Frederic Kwesi Great
Agboletey
Brottby, Sweden.
A Locus of
Implementation Enquiry Modelling of Adaptive Change
Introduction
This paper attempts to model
fluid organisational states occasioning organisational change implementation
employing an innovative configuration of wax structures which are
representative structuring to define dynamic system states, where self
determined structural emergence depending on the dependent link interrelations
that determine event actualisation in organisational task accomplishments can
be detailed and mapped for facilitating clarity. The modelling effort is based
on delineating at any particular task unit level configuration all the other
identifiable organisational units that are engaged in co-dependent resource and
informational exchange process with the unit under consideration to generate a
productive activity framework within which task goals are accomplished. The
situational defined emergent model thus derived, enable prescient, precise
definition of which exchange dependent process define an organisational
activity state and how the aggregating influences determine the unit task
quality within an adaptive change situation.
The impetus to derive a
process model arose out of an earlier research on adaptive change in the
manufacturing where the interviewers attempted to relate the perceived need for
change in terms of detected influences from within and without the organisation
and implied adaptive change success in relation to the nature of
interdependency activities within and without the organisation. Since existing
literature accessed lacked adequacy for effective interpretation of such
interviewee perspectives to carry across the nature of adaptive change, the wax
structure gradually evolved as the writer attempted to evolve an effective
approach for representing fluid states in dynamic organisational states. Where
the unit of activity becomes a focus around which relevancy is generated and
action consequences defined with wider organisational consequences.
Formal organisational
structure, it is conceivable are simplifications derived to structure fluid
interaction dynamism and give predictability and meaningful stability to
otherwise complexly determined interaction along constantly changing
interfaces. Formal constructs of hierarchically organised dependency relations
in that sense have just that much verifiability as being truly representative
of the organisation. In some instances a breakdown through defragmentation of
formal structures to configure meaningful aggregation at lower levels of task
unit and generating interaction patterns of unit dependent interactivity as the
basis for defining complex dynamic structures is inevitable. Since such lower
level representation enables more adequate states for dependent cluster
activity delineation and interpretation as complexly structured systems are
deliberately broken down for system analysis. The convergence of value
definition at these lower levels of system constituency being the adequate
level for understanding the characteristics defining the outcome state of
complex structures.
The importance of being able
to identify and designate the exact point of interaction within a complexly
related structure where action of change implementation is effected and
proceeds to permeate system wide state may depend on the extent to which
eliminating of vagueness by focused detailing of action emergence and
consequence in multi-layered indicative system constructs underlie clear
concept development pertaining to a research or organisational study.
Inarguably, however, indeterminacy of action origin undermines accuracy of
interpretation and may lead to gross over generalisation and organisational
issue analysis at less than precise sources of action implementation, which
though may generate equally viable results is just as prone to bifurcation and
imprecision. By narrowing down on adaptive change implementation locus and
generating interdependent loci of influence, detailing the exact nature of such
interdependency effective adaptive change modelling is able to concretise
adaptive change action emergence, action instigated response reaction at source
of adaptive change implementation and the consequences thereof as it influences
the overall system. Which is what this paper aspires to achieve.
1
The manufacturing
organisation by constitution is that organised and managed grouping of humans
employing machinery or a form of technological application to achieve certain
ends. Which mainly in the manufacturing sector consists of importing in raw
materials to be processed by the installed machinery to achieve the ´production
ends for which that organisation exists to meet. The products thus processed
are then released into potential consumer markets of that manufactured product.
Manufacturing thus is the employment of machinery to change the primary state
of any imported material to a new state of potential utility value for which
there exists a consumers’ market. The manufacturers expect profits from the
products they sale. Though a manufacturing organisation may have processed
materials as raw material inputs to meet its ends, as at the point of
acquisition, such inputs are seen as raw materials for the internal processing
by that manufacturing organisation.
An organisation basically is
the physical implementation of an idea from its emergence in the mind of an
individual or group of individuals, who then acquire the financial resources to
acquire the physical location where a structure constituting the physical
infrastructure within which machinery acquired, is mounted, workers employed to
man those machineries and a group of men with the adequate managerial knowledge
background are employed to manage over those manning the machinery.
Simply put, the
manufacturing organisation is a physical entity housing machinery and
employees, processing material inputs, imported from any of a variety of
external environments to be processed by the installed machinery through a
series of complex processes to produce a desired end product that is then
exported to that manufacturing organisation’s consumers market to be sold and
the monetary resources thus generated, used to acquire material inputs, pay the
employees, maintain the physical infrastructure and the machinery that the
organisation maintains to enable its primary activities. From an initial
position where the organisation owners have to acquire financial resources,
either by borrowing or from saved resources to establish the organisation, the
organisation once it has exhausted that initial establishing funding has to
sustain its survival by the successful acquisition of input resources through
profit generated on earlier product sales.
An effective management body
that is able to align the needs of the workforce with its organisational
resources to ensure the best possible combination of employee and
organisational resources to establish the amenable environment within which the
organisation engages in its primary production activities and the finished products
then exported into the consumers market by an effective marketing department
that increases awareness of the product assisted by the sales department, who
engage in the actual delivery and receipt of payment for goods delivered unto
consumers or wholesalers as the case may be. The products successfully sold and
perennially desired by consumers is what generates the resources that the
organisation needs to function as a viable entity.
These chain of complex
interaction at many levels with varied and changing interacting interfaces both
within and without the organisation as a defined entity has created a complex
human-machinery/technology multiple interfaces which is the area of academic
and research interest in organisations and on the reverse, the applied
employment of acquired knowledge for many students of organisations in a
variety of academic areas and professional fields. For all these variety of
fields and their different perspectives on a common field of interest, the
commonality that binds the variety together and that by default make all these
varied knowledge defined fields of differences, shared partners in
understanding the unique situational definition of humans in the social setting
of productive environments is the fact that all these diversified fields are
studying the “working work place”, be it manufacturing industries, educational
institutions, service institutions or any other place where humans gather under
organised circumstances to realise a defined outcome state.
The dynamic nature of the
human-machinery interface; the unexpected consequences that develop when humans
gather within socially defined settings to realise common ends of individual or
group based allocated tasks evolves new states of being for the humans who work
in the organisation. Consequently, requiring new frames of interpretation of
the unique social setting that the organisation is.
The organisation itself, as
an entity or a collection of identified units in a global, continental,
regional, national and local environments, all generate independent and
interrelated expressive states that influence their inner constituent state,
the environments within which they acquire their resource inputs and export
their products, and the collection of organisations producing similar products,
employing the same raw materials and exporting into the same markets.
The organisation, the
technology and the machinery, the human elements that work within its defined
physical construct, the policy making external environments, the resource
(considered in the broadest possible sense) import environment, the labour
acquisition environment, the processed product out put environment, are all in
dynamic states of constant variation from any given state of comparability and
affect any organisation in any of a variety of manners, both expected and thus
predictable and consequently capable of being reacted to with the appropriate
set of responses, and unexpected, thus poorly predictable, consequently,
unexpected in manifestation and under the best of circumstances being absorbed
by slack resources developed by the organisation in quest to provide a buffer
against the unexpected.
These variety of activity
sets generated as a consequence of the complex and dynamic social system of
interdependency created in the wake of the primary goal of making a product for
society and deriving profits from those products have created certain dynamics
that are tangential to the primary function of production but impact the total
outcome state of the organisation and thus become the concern of both the
organisation’s management body and students of organisations. For the most
part, significant aspects of management activities revolve around attempts to
resolve rising issues of collectives of humans interacting at common interfaces
to realise commonly shared ends. These tangential activities other than
applying human labour and mind to operating machinery to produce goods or
render services have made the working place a unique social environment with
its own distinctive social dynamics.
More often than not, managers have found that
what makes an organisation successful in attaining its primary objectives,
requires a careful balancing of the production technology, the internal
resource dispersion of the organisation and the creation of the working milieu
that minimises social friction while enhancing the sense of shared collective
ownership and responsibility across the organisation’s span. However this
relates only to the internal organisational environment.
1-2 The Organisation’s External Environment
Organisations also exist in an external
environment that directly or indirectly affects their day-to-day operations,
medium term organisational state and long-term survival.
The organisation is an
integrated entity, which at any one time is interacting dependently with any of
its several identifiable external environments. The organisation by itself
constitutes an element of the external environment for other organisations.
However, as an identifiable entity, the organisation is affected and affects
other identifiable elements of the “world” in which it exists. The external
environment of an organisation for obvious reasons of nature of direct impact
on day-to-day organisational operation can be separated into two broad layers
of immediate or task environment and the distant or general external
environment.
What constitutes these two
types of environments for an organisation depends on the nature of an
organisation’s activities and consequently what elements of the external
environment the organisation must interact with and/or pay attention to, to
enable it operate successfully.
Those aspects of the
environment that the organisation has direct contact and interaction with
constitute the immediate environment; changes in these aspects of the external
environment have immediate and direct impact on the organisation. Thus
organisations are required to monitor these elements of the external
environment to enable them generate the appropriate set of responses to
counterbalances departures from the assumed norms in these environments.
Inasmuch as human systems are dynamic, constantly changing, there is an element
of stability and predictability built in these human systems and it is this
predictability that allows an organisation to plan meaningfully, whether it is
in terms of how much to allocate for purchasing raw material inputs or
producing certain amount of goods.
In some instances the
organisation through its representatives directly interact with these
environments and thus can feed-into the management decision making process the
state or more appropriately the perceived state of that environment. In other
instances, an immediate external environment may have direct, daily
consequences for an organisation but the organisation my not have any direct or
determinant influence, albeit it is influenced by that aspect of the external
environment of the organisation’s immediate external environment. The
organisation in that case would have to find a means of gaining adequate information
on the nature of that environment and its influence on the organisation through
third parties.
The organisation as a
defined entity, formally registered, having a physical presence and
infrastructure, with machinery, furniture, technological gadgets to assist its
human constituents is a physical reality in most instances but it finds actual
expression through its human components, who have been allocated tasks aimed at
meeting the goals of that organisation. Thus, in many instances, a single, powerful
individual, powerful in terms of their organisational role can and do assume
the expressive totality of the organisation.
Since the various aspects of
an organisation, at different times, in relation to the nature of task activity
at the focus of interest, variedly express this nature of organisation, the
broad descriptive term organisation, when employed in the study of
organisations is more or less giving expression to some form of activity sphere
of some or all of the totality of the organisation, orchestrated such that each
member playing its role on its production machinery or technology assisted
production device complement the individual effort of the rest, which
collective activities combine to define the various sub-system activities aggregating
to define the total organisational system.
The range of changes, that
when detected through immediate environmental monitoring can be responded to by
the organisation to maintain the organisation on an even keel often fall into a
range of possibilities. Beyond this range that is determined by organisational
resource capabilities, there is not much by way of effective response that the
organisation can initiate, to effectively respond to the pressure for
organisational adaptation other than to employ the available resources for
system containment to safeguard collapse. But these are under extreme
circumstances of unusual changes in the organisation’s immediate
environment.
The general external
environment include those aspects of the overall environment in which the
organisation exists that may occasionally influence the organisation but do not
demand a close, constant attention to. The government’s economic policy of the
country in which an organisation exists is one example. The general performance
of the stock market, changes in the cost of fuel prices is all good examples of
the general external environment of an organisation.
The organisation as it is
obvious may face changing categorisations of what constitutes its immediate or
task environment and its general external environment, based solely on the
qualification of what aspects of non-organisational elements require immediate
and constant attention by an organisation to enable it to have effective and
predictable control over its day-to-day operations. Sudden, unexpected weather
changes such as catastrophic hurricanes, land-ward bound may change the weather
and its consequences from being a very distant organisational environmental
concern, to an immediate concern, requiring maximal informational resources to
understand its impact on the organisation's survival. Outside this extreme
example is the fact that in turbulent environments, the environmental factors
that would normally, in more economically stable environments be considered as
part of the distant environment become aspects of the immediate or task
environment.
1-3 How Changes in the Environment Influence
Organisations
Each of the external
environments within which an organisation exists exercises some form of
influential pressure on the organisation’s state of existence. The organisation
in turn makes internal adjustments in response to this influence, or pressure
to be able to maintain internal stability as it pursues its goals.
Given the multiplicity of
functional units that constitute the typical organisation, all of which units
must interact at many common fronts to generate an expected organisational
state, and taking into consideration that organisations have to take into
consideration various environments, some of which must be monitored closely,
interacted with on an almost daily basis and others which are acknowledged but
barely directly impacting on daily organisation actions, it can be concluded
that organisations are complex compositions of humans and machinery interacting
as multiple constituents units interacting with multiple environments.
Complexity as emergent
within the organisation and its external interactions is mainly due to the
number and the interconnectedness of the influential nature of interactions
more than it relates to inability to comprehend these external
interconnections.
Indeed what makes the
organisation-external environment complex is its shifting nature (in a related
sense), of all the factors that are operable in the organisation and its
environment and in some instances the instability experienced in some of these
external environments. In addition to this, not all of the specific factor
constituents impinging on an organisation are immediately obvious and
calibrated against their impact on the organisation.
What is referred to, as an
organisation's external environment might not necessarily, directly refer to a
physical state as to an informational state or a state of knowledge that in
finding expression redefines an organisation's realities. Thus constant
technological progressions in reference to industries in the technological
products sector is a state of awareness that keeps research and the push for
innovation in a high state of activity in organisations in the technological
products sector. While, for example in the sugar manufacturing industry
technological change may be of lesser relevance.
What is obvious however is
that the typical organisation is open to a variety of environments, from aspects
of which environment it acquires the resources needed to feed its internal
resource processing activities and into which it exports finished products. The
organisation not only acquires physical resources from its environment, but it
also acquires information needed to make management decisions.
The environment of
organisations can be categorised for easy reference into the technological
environment, the economic environment, the socio-political environment, and the
cultural environment.
An organisation’s
environment can be categorised for purposes of easy interpretation into stable
and predictable; predictable but constantly changing or turbulent and highly
unpredictable. While the characteristics of an organisation’s environment can
be interpretable from the socio-economic system within which an organisation
finds itself, the organisation's environment is best defined against the unique
characteristics of the organisation and its products. Thus from the earlier
cited example of sugar and maybe a telephone manufacturing company, the
socio-economic system may be the same but the unique organisational
environments, arising from competitors pressure, technological progress and
ability to be innovative in product design and market niche acquisition may be completely
different, Indeed, industry localisation in terms of national identity,
resource acquisition source and consumers market may be considered rendered
nonsensical given the unrestricted access to information and awareness created
in the wake of globalisation and international trade laws that promote free
trade, not to mention the less critical but significant influence of ease of
global information access enabled through the Internet.
Thus to understand or
comprehend the organisation as an open system in constant interaction with its
environment, there is the need to be able to detail the external forces which
impact an organisation, which aspects of the environment these determinant
forces emerge from, how these influences decisively influence the organisation
in its primary goal pursuits and how the organisation can integrate these
knowledge into effective running of the organisation. In those instances that
the organisation can influence these external influences, full knowledge of the
external influences will enable the organisation to shape these influences to
its benefit.
In adaptive change response,
full knowledge of the external environment conceived in terms of its influence
and impact and how the organisation can and should respond to integrate these
externally emergent information into designing and executing appropriate
organisational states cannot be under-estimated.
The next section takes a look at theoretical models
of the wider organisational environment. In seeking to give interpretation to
this environment, the reader must necessarily take into consideration that,
there is no one single organisational environment and neither do all of an
organisations various sub-systems deal with similar environments at the same
time and there is the need to acknowledge that even in the immediate external
environment of an organisation, certain aspects of that environment may have
more relevance to sections of the organisation than others, however, the
collective of these separate environments must be analytical combined to give a
discernible expression of the organisation's external environment.
1-4
Characteristics and Models of the Organisation's Environment
The organisation exists in an external environment;
this environment is basically the organisation's resource acquisition
environment, which encompasses also organisational system influencing
informational sources.
In giving expression to the collective environment,
Duncan (1972; 1973) presented an interesting characterization of the various types
of external environment an organisation can face. In a four face combination of
two dimensions of complexity and simple, on the one hand as against static and
dynamic, he elicited a tabular model of the characteristics of the four
emergent environmental state, in the two by two combinations of likely states
of the two dimensions and their characteristics, detailing the characteristics
likely to occasion each of the four environments an organisation could face and
suggested the response best suited to each environment.
According to Duncan's model, the highest perceived
uncertainty is emergent in environments that are both complex and unstable,
whereas an organisation in a complex but stable environment is able to
predicate and anticipate its environmental influences. In terms of application
to adaptive change where the pressure for change may be emerging from the
external environment, Duncan's model enables a basis for environmental analysis
interpretation when cast in the perception therein evolved and provides a means
for nature of assumptions an organisation must make towards an interpreted
environment. Unstable-dynamic environments call for a more agile management
strategy as regards response to external environment pressures than stable and
complex environments.
Appropriate interpretation of degree of certainty or
uncertainty a decision choice offers management may determine appropriate
management strategic orientation in respect to the manner the organisation's
environment is interpreted, and such interpretations are conditional to
effective management response, to both the external and the internal
environmental demands of the organisation.
Thompson's (1967) analysis of decision making
strategy as a function of (1) goal consensus among the dominant coalitions in
an organisation and (2) the degree to which there is a certainty about how to
accomplish a given goal. By combining it with the dimension of certainty and
uncertainty as articulated, (while suppressing for the time being) the social
consensus, social system underpinning of organisation effective derived states,
within which the theories and models were generated) a powerful taxonomy of
managerial decision types can be derived, within which the nature of social
system characterizing an organisation can be configured for more effective
decisional choice strategies, in response to emerging organisational needs.
1) Computational: If there is a high goal consensus
and high certainty about how to achieve goals, one can routinise decision
making much as one routinises mathematical problem solving once the rules are
known. Thus a shared decision the rules are known. Thus a shared decision can
be reached to develop a new product for which the technology is known and for
which a clear market exists.
2) Compromise: If there is a high certainty about how
to achieve various different kinds of goals but low consensus on which goals
should be sought, management finds itself having to make compromises and engage
in various kinds of bargaining behaviour of the kind that Cyert and March
identified. One such situation might be compromise on which of several products
to develop where the technology for each is well known but where lack of
consensus exists on the size of the profit margins each will yield in the short
and long run.
3. Judgmental: If there is high goal consensus but
the environmental organisational interaction is such that there is low
certainty about how to achieve a given goal, what is needed is good judgment on
how to maximize the probabilities of desired outcomes and minimise the
probabilities of undesired outcomes. Thus, judgment is needed where the market
for given product is clear and where profit goals are clearly agreed upon but
the costs of developing the product are highly uncertain because of changing
technology.
4. Inspirational: If there is neither consensus on
goals, nor any degree of certainty on how to achieve a given goal, what is
needed is an inspirational leader who combines the ability to pull diverse
coalitions together and the judgment to make the decisions with the highest
probabilities of desired outcomes. The decisions that entrepreneurs make in the
face of high environmental uncertainty to go ahead with certain products and
market strategies are of this type.
The relevance of the two models outlined here is in
terms of their indication of the relative degrees of variations in situational
variations in different organisations and different organisational situations.
They also prepare management for the need for a more contingent response
orientation in organisational response strategies. With induced decision making
flexibility increasing as predictability and certainty diminishes. These two
models enable a reference framework within which contingent modeling can
find a reference and combined with the Spider maps, enable the generation of
functional task related structures that define the intricacies of resource
acquisition interactions to be considered in unit task adaptation efforts.
Much as management has been described as a consensual
approximation process (Agboletey, 2001), the practical requirements of large
and micro system management are no doubt enhanced by proper delineation of the
various influences determining an organisational situation, whether that
situation is a production process or a social system management situation, and
how these individual influences combine to determine that organisational
situation of interest and consideration. The management is then left with how
to determine with situational role
players the most appropriate situational determinant variable (s) combination
within the resource provisions affordable by the organisation, to enact the
desired outcome state that is mutually supportive of individual role players
and the organisation's goals. The best combination of organisational resources,
employee considerations and management opinion yields under all circumstances
the best outcome state rather preponderance to one over the other. It gives
credence to the long held notion of management, one indeed which defined the
contingency theorisation movement that there is no one best or "all time
correct way" to organise; the exigencies of the situation determine the
best action response set. The internal state considerations require effective
integration of external environment impositions to derive desired states all
round.
1-5
Organisational Structure
Formal Organisational
structure represents the way in which an organisation integrates various levels
of its total human constituency into a framework of positional dependencies and
interaction formats, often visibly presented as an Organisational framework.
In its actual expression, an
organisation’s structure is best described as the formal definition
representing a less precise form of organic interaction pattern of task based
interaction pattern necessary in the organisation. The formal organisational
arrangement of structured layers yields optimum organisational benefit where it
is able to define operational environments where ease of access facilitates
unhindered communication across levels in the formal structures. As stated
earlier this facilitates the approximation of formal operational targets
without undermining the less cohesive informal social characteristics of the
organisations employees. Seeking to establish working norms that enable the
informal perspective to not only share but also actually give credence to a
formal management perspective is the benchmark of management efficiency; one
that is easier expressed that formally realised.
2
2-1 Open Loop Decision Making (Social Arrangements Around Technology
and Machinery)
The notion of open-loop
being suggested here simply implies that within the formal decision and
responsibility hierarchy of formal organisational structures the decision making
process be conceived as an all encompassing participative engagement, rather
than being a uni-linear transfer of directives from upper to lower levels or
from management to operations.
The notion of organisations
as socio-technical systems has been an organisational awareness since the
1950's and it is a relevant awareness. The workplace is a social setting where
value aggregates around socially mediated states. The technology is a given and
the personnel assigned to the jobs are barely self-selective other than as per
pre-specified background requirements for the task in question. The nature of
exchange relationships that evolves between the personnel may be task based to
significant extents, but there is a cogent social dimension to exchange relationships
at the workplace that determines the quality of work and the employees’
satisfaction with their work setting.
One important consideration
of management is how to gain appreciation of the expectations of employees,
their aspirations as they expect it to be fulfilled in the organisation, how
their values as regard work and life merge with the employing organisation's
´work philosophy, and how informal group norms and norms deriving from
workplace interaction support or undermine organisational goals. The
organisation thus has to be able to ascertain these various states of the
employee through “mutually engaged” management techniques, which integrates the
employee with the organisation rather than the organisation seeing its
employees as mere productive resources. Obvious as this is, many organisational
problems result from discordances that arise from deviances in these primary
human needs and an organisation’s management impositions. The suggestion being
made here is that under normal circumstances, individuals who enter into
employment at any workplace should be seen and treated as much as part owners
as those who have invested financial resources to set up the organisation and
need to be seen in that light as part owners who must be engaged in mutual establishment
of the organisational system state and conditions whereby all needs are met
under the best conditions that make the organisation and its employees
collective winners in the value creation effort of resource processing.
Clearly, whatever an individual's
view of reality before joining an organisation, those views and cultivated
norms are capable of being influenced and positively changed to the benefit of
the organisation under the appropriate conditions. (On the reverse, employees
can be subtly influenced correctly or incorrectly by informal group viewpoints
to interpret the organisation along any of variety of assumptions that work
contrary to organisational expectations).
Clearly, there is
preponderant evidence that the employee's capacities, preferences and
expectations cannot be taken as a given, but these are factor variables that
are influenced by the organisational context and capable of being influenced
decisively by management practices and the contingencies of the working
environment and its provisional state, positively or negatively.
The immediate implication of
this is that the organisation must design primary job functions with the
intention of positively influencing its employees and structure the work groups
into an organisational system structure that is responsive to the employees
needs and make employees sensitive to organisation system expectation, creating
interfaces where these two major organisational forces can interact with
reduced friction.
Thus this awareness of the organisation
being an open, socio-technical system, enables management to constantly pose
the guiding question in organisational system design and the adjustment thereof
in response to changing circumstances, and the inevitable pressures for general
system adjustment in response to internal and external pressures for
adjustment; "what combination of technology, management influenced
employee attitude and conformed organisational structures would enable the most
effective state of organisation framework around which individuals and groups
interact to realise their required tasks?
The intention of this
guiding question will enable an organisation's management to ascertain how the
influence of the different informational inputs determining employee
perspectives and influencing the organisational state in reference to the
primary task accomplishment of that organisation, the resource utilisation
demands these influences of the organisation and the organisations available
resources set against the technological developments and existing acquired
technological level of a particular organisation could be employed in
determining what best fit could be enabled in task configuration into total
organisational system.
These considerations among
others enable the configuration of the most appropriate work methods that under
the desirable considerations would allow technology and machinery to be
responsive to the social needs of humans grouped around tasks. Allowing these
groupings to be integrated into supervisory and management supportive systems
to define the most appropriate organisational social system that would support
the organisation structure designated to interlink persons in various positions
of responsibilities in the organisation.
The basic consideration in
realising the desired organisational social milieu that is both supportive of
the social needs of employees and capable of generating management production
targets within the circumscriptions of the existing organisation conditions can
best be facilitated by bringing employees at all levels in the organisation
into primary task decision making and discussing ways of facilitating the
appropriate working environment within the limitations of organisational
resources.
Open loop decision-making
will encourage employees to express their opinions on management suggestions.
There is no best way to manage but there are well-tested approaches that have
consistently yielded desired employee reaction in terms of attitude to work and
the employer. Management practices are based on individual management
philosophies as to the best way to manage integrated into formal assumptions of
what is currently deemed appropriate and best, as well as analysis of total
organisational system, which situational state might suggest what is most
appropriate in terms of management orientation, as well as external environment
information about what pertains in other similar organisations. These serve as
input analysis to derive an assumed state of effective mode of management
conduct. Which in turn determines how tasks are organised, employees allotted
to the tasks designated and the control and supervision system set in place to
gird employee activities. The decision loop is opened in that these management
conclusions are then open to work groups to confirm as suitable and employee
supportive, both individually and as groups. The organisation in seeking for
employee input, by default, must create meaningful decision influencing room
for work group input.
Open loop enables
flexibility for employee determination of optimum states for effective
productivity within an expectation framework emanating from an organisation's
final decision-making body.
While an organisation's
management are positioned to have overview knowledge of overall system and the
various external environments monitored by an organisation and aggregate these
information for decision making, micro-management of work groups are best
enabled when the work group itself within the supportive framework of
management expectancies is made to appreciate the wisdom in particular
management decisions as related to a particular work group, rather than being
left outside the loop. This awareness must be mutually acknowledged and
considered an aspect of the organisation's management strategy, a means for
overall system stability and optimum productivity to be conceived in terms of
management attempting to cultivate a sense of collective ownership and mutual
engagement among its employees and facilitating the conditions under which
management knowledge and organisational awareness state enables work groups to
make the best decisions, with regards to their peculiar needs in the light of
organisational expectations and resources available.
Aspects of an existing
production process may have, at times, to be slightly adjusted to enable the
best human-machinery fit. Where these involve the initial outlay of capital, an
organisation's management may have to decide whether short term savings due to
unwillingness to invest scarce monetary resources to adapt machinery,
technology or basic infra-structural provisions to yield adequate employee/task
group needs weigh favourably against the long term undetermined consequences of
employee dissatisfaction because of management lack of consideration for employee
needs.
It is within that context
that the open-loop decision making approach is recommended since it enables a
point of interaction that narrows relevant information to self-selected points
of implementation reference, where the situational awareness capacities of the
organisation interact at the narrow perspectives of work groups/employees to
facilitate the corroborative optimum implementation states for task execution,
enabling the development of the socially supportive work setting, as a
congruent state of dynamically negotiated outcome state of management-employee
(most likely, task group mediated) interaction at a common interface for
mutually desirable end states, with the resources of the one giving relevance
to the needs of the other.
The fundamental precept
under which management employs its vast resources for overall organisational
system-environment monitoring is partly for operational level decisions which
must be varied in response to noticed variations in external as well as
internal organisational states. While management has better oversight and
insight as regards the appropriate choice of action to promote the
organisation’s well-being, there is an intrinsic element of task performance
that in adaptive change implementation predisposes management as an external
knowledge and advisory content providing an analytical framework for effective
structuring of organisational situational state for effective implementation.
It is within that construct that a need for open loop decision-making is recommended
here.
2-2 Facilitating Adaptive Change
The awareness is mutually
shared by both employees and management that, there is no attained state of
perfection for work implementation, rather changing circumstances require
changing response patterns to enable the appropriate adaptive responses for
effective implementation taking into consideration the existing state of
technology, employee quality in terms of knowledge base, experience acquired in
reference to their work, conditions existing in competing organisations and the
immediate and extraneous factors emergent that affect the organisation and the
organisations resources for facilitating adaptive change in response to
pressures for change. Since that awareness permeates organisations have set in
place the response mechanisms that facilitate the dynamic negotiation framework
within which adjustments are facilitated by the organisation for its work
groups.
Awareness of a need for
change in response to changing circumstances that require a response from the
organisation and the changing nature of response patterns and type of responses
initiated as implementation measures to cope with unsupportive internal and
external systems, whose supportive adequacy as organisational system productive
mechanisms have been eroded by emergent states, imply that not only are
organisations required to make adjustments, updates, retooling to improve worn
machinery, change technology systems to improve on productivity, introduce new
products more in tune with what consumers desire or to maintain market niche
etc, but also the actual nature of change to be adopted is an adaptive change
response open to creative choice based
on situational circumscriptions.
The precise modus operandi
with regards to any adaptive change must necessarily be situation defined
(decision consensus implementation may take a cue from an existing knowledge
framework but each execution is a variation on a norm and must be acknowledged
as such, if its nuances are to identified, and catalogued as reference
material). It must be noted that the very organisational system precludes a
null state of reference for any organisational action. The organisation finds
existence and sustenance within a state of assumption that determines action
state and determines effect state and consequently the existing state of the
organisation. Understanding what these states are, is of considerable influence
in effective management. On the other hand, assuming that this state is a given
can seriously undermine all efforts to make the necessary adaptations that
changing circumstances require of the organisation’s production and social
system.
2-3 Process Management Within Dynamic Organisational Construct
An organisational process
has been defined as “a set of activities that, taken together, produce a result
of value to a customer (Ittner & Lacker, 1997). An organisational process
can be seen as the underlying routines and procedures that guide organisational
activities (Nelson & Winter, 1982). The explicit focus on repeating and
continuously improving existing organisational capabilities (Garvin, 1995) can
be seen as first order learning, which is likely to increase the coordination,
interdependence and efficiency of the processes. Benner (1999) opines that this
focus on the improvement and refinement of the existing capabilities is likely
to affect the balance between exploitative and exploratory activities. He
further observes that as process management is explicitly focused on exploiting
and extending current organisational capabilities, incremental forms of
innovation are likely as an organisation extends its current technological
capabilities. In organisational external environments where technological
change is comparatively rapid, adaptation in those environments require the
appropriate form of technological change response within the organisation.
During periods of incremental technological innovation in the environment, the
internal organisation focus on incremental innovation to parallel external
developments is likely to contribute successful adaptation through internal
adjustments to reflect the external developments.
Process management has been
widely adopted by organisations in the past decade, often in the form of
programs like Total Quality Management (TQM), ISO 9000, the Malcolm Baldbridge
National Quality Award and Business Process Reengineering. As a process, it is
a statistically derived value implementation to integrate efficiency into the
work process (Benner, 1991).
While these approaches are
generally intended to increase organisational efficiency and performance such
expectations have not been consistently borne out in empirical studies of the
process management (Powell, 1995). One explanation for the conflicting research
results on process management, Benner, contends, may emerge from considerations
of both the stage of technological innovation in an organisation and the
effects of process management on organisational response to technological
change.
Process management, it has
been noted, has the potential to slow the organisational to more radical
technological change, both by increasing organisational inertia and by
channelling innovation into incremental forms impeding responsiveness in the
face of radical changes in technology. In the same breath it is highly
commended for increasing internal operational efficiency through incremental
adaptation in an organisation. However, he notes a focus on incremental
innovation and improvement in organisations can affect an organisations ability
to recognise and adapt to technological change. Henderson & Clarke (1990)
found that organisations responded to technological change with incremental
extensions of current technology. Their study further found that process
management further exacerbated such a tendency.
Benner (1991) reviewing
literature from the field of Organisational Theory, focusing on subject areas
of adaptation, innovation and organisational learning, attempted to develop a
conceptual argument for process management in organisations and its influence
on adaptation to technological change. He argues that process management
influences an organisation’s adaptability capacity through its effects on
inertia and innovation. Supporting research that has examined the factors
within organisations that influence adaptation to changing technology (such as
those of Christensen & Bower, 1996; Henderson & Clark, 1990; Tushman
& O’Reilly, 1997).
The combination of increased
efficiency due to the “ping response effect” of matching internal states to
external developments and the consequent incremental innovation within the
organisation is likely to result in performance benefits for the organisation
in periods of incremental change.
Itter & Locker (1997)
found performance benefits associated with process management techniques for
firms in the automobile industry but found process management was negatively
associated for firms in the computer industry. Benner (1990) concludes that one
possible explanation for this finding may lie in the differences in
technological change between the two environments.
Hackman &Wageman (1995)
note that process management may exist as rhetoric in an organisation because
of its social desirability, thus the term may be touted without effective
implementation. They further contend that, efforts to assess the true extent of
adoption, separated from socially desirable responses, may require extensive
observation of organisational activities.
2-4
Particularisation of Complex Dynamic Systems
Organisations are constantly evolving due to their
interaction consequences. With passing time some organisations expand and
become more complexly related in their internal and external interaction and
information exchange processes.
(Galbraith, Kotter & Lawrence and Lorsch all make
attempts in their theorisation and modelling efforts to explicate the dynamic
nature of organisations. Galbraith shows how different kinds of organisational
design decisions can be related to information-processing requirements as an
organisation grows and becomes more complex.
Kotter develops a dynamic diagnostic model which ties
together many of the structural elements identified in an organisation and lays
a foundation of how to intervene constructively if one wishes to influence
organisations.
Lawrence and Lorsch (1967) focus on the effects of
Differentiation and Integration. They imply that every organisation must
determine its optimum degree of differentiation in terms of the particular
characteristics of its different environments and must choose an appropriate
means of integration based on an analysis of which functions give the
organisation its particular competitive advantage in the marketplace.)
While these organisational models aid understanding
organisations, they are hardly adequate in enabling the organisation to detail
the breakdowns required in the analysis of pre- and post unit task adaptation
efforts. Pre-adaptive task unit analysis of interaction interfaces coterminous
on task execution is necessary for the organisation to detail the chain of
dependency bearing upon the task units efficient work completion and how these
interaction interfaces can be managed to ensure successful adaptation. Post
-adaptive change implementation analysis enables organisation system wide
impact analysis consequent on implemented adaptive change.
The employment of the concept of wax structures as a
means for defining functional unit structures and the detailing of the
intricate network of dependent interrelations between the various constituents
units of an organisation serve the additional purpose of breaking down
complexity of dependent interrelations that occasion the organisation to neat
bundles of task and situational relevance networks that can be integrated
system wide to define an existing state of the organisation.
The organisation as suggested above is best conceived
of as a system of sub-systems in complex internal and external dependent
interaction with a variety of close or immediate and distant external
environments. These external environments determine the internal organisational
environment through the open system resource acquisition and export process, in
that they determine how organisations attempt to derive the best combination of
the acquired resources with internal resources to generate efficient production,
while contending with the more difficult social related concerns of enabling
the best working environment for employees.
The organisation, thus is an open, complex system in
dynamic interaction with multiple environments, attempting to fulfil goals and perform
tasks at many levels and in varying degrees of complexity, evolving and
developing as the interaction with changing external forces coerce new internal
adaptations.
The organisation needs to be able, at the unit level,
define the need for change through process mapping of 1. What leads to the need
for changing an existing state, by tracing the trigger source of the need for
adaptive change; whether internally driven or externally originating. 2. How
that need for operational adjustment can be obviated through adaptive change.
3. Detailing the intricate interaction network that determines functional
relevance of the unit where the need for adaptive adjustment at some
operational level has been identified. 3. Be able to ascertain the availability
of internal resources either from within the unit under consideration or from
wider organisational sources to invest in the adaptive change. 4. Be able to
determine how resource importation will be affected and whether such resource
import change can lead to system instability elsewhere in the organisation and
ensure that adequate information transfer into the organisational unit thus
affected, where possible is effected with adequate time enabled such units to
adjust their unit centred activities to adapt to the extra unit adaptive action
(here the complex integrative nature of organisations becomes evident; if the
adage could be stretched, then one could say that no organisational unit is an
island onto itself). 5. Prepare the employees in that task unit to accept or
share the need for adaptive change 6. Determine how change effects will impact
"export" target of unit production effort; this "export"
zone may be another organisational unit. 7. Determine how the adaptive change
will affect the overall organisation and 8. Execute the adaptive change and
ascertain its success rate.
This chain of action processes must be systematically
realised, while at each stage the complexities engaged must be broken down into
their simplest possible constituent state and the nature of interactions chains
clearly identified and laid out for understanding the instigator and spread
over of the need for adaptive change on the one hand and implemented change on
the other. The adaptive response effectiveness of any sub-system or sub-system
task unit cannot be understood without considering these multiple interactions,
action possibilities, action consequences and functional integration of action
along any of a number of unit interaction interfaces.
The complexity of subsystems constituent unit inter
and intra relation, dependency and mutual influence in terms of action
consequence require some form of comprehensive structural breakdown to
facilitate comprehensive analysis. Each adaptive change effort must be
considered within a larger system framework, which framework must be defined
according to the situational specification relevance.
Since, adaptive change is often within a subsystem’s
task unit level, even where conceived on a work group basis, production line or
department, it is more often than not focused within a subsystem level with
system adjustments made to accommodate the change. It becomes necessary that
the interdependent relation be specified in detail and the nature of dependent
relation effect consequent on adaptive change detailed at the
pre-implementation phase of adaptive change consideration since interdependency
assumes that changes within one unit or sub-system will reverberate across the
system whole.
The organisation - external environment interface is
complex and multi-faceted. This introduces another element of complexity into
organisations, since the multiple links between an organisation and its various
environments require multiple interaction and monitoring of all these
environments and the ability to determine their demands and effects on the
organisations, organisations are faced with not only effective information
integration at decision making centres but also quick anticipation of how
developments in any of these environments can impact the organisation's short
term and long term survival. In more than a few cases adaptive change in most
organisations have more or less been in response to competitors actions or
consumers behaviour or assumptions in regard to these.
The immediate implication of this is that, adaptation
effort must be conducted with marked consideration to the external
environment's impositions, constraints and support. Where adaptive change is
oriented towards new product introduction, the ease of product integration into
the external environment’s consumers market requires adequate consideration.
For example, a product change will have no relevance if the consumers market
has cause to believe that change from an existing product to a new one is not
worth it. In other words, consumers have always voted with their purchasing
power and more than a few organisations have had cause to regret poorly
conceived product adaptations, when consumers had decided that "new is not
always better."
Some organisational units
face an organisation's immediate environment and interact with such external
environments, given that adaptive change might be a response to noticed changes
in a component or components of the external environment, the subsystem units
that interact directly with these external elements of the organisation must be
able to convey their information to the appropriate decision making quarters in
the organisation for that information to be effectively disseminated into the
organisation. This information monitoring, interception, analysis and
integration at strategic information cellars for organisational decision-making
influence, needs to be broken down and made relevant to any change effort.
2-5 Organisational Internal Complexity
From simple states of
conceptualisation as a physical infrastructure housing machinery and the
appropriate technology to be operated by managed hired hands (employees) for
realising the goal of producing specified end products through the
manufacturing process to be sold to potential consumers in identified markets
for profitable ends, organisations in their operational states have often
turned out to be complex institutions, influencing their setting, being
influenced and internally complicated by the nature of internal organisational
states or naturally emergent interaction patterns consequent on determinant
activity sets in interplay with fluid human characteristics finding diverse
forms of behavioural expression.
Internal complexity arises
from the combination of unitary constituency and the various fronts that this
unitary constituencies or their aggregation as working groups, coalescing to
form departments or organisational sub-systems, which sub-systems together form
the Organisational system interact to yield unique organisational
characteristics.
The employees of an
organisation come from a variety of backgrounds and have their own expectation
to meet at the workplace. Differences in individual perspectives when not
submerged to become insignificant against the greater relevance of task
performance as combined effort can create conflict states that detract from
effective performance.
Even when an organisation
has clear-cut goals and the management machinery that enables a disciplined and
productive work force, the awareness that informal groups always form outside
the formal work group is a well-established nature of workplaces. Unless the
management is able to focus the group through internal state provision of
amiable working environment, where discrepancies between organisational
expectations and individual aspirations as enabled within the organisation are
not far apart, these informal groups of self defined interests aggregating at
common interfaces to find social expression in the organisation can undermine
the best management effort at attaining optimum production as defined from the
organisation's managerial perspective.
(Reader can refer to Hawthorne studies of the 1920's; Mayo (1945; Trist
& Bamforth (1951).
Organisational complexity
must be understood from fundamental perspectives to enable complexly structured
dynamic systems to become manageable and to some extent predictable.
Individuals people the
organisation with different perspectives on how a particular function needs to
be performed. Each individual is a constant variation of changing physical,
emotional and knowledge constituent state, and while aspects of the individual
may remain fairly predictable (for example, knowledge background) others such
as physical, emotional and psychological states are variable. Marked variations
at the individual employee level may have minor or major organisational
influences depending on what role the particular individual plays in the
organisation and whether sufficient role supporters exist in the working
environment to absorb the performance deficiency slack that lower than expected
performance from one person engenders in daily operations.
The employees are normally
constituted as work groups structured around a particular task definition
facilitated through needed machinery or technology provisions to enable
effective task execution.
Effective task performance
or task execution is required of an organisation’s employees on allotted tasks
given the resources and technology made available.
Work or task groups are the
primary employee compositions around which tasks are structured in most
organisations or more appropriately in the manufacturing sector. The basis for
group formation depends on the operational setting as structured around the
machinery and technology that mediate the production process. On the other
hand, behavioural assumptions of supportive work settings irrespective of
whether the task can be performed by one person or not need not be
under-estimated.
The work group normally has
a group leader who is responsible to a supervisor who is in charge of that
group and above all the various working groups in the operational theatre of
actual production. Above the supervisor is a layer of management personnel who
exercise decisional authority depending on their role and positional influence.
In most manufacturing organisations, these management personnel including the
owner (if it is a young organisation) meet to plan and access the performance
of the organisation.
Management may have fairly
simple one or two layers of positions or may be a complex array of different
knowledge fields interacting to enable effective Organisational performance.
The assumption of complexity
in dynamic setting requires a simple, accurate and replicable modelling
representation, which the next section discusses.
2-6 Wax Structuring
The assumption that formal
organisational structures depicting individuals arrayed in linked hierarchies
of functional and positional role dependent interactions is a true reflection
of how organisational roles actually relate to execute their daily functions is
considered by most organisational scholars as an organisational myth. Formal
organisational structures are position related, responsibility placeholders
around which a more diffuse dynamic interaction stream of varying, relevance defined
linkages evolve as different role components are faced with differing task
imposed interaction needs with different environments and different role
occupants.
Though the argument could be
advanced that for the most part most manufacturing roles revolve around highly
predictable operational practices, it is also the case that some positional
role occupants have to adjust their routines to meet the task imposed demands
of varying fronts of interaction and changing activity schemes, especially
those in management role positions. In this sense, while charted positions have
useful role position responsibility reference relevance, actual organisational
practices may require an extrapolation beyond these organisational chart frames
to enable understanding of actual organisational practices if one is to
facilitate changes in these practices.
Irrespective of what
organisational chart an organisation adopts, it's relevance is compromised and
its actual operational relevance as a predictable tool for detecting
interaction patterns is conditional to how closely actual practices reflect the
charted role positions. However, the role responsibilities allocated and
indicated on the organisational chart is more or less the basis for functional
implementation and departures thereof. In daily practice in organisations,
interacting unit coalesce at functional interfaces, which must be defined to be
able to accurately determine the variables of interaction to determine unit
state within the framework of the larger systemic whole. A process breakdown
and analytical definition that helps in reducing other wise complex activities
aggregating unto an adaptive change implementation task unit into a simple
frameworks.
The actual patterns of an
organisation evolving interaction pattern is of relative importance both in
practical terms and in terms of organisational research interest. An
organisation's functional units conceived within wax structures are functional
aggregations at nexuses of task interaction, where interaction is task defined
and thus dynamically realised as per task demands. These coalesce of
identifiable units at functional interfaces is more representative of the
dynamism that occasions the activity stream of the organisation and has some
relevance in more effective organisational interpretation and short-term
analysis.
What is of prime relevance
is that, whatever the eventual emerging structure to define interaction in
relation to any change implemented, it must have certain fundamental
characteristics: -
1. The outer layers, which
access the environment, must integrate as multiple sided environmental sensors
and interactive units combining their informational resources at a common
internal analytic reference point.
2. The actual zone of
integration may more often than not be an informational access zone(s).
3. Internal system states
provide a supportive system frame for external sensor, organisation-external
environment interfaces. In other words, any organisation access-to-access
external environment information must have some internal relevance or it is
redundant and cannot be integrated into a supportive internal framework.
Properly, conceived, an organisation-external environment interface exists
because it has been internally enabled structural form of expression.
4. Effective internal
integration requires the existence of multi-faced interaction zones for each
defined organisation unit, which units interact along several fronts to create
a centre of stability that enables it to maintain a feasible form fronting unto
several independently identifiable but interconnected unit frames, each of
which frames define units through system relevance that creates a centre of
stability through organisational functional task relevance through aggregation
at centre of multi-channel resource and informational input to define its
existence relevance as a defined organisational unit, facing adjacent units
through relevant interaction of either processed resource transfer or
informational transfer. The unit can be either an individual in a role position
or groups in a task role. The interface thus generated at any defined task
requirement informational, resource acquisition and processed resource export
further down the production process generates a wax structure.
5. The wax structure is
constantly reforming around task determinacy, some of which may be recurrent
others less recurrent, but all of which must find expressive definite form at
all times for the organisation to exist and yield functional relevance.
6. It is important to not
conceive the organisation from the strait jacketed perspective of fixed role
occupants in predictable interactions but rather functional reorganisations
around system defined interactions in the realising the organisation's goals.
7. What constitutes these
structures and how they interrelate must be defined for each unique
organisational situation under consideration. Since the elaboration of this
wax-structured interfaces or linkages thereof enable easier breakdown of
otherwise complex activity sets over several organisational units.
8. The organisation as a
system is composed of several sub-systems which further breakdown into
departments and sections. The human constitutes in those subsystems aggregate
around a task by employing informational and input resources to be processed as
its task responsibilities in a specified operational medium which completed
task is then exported to other organisational system components. All the needed
information and resources of both input nature and export requirements form the
interfaces around which that subsystem, subunit finds operational definition as
an organisational unit cooperating, competing and coordinating with other units
to meet its task functional goal.
9. The task functional goal
is mediated by the group social climate and the informal group opinion on the
nature of the task execution. The appropriate social medium as opined above can
either be left to find self-expression or can be negotiated at one of the
interfaces that define the task group by the organisation constituent in
influential position and thus forms one of the interfaces.
10. This task group social
system mediation is indirectly conducted by attempting to define a state of
mutual preference for the group under consideration, through facilitation of
group needs along any of a variety of dimensions, be it task related or social
need facilitation through management intervention that lowers non-task related
group conflict due to individual group constituent frictions. The effort is
directed towards enabling through the organisation’s intervention the provision
of those group states and conditions that weigh the groups formal and informal
social orientation favourably towards the organisation and in so doing causes
the group to perform at its optimum capacity.
11. Role occupancy is
equivalent to work group if the role occupant occupies a strategic role
position that interacts across various role positions. Just as much, an
individual management could represent the organisation as much as collectives
could define the organisation.
12. An effective group in
effect is a unit consisting of several individuals, while a strategic single
role occupant represents an individual in multiple role position interacting
with several interaction interfaces. The task defines the number of individuals
in the unit under consideration but that does not minimise their contribution
as key occupants of relevant and defined units in the organisational system.
13. The wax-structured unit
is a defined interface aggregating on a unit performing (a particular) task. A
process aggregation through interaction at a number of interfaces where it
obtains the needed resources of information or material resource input to
enable it realise its primary responsibilities, irrespective of how that unit,
operates to realise its task obligations to the organisation. In other words
the unit is defined first by its resource/informational acquisition sources
which simply are all the other identifiable organisational units that unit interacts
with and secondly by how these resources are combined at its core through
acquired resource combination with its internal resources, whether those
resources are acquired knowledge state of the individual or the machinery and
technology facilitating processing of the input resources in reference to
anticipated or known receptive needs of the transfer/export zone of the
processed acquired input.
14. By way of speaking, wax
structures define an organisation in terms of its changing patterns of unit
implementation activities as defined in specified unit interaction with all
other system constituents to enable it conduct its tasks at any specified point
in time. Thus considered, while some units may indicate unchanging interfaces,
the likelihood is that changing task needs might result in changing unit
interfaces aggregating to define the interaction interfaces circumscribing that
core unit’s task activities. By the same token the exact resource input and how
they are employed for the unit at the core of the defined wax interface must be
elucidated for the model to be complete.
15. While over emphasis on
informational/resource input might give an indication of a one way process of
input acquisition, the tentative information and the process of exporting or
forward processed inputs to other organisational sub-system elements is
implied.
16. These set of assumptions
is very much akin to what is referred to in older literature as role set but
differs from it, in that role set attempts to define with whom a role occupant
in fulfilling an organisational role relates to. These set of people, who could
be superiors, subordinates, peers and outsiders constitute the role set. Wax
structures on the other makes reference to how all defined and detailed
interacting interfaces that border a work units resource and informational
interface are functionally linked through material resource and information
resource exchange. How these acquired inputs combined with the internal unit
constituency to generate an output value of organisational benefit, which
resource is then exported further through another interface into another
sub-system constituent unit thus generating another interface on the wax
structure.
The focus is on the actual
interfaces and how they are characterised in reference to that unit and the
organisation as a system. A two level structure is feasible under these
circumstances; the one is the interface and the other is the unit as an entity
with its internal working mechanisms in interaction with other sub-systems to
generate these interfaces. Adequacies and inadequacies thereof may be sought
from within the unit in relation to what extent its operational needs are
realised from the interfaces thus engendered by the unit’s unique operational
needs that can be accomplished by importing from other sub-system. Whether such
sub-systems are within or without the organisation, they are conceivable only
within the organisational system, since the organisation must per necessity
mediate any organisation-external environment resource/informational
acquisition. While informational resources may be acquired independent of the
organisation, depending on the acquiring source that information must somehow
be acknowledged as organisationally relevant and integrated into an accessible
database or informational reference format for generic system employment for
applied situational specific purposes.
17. One of the problems of
role sets which the wax structure model attempts to obviate is that analysis of
structure is dynamically responsive to situational mediations of action choice
of interfaces defined as employed and action consequences of post
implementation analyses, which will help determine the next constituent
characteristics of the wax structure defined by the unit under consideration.
18. In which sense the
dynamic wax structure is defined by a unit's adaptive response to redefine its
unit needs according to task plus situational needs configurations and the
identification of system constituents from which the needed resources can be
imported and completed task exported into/to. The considerations of relevance
is basically a) what these identified interfaces are, b) what is acquired from
each and the nature of that resource, c) how these acquired resources are
combined with unit resources to generate an expected outcome, d) where the
completed output is heading e) a post production analysis to ascertain how
efficiency was realised in meeting production targets
19. All post production
analysis become determinants for the next structure configured as a process in
realisation consequent on actual production.
20. At any point in time, an
organisations wax structure which is the totality of actual resource exchange
deliberately engaged in by a unit to facilitate unit production or operational
realisation can be detailed linked to the various interfaces of resource
acquisition and made analysable. However, these wax structures conceivable as
modular mappings may be of equally viable relevance in enabling a sub-system or
work group to determine the adaptive response effect in changes manifested at
interaction bearing on unit task realisation.
21. Spider maps, a variation
on the spider mapping technique (Hanf, 1971) or planar link surface diagrams
can be adopted to enable extensions of a simple of wax structure. The relevant
consideration is that in determining the critical interaction interfaces it
should be possible to determine the influential informational and resource
sources which are needed for unit/ or work group operational task accomplishment
purposes. Spider mapping enables graphic presentation of depth structures in
simple linear diagrams enabling easy reference scheme. This is completely
removed from its original use as a means of mapping structural knowledge or
cognitive structures. It is in this
instance an application extension into the organisational adaptation study
area.
2-5 Spider Mapping Upon Wax Structured Interfaces
The basic assumption within
which wax structures are conceivable is that all of the constituent organisational
system sub-systems and unit components are per necessity identifiable and are
defined within a functional spatial dimension as relating to other conjoining
units. Any of the other identifiable units that a system interacts with form
part of that systems conjoining interface. Since interaction generates a common
interface of resource exchange, acquisition or export. The assumption of
multi-interaction common interfaces is the norm of unit operation in any
organisation. It is in that same vein that identification of these interaction
interfaces is conceivable as a means of tracing and determining how external
influences determine adaptive response pressure. If the need for adaptation has
an extra-unit origin then defining the requirements imposed is needed to
understand how the adaptive change therein engaged is characterised and its
overall effect on the unit under consideration within the broader
organisational framework.
A fair amount of
organisation adaptations are also unit emergent whether it be in terms of
product changes or group social dynamics or personnel management approaches,
the results of such actions and indeed the change resources would involve
several organisational extra-units and ultimately influence the whole
organisation.
2-5b Mapping Interface Interaction Details Employing Spider Maps
At the core of the diagram
is the unit making adaptive change. This nucleus structure must then have lines
radiating to resource acquisition and export designated interfacing units in
the systemic whole. The lines must attempt to focus resources on identifiable
formal organisational units and further breakdowns made as deemed relevant.
This simple structure thus enables in-depth as well straightforward delineation
of all that a focus unit acquires, deems as relevant to its work activities
completion.
The primary link leading
into and away from the unit under consideration to bordering units forms the
primary resource link identified as unit related to enable effective grouping.
Once a unit has been identified as relevant to a production unit seeking to
trace its resources links, that primary link can then be further separated into
ancillary or sub-links if more than one core resource or core resources need be
broken into additional breakdowns to facilitate understanding. The emphasis is
on effective mapping of the group resource originations and these resources
include information, which much as it is not tangible is definitely an
influential element determining unit task execution and production processes.
It is the therefore incumbent on the unit to identify its significantly
adaptive change inducing information source, which may be as obvious as
specific management directive arising from changes in aspects of the external
environment or it may be an internal strategic move to expand product range, or
any of variety of reasons that will require making changes in an aspect of an
organisation’s subsystem to improve existing organisational state.
The spider maps enable a
simple approach to detailing the significant influences on a unit emanating
from outside the unit. Possibly, the nature of relationship between these
factors and their collective influence on the organisation unit under
consideration can be elicited as a consequence of the mapping process. However
the spider map is one simple step in unit definition of task variable
influences and their origins. These factors and their originating sources,
their consequence for the unit’s task and organisational relevance can then be
further integrated in intra-unit analysis of task efficiency analysis.
These enables the formal
organisational structure to be disintegrated to generate a more applied,
organic but still capable of being detailed interaction interfaces among the
various units and levels of an organisation, creating system structure
relevance at the task unit level that would break down into meaninglessness
when applied to all of the organisation, but a dynamic organic structure
linkage that is important to understanding task units.
In generating the map, the
researcher or manager, can interview employees, review organisational documents
or give out plain sheets for employees to generate their own spider maps, which
can then be integrated into one diagrammatic representation.
(ref: Hanf, M.B. (1971) Mapping: A
technique for translating reading into thinking. Journal of Reading, 14,
225-230.)
Figure
3. A prototype spider map linked with hypothetical resource import acquired to
facilitate work unit task completion
Figure
3b.Indicates a target unit with bordering interaction units that form an
interface of resource sharing, acquisition, import or export. Any unit at the
focus of analysis for resource acquisition; a number of formal organisational
units can be identified as interacting interfaces. Which units aggregating
these interfaces may be contingent on any of a variety of situational defined
states. (The surface area occupied is not related to scale of influence of an
interacting unit on the target unit. If two separate units interact to generate
a value system that becomes a resource import for the target unit, then for
purposes of this study, the interacting must be represented. In most cases
however, such interfaces are easy to generate, for example. Since the
collective decision of the individual board members of a large organisation can
be aggregated at the Board of Directors- Unit interface).
The ability to elucidate clearly
the resource imports needed by any work group to complete unit tasks, the
actual nature of imported resource combination with existing unit resources
become important where adaptation has to be 1. Traced to source of instigation
especially if it is from within the organisation. 2. How the change or
adaptation intended can be effected by taking into consideration resource
import and how the change in product in being imported to other organisational
systems can have the desired impact. Change or adaptation may have unit
relevance in efficiency gained through adaptive change but resonate system wide
in its transferred impact. In this sense, all adaptive change must be conceived
with the system under consideration. It is in this sense, that spider mapping
becomes effective technique to diagrammatically detail how a system’s,
subsystems directly determine the operational efficiency of the unit where the
adaptive change is directly being implemented. Since organisations often exist
in not only complex settings but also dynamic ones, such breakdowns enable
appropriate analysis of the adaptive response, in terms of task resource
acquisition sources and processed product export destinations within the
organisation.
3
3-1 Adaptation as
a Means of Increasing Organisational Effectiveness
An organisation's effectiveness must be defined
within the unique organisational circumscriptions of purpose as a defined
social institution on the social landscape, having within itself a unique
social system, built around its primary productive functions. It must defined
within the organisations purpose as self-defined, the means available for
attaining those purposes, the indicators the organisation has evolved to
indicate when it is achieving its purposes in terms of those purposes
translated into goals. The degree of goal approximation needs to ascertained at
a system wide level and the breakdowns of those goals to be realised at unit
levels and as identifiable goals that aggregate to determine the overall
effectiveness of the organisation.
Progress toward any goal can be measured and that
measure has usually been defined as efficiency. Efficiency is optimum resource
employment in relation to any specific organisation task. Choosing the right
priorities among goals ensuring that the ultimate functions of the organisation
are met under the most desirable circumstances of both labour and resource
employment is a more complex process that approximates the concept of
organisational effectiveness.
Given that organisations are aggregations of multiple
units achieving a variety of functions in a social system that generates its
own conflicts and cross interests of participating constituents, it is only
normal to conceive measures of how that organisational system is performing on more
than one level in attaining fused functional goals independently, collectively
and collaboratively attained from an open system perspective that gives
adequate consideration to the unpredictability of the external environment, the
organisation’s agile capability to react to change, anticipate changes from
within and without and adapt to maintain an even keel and create a basis for
self-sustenance and growth as a viable social system evolved around collective
productivity.
3-2 Determining the Effectiveness Value of an Adaptive Change
An organisation's effectiveness is a measured,
attained, outcome state of an organisation compared against a preferred state
of possible attainment of the organisation as a system given the cogent factors
operable in determining the existing state and the possibilities of attainment
given the organisation's existing state. A fairly significant amount of this
measure is highly subjective, occurring in system states that hardly make
themselves amenable to objective evaluation while aspects such as amount of
goods produced can be objectively assessed, while bottom line measures such as
profits are indicatively monetary. This measured organisational state of
attainment given the totality of multiple system constituents interacting with
externally resourced inputs internally processed does generate a measurable
state of comparative value, which determine the state of effectiveness of an
organisation.
It is to be noted that an organisation's
effectiveness no matter how indicatively measured is a long term concept
evolved involving the organisation’s resource use, including tangible and
intangible management activities that have far reaching organisational effect
and human administrative processes difficult to measure as figure value but
that ultimately enable long term organisational survival and growth. Though
aggregate indicators of organisational activities such as total production
output and profits may be considered as helpful static measures, these measures
are only partial indicators of a more dynamic construct.
Schein (1980) concludes that a system's level
criterion of organisational effectiveness must be a multiple level criterion
involving adaptability, sense of identity, capacity to test reality and
internal integration. He further asserts that viewed from this system's
perspective conception, the effectiveness of an organisation is conceivable
from a variety of possible conceptualisations, however in defining an
organisation as an open system interacting with a variety of environments,
having to cope with those environments employing a variety of internal resource
combinations must necessarily feature in any of these conceivable concepts. He
further clarifies this notion by indicating that taking the organisation as a
total system, organisational effectiveness could be grappled with by seeking to
find answers to the questions: how does the organisation cope with its
environments? How does it obtain information and process it validly? What
mechanisms exist for translating information, particularly about alterations in
the environment into changed operations? Are the internal operations flexible
enough?
The value of any adaptive change must be inferred in
terms of how it has enabled the organisation to improve its effectiveness as a
viable entity.
3-2 Capacity to Cope with Need for Adaptive Change
One question, management in all organisations have to
face all the time is whether an organisation has the resource capacity to cope
with needed changes. How can the organisations capacity to cope be improved?
Management action in response to this question
revolves around two action processes, these are 1) Micro-processing management
and 2) Macro process management responses. In the former, management is
involved in detailing out the action response and managing its implementation.
In the latter, management defines the broad framework, within which units
define functional relevance in deciding on the details of generating the
appropriate coping strategies and solutions to emergent change needs, which are
then approved by management pre or post implementation.
Micro processing management is preferable in smaller
organisations, in large organisations, and in organisations that have adopted
organisational structure formats that have transferred significant decision
making on task related issues to task implementation sources, management's
actions are framed within the macro management principle, where broad action
frameworks are defined and decision making in fast track multiple determined
situations favour task units to generate effective responses to deal with
emergent problems with ease of access to secure higher management support in
terms of seeking approval or securing resources to facilitate change
implementation.
However, these are extremities on degrees of enabled
decision-making as management deems appropriate for enabling effective
organisational states and are not per se static. Problems within scope of
subsystem capability to resolve are best solved at that level; deviations from
the norm and unusual circumstances might require expert solution or support
which may not be within unit task capacity to enable in which case the problem
decision is transferred to a higher level. This leads to the notion of problem
norms, in adaptive change situation, expected problems are often configured
within an expected response set, unusual problems related to a need for change
require operating outside the box of normal solution generation and may require
innovative responses to a need for 'deviation from the norm'.
Adaptive change that leads to sub-system redefinition
at a fundamental level in terms of product processing methods or
re-arrangements of existing groups inevitable have implied in them a period of
normalisation that may influence the true outcome of the adaptive change
action. Workplace norms to some extent aggregate around the behavioural norms
arising out of task organisation and changes in these task organisation format
as a result of adaptive change actions must be taken into account in short term
evaluation of the success or otherwise of significant adaptive change,
especially at the task unit level.
Adaptation is a response to a need for change
identified. It is in that sense an anticipated need to change an aspect of the existing
state based on information filtered from within or without the organisation. It
is a carefully considered response of alternatives deliberated to yield a unit
task response to introduce any of degrees of variation to an organisation's
products, operational processes, the technological processes in facilitating
the production process, or a change in response orientation to an aspect of the
organisation's environment. As to what the actual action process therein
engaged is and to what extent the adaptive response reorients the existing to
variations of departure in any of a variety of dimensions from an existing
state is mediated by the demands of the situation under consideration. What is
certain however is that every adaptation effort is a coordinated effort to an
imminent problem or toward an anticipated improvement in existing operational
state in any organisational sub-system or task unit thereof.
While alternative solutions exist for just about any
problem or imminent problems in the workplace, Decision-making requires
elimination of alternate courses of action for choice of appropriate response
to match the best combination of resources and knowledge state.
Product change adaptation hinges on technological
capability on the one hand and resource available for importing the needed
resources to enable the adaptive change in the product. The degree of
adaptation needed more than anything determines the resource investments
required and the capability of the organisation to carry out that adaptation.
Coping is akin to containing an impending problem
situation through implementation of a more adequate operational response set
than presently exists.
An adaptive response is a response tailored to the
peculiar needs of a situational demand from the unique interpretational
viewpoint of organisation set against the perceived response need. Such
responses are tailored to solve specific needs and yield certain results.
Successfully carried through, these adaptive response become integrated into
the normal organisational operational response set.
Adaptation is a grafting-in process that initially
superimposes a new form in place of an existing operational process with the
calculated intention of improving an aspect
of the organisation which. Initial departure from the existing synchrony
evolved over time will have to be taken cognisance of and problems expected and
unexpected must be resolved as new processes find effective integration into
prior states.
3-4 Mode of
Determining Adaptive Change Action
Interacting variables of
situational determinacy create a congealed state within which the need for
adaptive change response is interpretatively defined. Once a problem has been
identified as requiring operational adjustment solution, the solution thus
derived requires interactivity beyond the task unit of problem identification
and implementation. Since systems are interrelated in dependency relationship
networks, the resource acquisition link for task implementation and new task
implementation in most organisational instances can only come from management
approval. Thus any new adaptation requires a multifaceted solution approach.
Since the adaptive response
emerges from a fluid interactive state of dynamic production, it requires that
means for breaking down the fluid state for analytical assessment be enabled
(as suggested in this presentation as through spider web mapping technique
considered within wax structure modelling of organisational dependency
interactive networks.)
Definite proposals for
actual implementation may come, mostly, from within the task unit, from
external units or by management suggestions for specified changes or from some
combination of all these interaction at a common solution generating interface
An organisation in
anticipatory adaptive mode has sensing mechanisms that enable it to interpret
and integrate its operational procedures, anticipations of forces developing
that will require it to make changes within some aspects of its productive
activities to enable it cope more effectively with its environmental pressures
and maintain internal states at levels that enable the most value to the
organisation as a system collective.
In both the state of
response to defined problem state and anticipatory response mode of adaptive
coping, organisations, as evolving systems in dynamic integrated dependency
systems must be able to evolve as part of their overall survival strategy to
emerging situation through system engendered flexibilities. These flexibilities
are resources and predisposed knowledge states, enabled as resources to enable
the organisation resolve emergent needs for resource investment above the
normal operational costs to enhance the system state to enable improved
organisational states.
Even where an organisation
has created adequate resources to contend with unexpected materialization of a
need for change in an aspect of the environment, such momentary adaptive needs
require response sets that call for a reaction beyond the normal operational
activities and may demand striking for adaptable forms from beyond the blue.
Where a response generated in a subsystem of the organisational system might
require innovative idea generation form.
A pending problem state with
no immediate response available for implementation consideration erodes overall
organisation effectiveness and consequently the robustness of the organisation
to deal with that need and other emergent needs for change.
Figure 5
Solution set focusing in adaptive response selection The decisions choices that any adaptive
response action generates can be grouped descriptively into whether response
choices available are 1) Unlimited, 2) limited by specific restrictions or
problem defined solution possibilities 3) restricted to a single response
Unlimited - The choice of
adaptive responses are literally only limited by the ability of the decision
making body under consideration to evolve the appropriate responses to the
adaptive need.
Limited - The response
implementation is limited by any of a variety of factors such as knowledge
level developed in relation to the adaptive situation under consideration,
technological barriers to choice of action responses, leadership courage to
engage in untested operational formats, legal and regulatory restrictions and
controls, availability of expert knowledge to derive fitting responses etc.
Restricted - The problem
defines the possible solutions and within existing attained knowledge state
such responses vary around a fixed response which must be unconditional
implemented.
Adaptation is built on the
ability to first and foremost detect the need for a deviation from an existing
state; the existence of the capacity to facilitate the detection of this need
is conditional to making expressive that need for adaptation.
Whether or not an
organisation has the ability to make obvious the need for change and
consequently make that change through adaptive response is also an issue of
management efficiency and resources devoted to monitoring sources both internal
and external likely to instigate adaptive change need and having the management
resources that analytical integrate diverse information and aggregate them at a
decisional level for management action.
In regards to the above two
assumptions two questions can be posed which are: -
1) Why are some obvious
needs for adaptive change overlooked?
2) And why are certain needs
for adaptive even when detected poorly resolved, either through inadequate
implementation or implementation actions that bring to fore the phrase, “too
little too late”?
Figure
6 The Broad Action Process Framework Within Which Need for Adaptive Change is
Recognised, Executed and Verified.
The adaptive process
breakdown as indicated in figure 5, can be framed within a definite time
sequence or be operationally discerned through process analysis and presented
as categorical sequences in a diffuse dynamic activity stream of organisational
activity with clearly specified origins and assumptions of end effects.
Adaptation can be tightly
focused on resolving a particular problem in a particular sub-system unit or it
can be a response occurring at a sub-system level of the organisational system,
it could also be an intended multi-level coordinated effort to integrate
changes at various levels across more than one organisational sub-system to
enable short term organisational viability and long term organisational
survival, or it could be in adjustments facilitated at various levels within
separate task units in same or different sub systems to ensure effective
adaptation implementation at one unit through integration across interrelated
units, wherever the need for change is detected and implemented, the intent
obviously is to improve overall organisational state.
Whatever the degree of
complexity implied in any adaptive change effort or the levels of organisation
involved, or number of units through which the change need be coordinated and
integrated to ensure successful implementation, adaptation implies that an
organisation in some of its constituent units is required by exigent
circumstances to seek for new implementation forms beyond the daily activity
sets that occasions that unit of the organisation. This may require minor or
drastic changes in routines evolved though practice in the unit under
consideration.
The assumption under which
adaptation is engaged in is that, as an action response set, it is value
additive action response with overall organisational positive end benefits. It
does not however necessarily follow that every adaptive response activity is an
addition to an existing state, some adaptations are the introduction of
hitherto non-existent technology or practice form, but altogether, are expected
to have an additive effect. It does not also follow that all adaptive changes
will necessarily be successful and in consequence enhance the organisational
state from a comparative pre-adaptation implementation level.
However not all
Organisations are capable of similar agility in effective interpretation of
their environments and internal state to identify potential problems in
formation, identifying the appropriate knowledge framework within which action
response can be configured and engage the necessary response action to make the
necessary changes to offset those problems or make the necessary adjustments in
operational procedures to offset the problem requiring an adaptive response
action. What is certain however is that organisations that are strategically
poised to identify problem areas are more apt to respond more adequately than
those less inclined to invest resources in effective environmental monitoring
with an intention to make adaptations where the need is identified or
interpreted.
Figure 6b. Adaptive change is consequent on a detected
need for change in response the external environment or the internal
organisation state or some combination thereof.
The characteristics of the
environment from which pressure for change emerges for adaptive response, the
perceived degree of threat to organisational effectiveness in the perceived
need for change, the resources available for the organisation to carry out the
needed change will all combine to detect the quality of response activated to
cope with the perceived threat to organisational sustainability.
What are some of the forces
from the external environment that could pressure for an un-negotiable adaptive
response from the organisation?
i) Rapid developments in the
economic environment that impact the resource acquisition ability of the
organisation, which economic pressures emerge from the general environment of
the organisation
ii) Labour agitation
iii) Technological change
leading to lowered production costs in competing Organisations
iv) Rapid market erosion
v) Mechanical failures in
existing machine
Adaptation is internally
focused with an intent to make changes that enable the unit of the sub-system
that is implementing the adaptive change to maintain or improve upon its
viability by making internal state adjustments either in response to external
detected pressures for these adjustments or internal focused improvement
efforts. Externally pressured change is incidental on adaptive change as an
organisational system stabilisation effort since such changes are inevitably
unavoidable, whereas internal motivated change may be strategically oriented
towards improvement beyond an existing state of the organisation without it
necessary being unconditional.
3-4 Hard – Soft Interfaces Interacting to Determine Adaptive Change
Within Organisations, the
need for adaptive change might be in response to a need to effect change at the
human element constituency composition within the organisational system in
response to technological innovations, leading to the need to upgrade employee
knowledge base, reorganise work groups or it may be a need to update existing technology.
Rapid technological change has its own consequences in terms of adaptive
capacities engendered in the workforce through appropriate knowledge transfer
to enable effective performance on newer technology.
Adaptation in Organisations
may require adjustments at interfaces where a change in technology may lead to
changes in operational groups and work performance orientations leading to
variations from existing work group compositions or and task arrangements. On
the other hand adjustments made at the insistence of trade union regulations
may lead to changes in management employee management strategies. While changes
in management-employee orientation to enhance information transfer and
collective decision making may lead to changes in human constituent primary
interaction framework with system wide consequences with little or no
deliberate changes in existing technology or machinery employed in the
production process. These interfaces defining adaptive change can be
represented as a simple interface depiction between (human) soft and
(machinery/technology) hard, aggregations of four interaction possibilities
within which adaptive change can be configured.
Figure 7 The
various combinations of human - technology interfaces mediating adaptive
change.
Soft - Soft adaptive change
interface is change effected at primarily human - human interfaces such as
management - production workers de-layering. Common platform construction for
idea exchange as occurs in workers' durbars etc. Production employees and their
trade union representatives negotiating the collective bargaining Agreement at
trade unions – management interface that result in significant changes in
management practices, operations, salaries etc.
The hard face of the
organisation is its technological equipments, machinery and other task utility
equipments, which are calibrated to predictable output. Hard faces must
necessarily interact with soft face human components of the organisation, which
human components are less predictable, to yield operational ends.
Hard - hard adaptive change
interfaces occur where as technology changes, internal machinery are replaced
to reflect the adaptive change induced through the technology change; where
product quality improvement may require adaptive adjustment through machinery
upgrading; it may also be conjectured where effective integration through
technological adaptation in one organisational unit leads to unintended
upgrades to create system technology balance to enable efficiency in production
processes.
Hard - soft / soft - hard
adaptive change interfaces are configurable where technological change leads to
re-arrangements at the human machine interface and the reformation of work
groups as a consequence.
The element of flexible
fluctuation facilitated at the (soft-soft/hard-soft) human -technology
interfaces, effectively managed, may result in degrees of adjustment to
maintain peak average performance. Peak average performance can be interpreted
as the desired level aspired to in terms of attained productivity daily from
each task unit.
3-4b Streamlining
Hard-Soft Interaction To Yield System Supportive Adaptation
The degree of flexibility
permitted by an organisation to its sub-systems to effect adaptive change will
to a reasonable extent be defined by three factors:
1. Top Management acceptance
of identified need for adaptive change at some sub-system unit of the
organisation and the willingness to release the resources required to invest in
implementing the adaptive change.
2. Availability of surplus
resources
3. Overall organisational
culture that permits flexibility through encouraging creative employee input at
all levels, to enable ease of departure from existing states of predetermined
formats for task execution to adapt to employ new approaches.
Ingrid Bonn's article
"Staying on Top" which enumerates and elaborates the characteristics
of long term organisational survival examines four broad categories of
variables of that might affect longevity
1. Environmental variables
2. Organisational variables
3. Company strategies, and
4. Ownership characteristics
These variables were derived
from empirical studies that studied the relationship between various variables
that influence organisational performance.
Organisations that
coordinate through effective management to develop the best fit in the
relationship and interdependency between these variables in operational process
manifestation, and enable unit integration into the various sub-system units
and sub-system integration to define organisational effectiveness state are
most likely to yield the best performance, since resources are least likely to
be diffracted but highly tuned through collaborative effort at all interaction
interfaces where task implementation and decision making aggregate to yield
mutually supportive implementation processes, where task processes are designed
through collective input of interested parties to generate smooth with the
least flaws in pursuit of collective interests common goals, with individual
employee ends being taken into consideration as a complementary condition for
successful organisational pursuit and realisation of primary organisational
interests and goals.
Krell (2000) emphasis that " individuals will tend to
allow a group to make decisions that they would not make as individuals alone .
. . thus to effect change in an organisation, we must direct simultaneous,
diverse effort toward the social system, culture and each individual member of
every group at or about the same time, frequently this entails environmental,
technical and profound structural changes". Experience, as well as group
and social psychological theory, have shown that In other words in making
adaptive change, changes in management-employee relationship in terms of the
participative engagement of management and employee in the adaptive change
might yield mutual benefits.
Organisations as systems,
find definitive expressions at nodes, where the intricate balancing of
supportive, multi-variable dependency structured formal and informal roles evolved
through planned-practice to enable organisation system sustenance through
orchestrated infusion of imported resources to be operated upon to derive
contrived internal states which aggregate at nodal points in the complex chain
of dependency relationship of human (soft-soft) and technology (hard-soft) and
interaction to yield outputs, the export of which to an organisation's external
environment complete the open system cyclical interplay of resource acquisition
from the external environment - processing in the organisation - selling or
delivery to consumers - purchasing of resources with the earnings to begin the
cycle. In manufacturing Organisations, the cycle is a perfect model in
operation. The nodes at which the internal process of soft-hard interaction
aggregate are often the task units or work groups which constitute an
Organisations sub-system within which actual production or operations are
realised.
Adaptation is a recourse to
correctly perceived threat to the intricate balance attained in the combination
of material, humans and machines at any node in the complex organisational
network, around which organisational equilibrium, regularly adjusted in
reaction to internally determined and externally influenced states of
efficiency, feasible organisational existence accrues. One of the fundamental
assumptions of wax structuring is that these nodes of activity defined
interactivity congeal and dissolve to define unique activity schemes and that
certain organisational actions such as adaptation can only be understood by
defining construct reality from these nodes or nexuses of action definition.
Ineffective integration of
multiple purposes in any organisational task setting, such that primary
purposes conceived from an organisational interest perspective, for example
interests conceived in terms of increasing production from a purely technical
point of view, profit increment, are poorly integrated into support, secondary
purposes of employee comfort, internal environment material provisions, job
security, social need considerations of work groups, can lead to schism between
management and employees, diffracting focus from a mutually engaged task
orientation to sublime subversive employee undermining of "the
organisation" as a result of poor management practices. Such strains, in
the long run impose unnecessary imbalance in organisation resources at both
soft-soft, and soft-hard interfaces, as ineffective divergences from primary
task activities carried out in all supportive mutually configured organisational
management designations are discordantly disaggregated as secondary social
needs and primary task goals overemphasised as prime considerations stray
further from the former and cause work group energy diffusion in the
self-interest pursuit of seeking through informal self-redesign of work and
formal protest to bring these two states to be complementary. Management in
this case must at all times seek to create organisational states where
employees see themselves as mutually engaged in “running the organisation” and
part owners of their organisation.
(Definition
- 1. diffract - to split along primary lines of dissonance causing energy
distribution to split variables that ought to co-operate to yield favourable
end states and thus reducing end effect on one and collective object
constituency.
2.
Variable - representing an unspecified member of a class of entities.)
Adaptive change is local
focused change, it is a targeted action aimed at resolving a real or presumed
problem within a sub-system or its unit thereof with organisational effects,
since such actions are intended to improve the operational state whether
through technological related adjustments or machinery upgrades or re-tooling
as the case may be.
Whatever, the problem
assumed, the origin of the problem need be specified and change facilitated
within that sector of the organisation, where change is necessitated to obviate
the presumed adverse consequences were such a problem not to be resolved
through adaptive change implementation. Problem solution need to be targeted
and resolved through unit participation, given that knowledge infusion from
management or expert knowledge sources must be implemented within a not so
obvious social milieu where task and non-task related social relevancies interact
to determine the explicit task outcome. This is simply because while
organisation task variables are preferably conceived from relevant aggregations
towards direct system relevance, where system relevance is often configured in
the approximation of some productivity target, employees at task unit
conception of organisation relevance is a more inclusive variable combination
of non-task related considerations and organisational management approaches
irrespective of how conceived are, yield better results when integrated with
employee inputs before decision implementation at points of execution.
Open system planning gives
credence to the assumption that idea generation is universal on the one hand
and that involved engagement rather than imposed requirements are the best
approach in the flexible work setting to maximise efficiency.
Assuming that the work
setting is a given, given that adaptive change can only occur in an already
existing work unit in an organisation (or one that has been created from an existing
sub system work group to meet the adaptive change implementation, giving
further credence to the earlier asserted “ pseudo snow-ball effect” of local
change having wider organisational ramifications), then it is only normal to
assume that employees will through interaction with this given setting mould it
to accommodate their socio-psychological needs. Technology and organisational
management attempt to meet employees normal social needs through design and
open system planning respectively, however such social need must be balanced
with organisational interests taking into consideration the limitations of
attained technology, the resources available to the organisation and the
socio-psychological needs of employees.
The question thus that needs
to be posed is, what degree of compromise between any combination of two or
more organisational factors within existing means of execution of the
organisation in the light of existing resources can be organised to yield
mutually complementary ends across diverse organisational interests?
The work group in a
production unit is of primary importance, since adaptive change implementation
occurs within some defined work group, how that work group
socio-psychologically breaks down and remoulds itself to adapt itself to the
demands of the adaptive change is relevant to the long term impact of the
change effort. Organisational psychology research in the area of work groups,
indicate the important role of informal group opinions and their crucial role
as sublime influences that not only prop-up formal groups but serve as
knowledgeable assessors of the quality of management as applied to the formal
work groups. Adaptive change efforts need to employ a process of mutual
engagement of all concerned to discuss the decision aspect of the nature of
actual adaptation to employ to ensure that whatever change is implemented is
not as indicated above rejected informally as not work group amiable.
Figure
7a Connexion influence on adaptive change in one task unit.
Figure
7b. The connexion determinant effect in actual adaptive change implemented.
In
this hypothetical depiction the Task Unit receives and sends resources or
information to the units labelled A, B, C, D, and E. These units may
pro-actively have to ascertain to what extent Task Unit where adaptive change
is being implemented will affect their interaction with Task Unit and make
adjustments accordingly, others will have to make process adjustments, the
degree of significance will depend on the nature of exchange relationship
between the target unit under consideration, here referred to as "Task
Unit", and the interacting unit. To determine the exact nature of the
resource dependency interaction, a spider web map can be developed by the Task
Unit.
Adaptive action choice
decision is more often than not a more comprehensive consideration that extends
beyond the locus of adaptive change implementation. Indeed, as is often the
case, management analysis of external environments may lead to decision to make
drastic adjustments at production or in marketing strategy, in other instances
production may feel the need to change machinery or acquire additional
machinery or re-tool, which need is then passed on to management for
consideration. Thus, the implementation locus is more or less an aggregation of
decision-making, which then serves as a departure point for further analysis
based on the outcomes of the implemented change.
The exact nature of how this
inter unit connexion of inter unit dependency variable re alignment takes place
is liable to be a planned effort or a less determinate elimination of
irrelevance by default of redundancy as change processes in operational
evolution reject redundancy by default or in formerly receptive organisational
units or more precisely, in the task unit at the focus of adaptive change
dependency interaction relevance is redefined and transferred to other units.
It is the latter activity set in relation to the adaptive change that is
worrisome since such non-strategic consideration may through some situational
defect take precedence over formal processes affecting the quality of
implementation decision outcome.
In seeking for highest
quality possible outcome for decision implementation, the non formal
influences, such as information import and export through informal means need
to be seen as primary considerations to be structured into the decision making
process by creating a collaborative framework where openness creates awareness,
for early input of divergent views before implementation has attained the stage
where changing the adaptive change will be far too costly than if early
awareness had enabled a means for divergent input across the stream of all
concerned interests.
The larger the organisation,
the likelihood is that the more complex adaptation will be. In such complex,
multi-unit constituted organisations, adaptive change in one unit with close
interaction and carry over effects through unit interaction at any of numerous
task situation defining interaction interfaces with others units must through
effective organisation management processes export change awareness across the
organisational stream, exporting the change efforts positive values and making
efforts to provide sufficient information and adequate support to facilitate the
adjustments needed to integrate benefits accruing from the adaptive change at
one level through supportive buoying across the organisation to yield
complementary ends of mutual beneficial ends for the systemic whole.
This consideration brings to
the fore the question of seeking to define what inevitable occurrences can
detract an otherwise well planned adaptive change response from yielding
desired end benefits?
To tackle this issue, there
is the need of dividing adaptive response change into two main spheres of
activities.
1. The first is Integrated
Adaptive Change Response where problem identification, more often task based
need for change discernment, is integrated into operational level decision
making, and changes suspected as necessary are forwarded to management for
consideration and resource provision.
2. The second is Adaptive
Change as a management level strategic response to external environment
indications. These mainly arise from total system analysis, which is an ongoing
management activity. This total system analysis may give management cause for
directing adaptive change at some level of operational activities to improve
and yield added value to the organisation.
The need for differing
between these two sources of need for adaptive change is simply for the reason
that in Organisations where the latter predominate, the associated
inflexibility of uni-directional decision making creates problems related to
effective adaptation that are totally irrelevant where the operational source
of change implementation is involved in problem identification and decision
related to the nuances of effective implementation.
The Organisation that
successfully adapts along several fronts progressively must create an internal
environment of: -
1. Effective sensing of
environmental triggers of selective change through multiple means, more
importantly this means informational resource must be converted into internal
resource at some point of convergence for system use and benefit.
2. Where interface
interaction, whether mediated through role occupants or product exchange or
acquisition process, inconsequential on human mediators, be coerced through
effective management strategies to generate overlap synergies while minimising
the inevitable conflicts that occasion all human interfaces (soft-soft).
(Definition:
synergy - The working together of two things to produce an effect greater than
the sum of their individual effects).
3. In other words successful
adaptation is defined within an existing culture of co-operation across task
units and where such is lacking the opportunity offered by change should be
employed in reducing conflict and enable the collective interest of system
sustenance through co-operation supersede parochial idiosyncrasies of opposing
blocs, collectively working to undermine organisational effectiveness, taken
from a wider and longer term perspective.
4. Which leads to the need
for management to define adaptive change relevance at employee level, where
shared awareness permeates the collective of the strategic, obvious and less
obvious benefits of the adaptive change under implementation consideration. On
the other hand unit emergent need for change will have to be reviewed by
management with a more objective, and organisational benefit of such change as
the focus within change is considered and implemented.
(definition:
Strategy: An elaborate and systematic plan of action).
Figure 7c. The broad process in problem identification to change
implementation
3-7 Industry Technological Change and Local Adaptive
Response
Since organisations in any
industry are often competing for consumers in similar markets, the competitive
pressure makes any organisation sensitive to changes in competitor’s products,
either directly through eroding market base or indirectly through implied lag
in competitiveness. Technological changes in manufacturing processes also lead
to lowered costs of production and give an added advantage to early adopters of
a new technology.
Products have a life cycle
which is indicated in terms of the products emergence as an manufactured item,
the rate of product output growth, which is the increasing output as a result
of rising consumer needs, this product life cycle is thus indicated as a graph
of product sales indicated as units sold against price, under normal
circumstances this should indicate a curve of rising sales from product
introduction to a peak, which levels and eventually declines as the product
loses its market appeal. It has been observed that this cycle has been
shortening through the decades. In 1920, the length of the average life cycle
of a new product was 25 years. In the 1970 the length of the average product
life cycle had decreased to two years (Scheuing, 1974). Indications are that
these product life cycles will be ever shorter as new technologies and
creativity outburst among an ever more educated population drives innovation
ever faster.
Rapid technological change
leads to rapid product introduction and increases pressure on organisations to
make technological adaptations to keep up with "the pack" of similar
product manufacturers. Since technological change transforms the nature of the
market place by changing the relative cost, features and availability of
products, an organisation is under competitive pressure to either adapt to
adopt new technology or lose the race for organisational sustainability in the
consumers market.
3-8 The Cost Element Of Adaptive Change
Adaptation may involve
resource allocation that is beyond slack resource utilisation and the
redistribution of operational resources to accommodate the need for adaptive
change at one unit of the organisation. This implies that adaptation may
require employing the reserved resources of an organisation and where it does
not suffice the shifting of resources from existing spheres through resource
redistribution to enable supportive supplementation of the area within the
organisation where investable resource lack may potentially threaten de-railing
of the adaptive change effort.
The need for change to
improve existing states within some organisational subsystem or task unit may
very well be undermined by invest able resource limitations or
non-availability, leading in the long run to spiralling failures as inability
to improve system state at one level transfers less than adequate performance
quality downstream in the operational activities sets.
The cost element of adaptive
change has by implication a variety of immediate and remote implications for
the Organisation of concern.
In the first place where
adaptation requires input resources that must be within means of organisational
acquisition, either by drawing from surplus resources or shifting existing
resources from areas of low priority to support adaptive change in the unit in
need of immediate change implementation. A third source will be acquisition
from non-organisational sources, such as through bank loans or other borrowers.
Where adaptive resource
acquisition means "poaching" from less burdened or lower priority
units to units under threat from less than adequate performance due to lack or
the need of resources to implement needed change, then immediate consequences
are actual tightening in existing resource levels including slack resource
depletion to supplement the obvious lack in the unit implementing adaptive
change.
The units from which
resources are shifted are in the interim forced to change operational form to
accommodate resource shrinkage. (While in the medium term, baring the total
collapse of the units from which resources have been shifted, slack resources
generated as a consequence of the successful adaptation may be shifted back to
depleted units, in the short term such units have to contend with less than
usual resources to continue to operate).
It is not to be forgotten
that normally organisational resources are limited and allocated according to
budgetary projections to units and thus any resource shift due to immediate
adaptive need impositions has financial stability repercussions for the
Organisation and its short-term operation.
Conclusion
Adaptive change normally
begins when certain changes in the external and or internal environment are
interpreted as potentially threatening to short or long term organisational
sustenance. Thus an organisation may sense that employee morale is too low, or
that several departments are competing destructively to undermine
organisational sustenance or that technological adaptations in competing
organisations has given competitors a market edge, or that technology needs to
be improved in the organisations to maximise resource use, or that aspects of
management attitudes and approaches are failing to elicit expected employee
response. Once the organisation perceives some need presaging a need for change
or bearing upon creating a problem state for the organisation if left
unattended, it must then digest this information at its information analytical
centres and courses of action in response to the situation in need of
attention.
The ability to determine how, what, when and where there is
a departure from an assumption of normal state of the Organisation and
consequently the need to align an existing production through upward adjustment
of an organisation through sub-system change lies at the root of successful
adaptation.
Adaptive change is best
conceived as anticipated, pro-active or reactive change implemented to resolve
"local" organisational need for adjustment with potential system wide
end effect.
Critical consideration must
be given to spread over effects of subsystem change. These diffusion effects of
change must be ascertained in terms of effect on other system units as
determined in actual influence on achieving internal task execution. This is
mainly due to the assumption that adaptive change is practically a hands-on
response implemented to address what is in most instances a less than total
organisational change. Resistance is lowered where those directly engaged in
implementing the change are made to appreciate its relevance well before the
implementation. Organisational constituents not so willing to accept adaptive
change in organisational processes must be quickly identified and gently made
to flexibly respond positively to changes rather than being allowed to maintain
their rigid attitudes of intolerance to changes in the status quo. Resistance
to change is normal and must be expected and preparations made as to how to
handle when it emerges as an obvious detraction to effective change
implementation.
The presentation has
presented a way to model task unit dependent change process of a limited kind;
the adaptive change. It is an untested model that needs to be verified as to
its veracity as worthy tool for the student of organisational change to
facilitate this field testing, a research format is detailed in the appendix
section.
APPENDICES
Appendix 1
Generating wax structured spider
web maps
A. The unit at stake of the
analysis is individually determined and each person as the question -
1. What are your job
functions?
2. What do you need to
perform this/these job/s ?
3. What resources other than
the installed machinery and or technology do you need to perform your work?
4. Where and how are these
resources acquired? (The employee is respectfully requested to indicate both
official and non-official resources without which the task is not
accomplished!).
5. On the sheet of paper
given you looking at the example provided link your resources to other
organisational units and external environment components?
(Please answer by ticking
either yes or no; to the question posed
- I don't have any idea where the task inputs
comes from, I only do my job)
yes ( )
no ( )
B. The research analyst would
have had prior discussion or interview with the manger and supervisor
responsible for the organisational unit under consideration and would have a
fair idea of how resource acquisition and internal production processes occur
and is able to indicate this diagrammatically against which he/she would make
confirmatory comparisons and unofficial information and support resource
infusion assessment from task unit wax model, spider web diagrams.
Appendix 1b
Study Questions
1. What
aspects of the external environment does the organisation pay attention to?
1b.
How do these environments influence the organisation outcome state?
0?Directly?
1?Indirectly?
2. How do
(the) organisations respond to an identified need to adapt any aspect of the
organisation to cope with changing internal and external states?
3. With
regards to a detected need, which aspect of the organisation system monitors,
collects and analysis information related to an external inducement to change?
4. How are
these information channelled to the appropriate decision-making and from
decision making to implementation stations?
5. On what
basis are particular developments in the external environment interpreted as
adaptive change pressures? - Relate to
actual examples?
6. How does
any particular change occur within the formal organisational structural
framework, at what zones does the formal structures disassemble to mould itself
adaptively to effectively integrate decision making and implementation in
response to quick internal response needs?
7. How does
the formal organisation interpret this fluid structural dynamism?
8. How
responsive are decision making bodies in the organisation prepared to regroup
information interaction interface at problem source and provide supportive
basis for functional efficiency at these “need determined interaction
interfaces”?
9. How and in
what ways does an adaptive response at one point affect the whole organisation?
10. How are
resources located and allocated for adaptive responses?
11. Why the need
for adaptive change?
12. Where does
the pressure for change arrive, internal determined or external detected need?
13. Detail what
these influences that suggest need for adaptive response at organisational
level are?
14. What gives
rise to the emergence of these adaptive change pressure emergences?
15. What would
be the consequences for the organisation if it decides not to invest resources
in the detected need to which adaptive response is required?
Appendix 2 (residual oversight
knowledge required to grasp some of the concepts mentioned in the body of the
essay)
Types of Organisational Goals
Perrow (1970), has
elaborated on five types of goals operative at various levels and in relation
to various needs and activity aspirations of the organisation.
1. Societal goals: These goals are intended to project a certain image
to the society and to work within this aspirations to maintain that social
presentation, examples of such goals are the organisation exists to produce
certain goods and services, to respect the industrial regulations and the
general laws of the society, to generate and maintain cultural values.
2. Output goals: This goal is intended at meeting the needs of a
certain element of the external environment; the consumers and target groups to
which an Organisations products are aimed. Examples of these goals would be the
creation of consumer products, business services, health care, educational
programs and so on, socio technical system theorists refer to this as the
"primary task" or "core mission" of the organisation.
3. System goals: These are goals related to maintaining an expected
state of organisational system state of existence. Examples of these goals
would be the goals of growth, efficiency, obtaining market share, attaining
certain profit levels, being a certain kind of Organisation in terms of style
or climate, being a leader in the industry and so on. These kinds of goal
uniquely identify an organisation and must be mixed up with output goals, if in
attempting to maintain a certain style, an Organisation loses sight of its
output goals, it may threaten its own survival.
4. Product characteristics goal: These are goals related to the actual
product quality, quantity, variety, styling, availability, uniqueness,
innovativeness or whatever. In one sense these goals are more specific
derivatives of the output and system goals since certain combinations of what
the Organisation is basically creating and its style will dictate product
characteristics.
5. Derived goals: An organisation's leadership do accumulate power and
resources in the course of primary goal fulfilments, these resources and power
it may decide to employ in certain ways. For example an organisation may use
its power and wealth for certain political goals, to build educational
institutions or to support the arts or local educational institutions. The
derivative goal inasmuch as it derives its accumulated resources and power base
from the pursuit and fulfilment of other organisational goals, the derivative
goals are independent of the goals the pursuit of which generated the resources
and power. (Adapted from Schein 1980).
Schein (1980) further
admonishes that it is particularly important that when organisations engage in
strategic planning activities, that they learn to distinguish their societal
and output goals - those which ultimately justify the survival of the
organisation in the total society - from the secondarily generated system,
product and derived goals. He emphasised that many of the essential components
of planning exercises should be especially geared to helping top management
first to identify clearly what their output goals are and what justifies their
continued existence as an organisation before they discuss system, product, or
derived goals.
Appendix 3
How Technology Defines
Organisational Forms
Whether there is any one
best way to organise an organisation and in doing so what criteria to take into
consideration has been a perennial concern of students of organisations. Early
work in the field of Organisational Theory attempted to derive the general
principles about such issues as the optimal number of subordinates, but
concurrent studies in the subject area have shown that effectiveness did not
necessarily correlate with the degree of adherence to these principles, thus
requiring further search for other variables to account for the relationship
between form and effectiveness. One such line of research attempted to examine
the nature of task an organisation performed and the technology employed in
meeting those goals. Woodward (1965)
from studies of about 100 British firms to determine whether their
organisational structures were related to three major types of technology which
she distinguished:
1. Unit and small batch technology, in which customized products are
made for individual customers.
2. Large batch and mass production technology such as that found on
the assembly line.
3. Process technology, which involves the transformation of raw
materials through a series of continuous (chemical) processes.
Woodward's study revealed
that companies with different technologies demonstrated different characterised
patterns and that the most effective companies within each group were the ones
closest to the median for that category, suggesting that there were optimal
organisational forms. For example, with increasing technological complexity, as
one moves from unit to mass to continuous-process technology, the number of
subordinates under a given executive increased, the number of levels in the
organisational hierarchy increased, the ratio of administrators, supporting
staff and specialists increased, relative labour costs decreased, and so on. A
more formal, structured approach seemed best suited to mass production
technology, while a more flexible organisation seemed better suited to both
unit and process technologies.
In subsequent studies by Pugh (1973), Hickson
and his colleagues (1969), and others called the Aston Group showed that the
effects of technology tended to apply only to those parts of the organisation
intimately involved with that technology - typically the production departments
- and that one could not infer organisational structures in other functional
departments such as accounting and marketing, or in the firm as a whole unless
it was very small. They argued for a more contingent set of relationships,
namely, that technology will influence organisation only if organisational size
and type of department are controlled for.
In a more recent study, Mahoney and Frost
(1974) focused on specific departments rather than total organisations and used
the three-part typology of technique proposed by Thompson (1967):
1. Long-linked technologies, in which there is a series of
interdependent steps such as in the assembly line or in continuous process
work.
2. Mediating technologies, which the work units links otherwise
independent units into a system through the creation of standard operating
procedures.
3. Intensive technologies, in which each task sequence is uniquely
applied to the particular needs of a given client based on feedback from
earlier steps
Using managerial judgements
as to which factors contributed most to effectiveness, Mahoney and Frost found
that in long linked technologies such as in data processing, the important
factors were planning, efficient utilisation of employee skills for task
performance and tight supervisory controls. In mediating technologies such as
clerical departments in an insurance company, effectiveness was related more to
the ability to remain flexible and adaptive to the needs of the moment. In
intensive technologies such as research laboratories, managers related overall
effectiveness more to effective utilisation of employees, the building of
cooperation and team spirit, the personal development of employees, and careful
staffing of projects.
Steers (1977) notes
conclusively that there is no simple, consistent relationship between
technology and structure, though there and is some evidence that more complex
unstable technologies are less likely to be associated with more formal
hierarchical structures.
From studies conducted on
technology and organisational form to date, Perrow (1970) starting with two
characteristics of organisational tasks (basic underlying dimensions of
technology):
1. The degree to which the
task is routinised and has few exceptions,
2. The degree to which the
task to be performed is based on analysable principles and known ways of
solving problems (versus having constantly to invent new solutions because of
variations in the problems posed)
These two dimensions enable
Perrow to sort various kinds of technology into a fourfold table as shown in
Figure 11.4. In cell 1 we have what might best be characterised as the
"craftsmanship" approach. The raw material and the basic product
remain essentially the same, but individual customers may want some special
feature.
In cell 2 is what Perrow
refers to as "normative manufacturing" or, at the extreme, R&D
types of work which require a much more flexible organisation, organisations in
these industries ideally display high discretion at both the technical and the
managerial level, high interaction, decentralisation of decision making according
to need for effective coordinating structures.
Cell 3 involves custom made
products, but in areas well known for their amenability to technical and
analytical solution. Typically engineering firms that design customised
equipment for manufacturing firms and production organisations that that apply
such designs to making drill presses. electric motors, and so on. In this
model, the technical level has relatively more discretion because it possesses
the problem-solving techniques needed to design and manufacture the process.
Coordination is achieved high interaction with and feedback from the customer.
The organisation is flexible but also centralised because of the known problem
solving routines.
Cell 4 is the traditional
routine manufacturing operation involving mass production or continuous process
operation where the technology is well understood. Thus, both of Woodward's
other types, the "large batch assembly" and the "continuous
process" fall into this cell, since both share what Thompson has termed
long linked technologies and a high degree of sequential interdependency. Firms
in this cell display the greatest tendency toward the formal, centralised,
bureaucratic form of organisation where coordination is achieved primarily
through the rules and plans; however, it should be noted that, at the extremes,
in continuous process technologies such as automated oil refineries, this does
not hold true. At the extremes the relationships are instead adaptive to the
particular characteristics of the task performed, so that in the oil refinery
there is high formalisation but also high decentralisation down to skilled
operators who have high levels of responsibility and high discretion within a
well defined set of rules (Blauner, 1964).
Appendix Figure 1 Types of production
technologies (Perrow, 1970).
The implied relevance of
this appendix is to enable a clearer format for interpreting technology and
organisational form, it is summary in nature and readers are advised to refer
to Schein (1980) for deeper insight and read original research publications
related to references made here and therein.
Appendix 4
Organisational Effectiveness
A system’s level criterion
of organisational effectiveness is by necessity a multiple criterion involving
adaptability, sense of identity, capacity to test reality and internal
integration. To the extent that effectiveness is a multiple criterion, it would
be erroneous to assume that just the establishment of a mutually satisfactorily
psychological contract with employees, or just the reduction of intergroup
competition or just leadership training or just the right organisation
structure, or any of these alone would guarantee effectiveness. Rather the
system conception would suggest a different way of thinking about the problem;
viewed as a total system, how does an organisation cope with its environment?
How does it obtain information and process it validly? What mechanisms exist
for translating the information, particularly about alterations in the
environment into changed operations? Are the internal operations flexible
enough to cope with changes? How can the organisations capacity to cope be
improved? (Schein, 1980)..
(Reference
should be made to Harrison (1987) for detailed reading material on measuring
organisational effectiveness during organisational change.)
Appendix 5
An Adaptive Coping Cycle
That sequence of activities
or processes which begins with a change in some aspect of the organisation’s
internal or external environment and ends with a more adaptive dynamic equilibrium
for dealing with the change can be thought of as the organisation’s adaptive
coping cycle.
An adaptive response
necessarily requires an evident or susceptible misalignment at one or several
critical nexuses of an organisation and any or its environments or between
internal system states. This misalignment, which may result in less than
desirable outcome states if left unattended, requires a reactive adjustment
response to realign the organisational system at a higher level of
effectiveness through the introduction of improvement conditions tantamount on
implementation of the adaptive change, which improves existing state by
introducing organisational state enhancing effects.
For purposes of analysing
the cycle, one can think of five conceptually separable stages, however these
are not process-wise realised, they are conceivable as simultaneously events
broken down for analytical considerations, since organisations elements are in
constant dynamic interaction with internal states interacting at multiple
levels with various external environments.
The first stage of the cycle
is sensing where a change in some
part of the internal or external environment is identified or recognised
through total system monitoring.
The relevant information
about the change is the imported into
those parts of the organisation that can act upon it and employ that
information in applied decision making in the organisation.
Decisions based on the
analysed information imported are employed in designing the actual adaptive change
implementation, which aims to change
production or conversion processes inside the organisation.
Once changes have been
undertaken through adaptive response, which may require internal product and
product processing, changes a new or altered product is exported in response to the interpretations made of environmental
emerging information of a need for change.
The success or failure of an
adaptive change can be determined through feedback
information collected as response on the change export.
Further there is the need to
determine adaptive change degree of
integration internal environment.
Any change in organisations
is potentially a destabilisation influence inasmuch it is a departure from a
known states of operations, stabilisation
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