What is an organization?
An organization is different from a simple sum of the individuals that make up its members. Some people tend to be more productive in a team setting than when they work separately. For example, a group of students working together in a study group can produce higher quality results within a shorter period of time than if each student worked individually at their homes. The opposite case ā where working together can produce worse results ā is also possible and, unfortunately, such cases exist in many instances. These and related matters are referred to as āorganizational phenomenaā. Scholars in the field of organization theory across the world have been researching these kinds of issues from multiple perspectives: for instance, what causes the phenomenon and what are its consequences?
Various types of entities can qualify as an organization, and there are multiple angles from which scholars examine these entities. To begin with, an organization is a group of people working with regular mutual interactions. A formal organization is an organization endowed with a legitimate status, often legal, which explicitly states the raison dāĆŖtre of the institution. Thus legal status, often accompanied by financial resources for the operation of the organization, is an important qualification of a formal organization.
At the same time, there is often a gap between the formal goals of the organization and the reality that the organization actually operates in. For instance, from a sociological perspective, the explicit goals of the organization often are not identical to the goals that many of the organizationās members actually pursue (Mintzberg, 1983).
In an attempt to make sense of the diverse approaches to understanding what an organization is, Heffron (1989: 2) found that the following elements exist across the majority of definitions of an organization. An organization:
ā¢ Involves more than two people (members) working together
ā¢ Possesses a common goal or goals
ā¢ Has members that act in a coordinated fashion
ā¢ Requires, to some degree, a structure
As the number of members of an organization becomes more than three, it is increasingly important to make sure that members are working together harmoniously. How can one make members work together towards the same goal? One way to ensure cooperation among members is to have rules and regulations within the organization.
Every member will have their own personal goals that they are pursuing. On the other hand, an organization must have common goals or missions that all of the members ought to achieve. It would be nice if everyoneās personal goals were in line with the organizational goals or missions, but unfortunately, such alignments are hard to achieve. More often than not, a member needs to forego or sacrifice his or her personal goals and motives so that the organizationās objectives can be prioritized. As such, rules and regulations are important. Of course, if there are too many rules and regulations, it may limit membersā performance and creativity and even devastate their motivation for work. At the same time, when individuals ignore the organizationās rules and procedures, particularly when they are against the organizationās interests, punishment is necessary to ensure that everyoneās work is aligned with the same overall organizational objectives in an efficient and effective manner.
Box 1.1 Definitions of organization
Organizations are defined in various ways, with each definition emphasizing a particular perspective.
ā¢ āA circle of people who are accustomed to obedience to the orders of leaders and who have a personal interest in the continuance of the domination by virtue of their own participation and the resulting benefits, have divided among themselves the exercise of those functions which will serve ready for their exerciseā (Weber, 1978: 952).
ā¢ āA structure of authoritative and habitual personal interrelations in an administrative systemā (Waldo, 1955: 6).
ā¢ āA formal organization is a system of consciously coordinated activities or forces of two or more personsā (Barnard, 1938: 73).
ā¢ āSocial organizations are flagrantly open systems in that the input of energies and the conversion of output into further energy input consists of transactions between the organization and its environment. All social systems, including organizations, consist of the patterned activities of a number of individuals. Moreover, these patterned activities are complementary or interdependent with respect to some common output or outcome; they are repeated, relatively enduring, and bounded by space and timeā (Katz and Kahn, 1978: 20).
ā¢ āā¦ social institutions with certain special characteristics: they are consciously created at an ascertainable point in time; their founders have given them goals, which are usually important chiefly as legitimating symbols; the relationship between their members and the source of legitimate authority is relatively clearly defined, although frequently the subject of discussion and planned change [by members who seek to coordinate or controlā (Silverman, 1971: 147).
ā¢ āA consensually validated grammar for reducing equivocality by means of sensible interlocked behaviorsā (Weick, 1979: 3).
ā¢ āA collection of choices looking for problems, issues and feelings looking for decision situations in which they might be aired, solutions looking for issues to which they might be the answer, and decision makers looking for workā (Cohen et al., 1972: 2).
Source: Harmon and Mayer, 1986: 18ā19.
However, there are views on an organization that are completely different from these classical perspectives. Some scholars zoom in on intangible and metaphoric aspects of organizations. For example, Gareth Morgan (1986: 343) emphasizes the importance of symbolic interactions among members rather than the empirical and superficial dimension of an organization. In the same vein, Weick (1979: 3) suggested that an organization, in a sense, is like a grammar that has āa systematic account of some rules and conventions, by which sets of interlocked behaviors are assembled to form social processes that are intelligible to actorsā.
A good organization
One example of good organization is a symphony orchestra. There is a conductor, who can be considered as the leader of the group consisting of individual musicians with a wide ranging variety of instruments, taking in different pieces and parts within the symphony. Then the conductor directs the musicians on how to play the piece of music and, more importantly, how to amalgamate different sources of sound into a one mellifluous harmony. He or she instructs some sections to be played in a mild, quiet tone and others to be played with strong sound impacts. The conductor can also modify the overall speed of the music by directing the team to play faster on some notes, while intentionally slowing down on some parts. In short, the team plays in accordance with the conductorās relentless signs and directions during the performance. Depending on how the conductor directs the orchestra and how well the players a tune themselves accordingly, the orchestra may perform a beautiful piece of symphony, or simply produce an aggregate sum of cacophonous melodies. In addition, it is important to note that the level of performance is not only determined by the orchestra members themselves, but also by the clients, in this case the audience of the performance. In every prestigious symphony orchestra, there is a third variable in which the musicians develop an invisible emotional tie with the audience. Can the example of symphony orchestra be applied to public organizations, such as a municipal government in a local city?
In every organization, leaders and followers coordinate each other to achieve their goals. Depending on the leadership and structure of the organization, an institution may run differently and, depending on individual membersā abilities, the organizational performance may differ. However, as in the orchestra example, environmental factors are hardly considered when discussing what makes a good organization. For instance, the main job of the conductor of the orchestra is confined to the realm of directing the musicians to create a single piece of unifying harmonious melody.
Managing an organization is not so simple. A leader of an organization also has to think about other aspects, such as limited resources and the logistics of the institution. Going back to the earlier example, an orchestra may have various supportive suborganizations such as administrative staff, drivers, acoustic technicians, a concert hall maintenance team, broadcasters and so on. If we take a close look into the real-world operation of an organization and its related functionalities, what we get is the simple fact that every organization (regardless of its size and scale) entails wide-ranging activities of management. In this sense, it is an uphill battle to manage an orchestra in a way that all components of the group are satisfied. The very process of bridging different demands and conflicts within the organization can be said to be an art in itself. Overcoming these difficulties, a good organization aims to satisfy its main clients. For an orchestra, the main client would be the audience listening to symphonies it plays. In this sense, we can reach the conclusion that a good public organization is the one that satisfies the needs of citizens for which it derives the legitimacy for its very own existence.
Different views on an organizational structure
Another question is whether there is a silver bullet for making a good organization. An orchestra is not only comprised of a conductor and musicians. At the top of each organization are figures, such as presidents or ministers, making important decisions for the group as a whole. On top of these top-rank managers, some organizations have another layer of leadership, often called the council. Some organizations are permanent in the sense that the members of the council maintain their jobs at their will, as tenured employees, but others are based on temporary agreements or contracts. Some organizations meet periodically, once a year for example. It is sometimes difficult to classify an international organization as an āorganizationā because some international NGOs (non-governmental organizations) are ad hoc entities that lack certain properties of an organization. Some organizations do not have an organizational structure, which more often than not leads to disorder and chaos. To the contrary, there are tightly structured organizations. A military is the quintessential example of a government apparatus that is notorious for its rigid organizational structure. Every service-person has an assigned role and specified tasks under the system, and each member is widely expected to follow top-down orders coming from the top-heavy chain of command. In this sense, there are two different views on organizational structure: a mechanistic view and an organic view.
The mechanistic view sees an organization as a static and machine like entity. Scholars who are adhering to this view investigate casual relationships of important variables. A study that falls into this category would often resemble the engineering blueprint of an organization at a particular point in time: this snapshot...
