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Advantages Of Contingency Theory

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In the 1960s, the academic world that was engaged in management theory and research began to adopt a new and simple orientation, which enabled significant advancement in the study of organizational management. This new orientation is known today as the contingency approach. This approach highlights the importance of situational influences on the management of organizations and questions the rationale of an optimal, single way to manage and organize (Zeithaml et al., 1988).
As stated by Donaldson (2001), the contingency theory of organizations is a major theoretical lens used to view organizations. It yields many insights and has substantial empirical support. As he said, today the contingency approach dominates theory and research in the management …show more content…

The mechanical theories ignored the role of the market environment, treating organizations as relatively closed systems that could be designed as clearly defined structured parts.
2. In contrast, the organismic approach stresses that organizations are open systems, understood as ongoing processes rather than a collection of parts.
3. The management of organizations can often be improved through systematic attention to the “customer’s needs” that must be satisfied if the organization is to survive. There are two implications deriving from this statement:
a. The emphasis here is on ‘survival’ as the key aim or primary task facing any organization.
b. The focus on “customer’s needs” leads to the view that organizations are interacting processes that have to be balanced internally as well as about their relation to the market environment. The subsystems such as strategy, structure or technology, have ‘living’ needs that must be satisfied, otherwise, the openness and health of the overall system will suffer.
4. In identifying different ‘species’ of organizations, management is faced with the concepts of diversity and choice, or effective organizations are contingent on their propensity to choose and the quality of …show more content…

When using the contingency theory, the focus has been on organizational effectiveness because it has been concerned about explaining the success or failure of the organization. Donaldson argued that organizational effectiveness can have a wider meaning, including efficiency, profitability, employee satisfaction, or innovation rate. He stated that, “Organizational effectiveness can be well defined as the ability of the organization to attain goals set by itself or by its ability to function as a system or by its ability to satisfy

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