develop a science for each element of a man's work, which replaces the old rule-of-thumb method.
1. Scientifically select and then train, teach; and develop the workman, whereas in the past he chose his own work and trained himself as best he could.
1. Management should heartily cooperate with the workers so as to ensure all the work being done in accordance with the principles of the science which has been developed.
1. There is an almost equal division of the work and the responsibility between the management and the workmen. The management should take over all work for which they are better fitted than the workmen, while in the past all of the work and the greater part of the responsibility were thrown on the workers.
The principal techniques he advocated were motion and time study, specialisation, standardisation planning, slide rules and other work-saving implements, work standards and guidelines, piece rates, wage systems, routing systems and modern cost systems. Most of the developments in the field of industrial engineering and personnel management can be traced to his work.
Taylor did not emphasise much on relations between worker and worker; worker and management. He recognised the need for a 'mental revolution'. But most people paid attention to his suggestions concerning '"efficiency experts", '"motion and time study" and speeding-up techniques to improve output and productivity. When the basic philosophy of scientific management and mental revolution did not gain the same emphasis, the scientific management movement hag began to be criticised as management gimmicks to get most out of workers. Nevertheless many of Taylor's contributions provide the essence of modern management practice. ~everal persons like Henry L Gantt, Frank and Lillian Gilbreth and Harrington Emerson made important contributions to the scientific management movement and expanded scope of the basic ideas propounded by Taylor .

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