An organization, put in simple terms is a group or assembly of people working alongside one another to achieve common goal or objective through a division of labor and or responsibilities. Business organizations in free market economies are formed to provide services or deliver goods to ultimate consumers for profit. Generally speaking, people form an organization because it provides a means of using individual strengths within a group to achieve more than can be accomplished by the aggregate efforts of group members working individually.
Over time there have been several models and theories with respect to organizational function and essential characteristics. One model suggests that organizations at their core are information processing
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Competence, not “who you know,” should be the basis for all decisions made in hiring, job assignments, and promotions in order to foster ability and merit as the primary characteristics of a bureaucratic organization.
• Records. A bureaucracy needs to maintain complete files regarding all its activities.
Although his theories are now considered mechanistic and outdated, Weber's views on bureaucracy provided important insight into efficiency, division of labor, and the hierarchy of authority. Post industrial revolutionary America began to adopt a less mechanical view of organizations and to pay more attention to human influences. The notable Hawthorne experiments shed light on the function of human fulfillment in organizations and were conducted in the mid 1920s and 1930s at a Western Electric Company plant known as the Hawthorne Works. The company wanted to determine the degree to which working conditions affected output.
The studies failed to prove any positive correlations between workplace conditions and productivity. The results of the studies demonstrated that innate forces of human behavior may have a greater influence on organizations than do mechanistic incentive systems. The legacy of the Hawthorne studies and other organizational research efforts of that period began to emphasize the importance of individual and group interaction, humanistic management skills, and social relationships in the workplace.
The focus on human influences in organizations
George Elton Mayo is credited with founding the human relations movement. Mayo conducted an experiment in the 1920’s and 1930’s know as the Hawthorne study. Two of the main aspects of the study centered around illumination in the work place and varying levels of break time and work hours (Wickström, 2000). The illumination study consisted of four different experiments over the course of three years. In each experiement, there was a control group and a study group. In the varying studies, the researchers experimented with varying levels of light and varying sequences of increasing and decreasing the level of light (“Hawthorne effect”). Throughout the experiments, researchers would often find patterns of increased productivity, leading them to believe that they had
Team B, also known as the Imagineers, was a group of add-ons and extra members of sorts. When originally formed, it only had four members who happened to be sitting in proximity to each other. I was given the choice to join an all girls team or to join Team B and I choose to join the latter. Our last addition to the group was someone who entered the class late a few weeks after everyone and thus we adopted him into our team. We originally struggled to choose a company that would have substantial information available on its organisational principles yet at the same time was exciting and innovative. After the other groups had chosen old standbys (Google and Facebook), we took our time to find a company that we were genuinely interested in, ultimately we choose The Walt Disney Company (Disney). Disney fulfilled our criteria, it was an established company that had been around for a while and there was a lot of publically available information, it was new and innovative throughout its history and most importantly, as one of the world’s largest media conglomerate it has multiple facets of the business that we could explore to find interesting insight about its organisational culture.
Organization is a group of at least two people intentionally organized to accomplish specific goals. Therefore, this leads to the appearance of management and
An organisation is a defined and stratified entity composed of people, who are united by association (e.g. through employment) toward meeting a specific goal (Business Dictionary, 2017). The foregoing definition lends insight into the existence of diverse roles and responsibilities expected from members of an organisation, which roles interface with supervisory, subservient and inter-personal interactions.
These perspective focus on workers productivity. During the industrial age Frederick Taylor, Henri Fayol and Max Weber were of the opinion that scientific solution should be applied to solve all problems in organization. It was also suggested that three basic metaphor should exist in an organization such as Specialization, Standardization and Predictability. the believe individual should be able to perform their job well if they are properly trained.
Organizations are about people. People are the most valuable asset that an organization can possess to create success. The development of these people and the ability for an organization to retain talent can be complex. An organization must be organized to communicate and provide the structure necessary for growth and development. They must also have the people within the organization understand their ability to grow and the directions available within the organization for growth.
In seeking to define organizational behavior, we must first define what an organization is. According to Cole (2001, p. 4), "an organization exists when two or more persons agree to collaborate over a period of time in order to achieve certain common goals." This should be seen as the most basic definition of an organization. In that regard, an organization (in the context of organizational behavior) will in this text be regarded as a group of individuals working interdependently toward a similar purpose.
kinicki & kreitner, 2008, defines management as “the process of working with and through others to achieve organizational objectives in an efficient and ethical manner.” Management comprises: Planning, organizing, resourcing, leading/directing/motivating, and controlling.
In today's high demanding world it is important for employees to understand the framework of their company. For an employee to be truly successful, they must have an understanding of organizational behavior, culture and diversity, communication, effectiveness and efficiency, and learning.
At the beginning of the twentieth century the United States business sector was thriving. Industry was shifting from job-shop manufacturing to mass production, and thinkers like Frederick Taylor in the United States and Henri Fayol in France studied the new systems and developed principles to determine how to structure organizations for the greatest efficiency and productivity, which in their view was very much like a machine. Even before this, German sociologist and engineer Max Weber had concluded that when societies embrace capitalism, bureaucracy is the inevitable result. Yet, because his writings were not translated into English until 1949, Weber 's
Organisations are groups of individuals functioning towards the similar goals or having the same rationale. It is a social entity of people that is controlled and managed to meet a need or to follow collective goals. All organizations have an administration structure that determines affairs between the different actions, tasks and the members. There is also a subdivision of responsibility to carry out these different tasks. Organizations are subject the surrounding environment and are directly or indirectly affected by the environment.
An organization is a social unit of people that is designed and managed to meet a need or, to pursue collective goals. Every organization has a management structure that defines the relationship between different activities and members of the organization. It subdivides and assigns roles, responsibilities, and authority to carry out different tasks. Organizations are open systems that affect and are affected by their environment.
Essentially, a business organization is a body that is formed for the aim of conducting a commercial enterprise (Bank, 2004, p. 2).
What is an organization? It is defined as a cooperative social system involving the coordinated efforts of two or more people pursuing a shared purpose. According to Edgar Schein, a prominent organizational psychologist, all organizations share four characteristics: coordination of effort, common goal or purpose, division of labor and hierarchy of authority (Kreitner 2004).
The course provides students with a conceptual and a pragmatic approach to understand the employees’ behavior in the organization. This course equips students with the knowledge and skills required to diagnose problems of organizational behaviors, and enhance students’ skills to manage the work behavior of employees at the individual, team, and organizational level.