Groups and Organizations

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Groups and Organizations

• Social Groups
• Bureaucracy
• Evolution of Formal Organizations
• Challenges

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Social Groups

• Social Group- is made up of two or more people
  who identify and interact with one another.
• A primary group- is a small social group whose
  members share personal and enduring
  relationships, bound by primary relationships.
• A secondary group- is a large and impersonal
  group whose members pursue a specific goal or
  activity. Secondary relationships involve weak
  emotional ties and little personal knowledge of
  one another.

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Two Leadership Roles

• Instrumental leadership- a group leadership that
  emphasizes the completion of tasks.
• Expressive Leadership- a group leadership that
  focuses on collective well-being. Expressive
  leaders take less of an interest in achieving
  goals than in raising group morale and minimizing
  tension and conflict between members.

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Leadership Styles

• Authoritarian leadership- focuses on instrumental
  concerns, takes personal charge of
  decision-making, and demands strict compliance
  from subordinates. This leadership can be fast
  acting and is appreciated in crisis.
• Democratic leadership- is more expressive and
  makes a point of including everyone in the
  decision-making process.
• Laissez- faire leadership- Derived from the
  French word-to leave alone.

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In-Group and Out-Group

• Out-Group- is a social group commanding a
  members esteem and loyalty.
• In-Group- a social group commanding a members
  esteem and loyalty.

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Formal Organizations

• Formal organizations- large secondary groups that
  are organized to achieve their goals efficiently.
  
• Formal organizations such as business
  corporations and government agencies, differ from
  families. Formal organizations operate in a
  deliberate way, not to meet personal needs but to
  accomplish complex jobs.
• Utilitarian Organizations- one that pays people
  for their efforts. Example, large businesses
  generate profits for their owners and income for
  their employees.

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• Normative Organization- to pursue some goal they
  think is morally worthwhile. Sometimes called
  voluntary associations, these include community
  service groups (Lions Club, League of women
  voters, Ted Cross).
• Coercive Organizations- have an involuntary
  membership. People are forced to join these
  organizations as a form of punishment (prison) or
  treatment (psychiatric hospital).

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Bureaucracy

• Early organizations had two limitations had two
  limitations, however. First, they lacked
  technology to communicate quickly, to travel over
  large distances, and to collect and store
  information. Second, tradition is strong in
  pre-industrial societies, so organizational goals
  were to preserve cultural systems, not to change
  them.
• Bureaucracy- an organizational model rationally
  designed to perform tasks efficiently.

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• Six key elements of the ideal bureaucratic
  organization according to Max Weber
• 1. Specialization- Our ancestors spent most of
  their time looking for food and shelter.
  Bureaucracy, by contrast, assigns individuals
  highly specialized duties.
• 2. Hierarchy of offices- Bureaucracies arrange
  personnel in a vertical ranking of offices. Each
  person is supervised by higher-ups in the
  organization while supervising others in lower
  positions, forming a pyramid shape.

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• 3. Rules and regulations- Cultural traditions
  counts for little in a bureaucracy. Instead,
  rationally enacted rules and regulations guide a
  bureaucracys operation. Preferably in a
  predictable way.
• 4. Technical competence- Bureaucratic officials
  and staff have the technical competence to carry
  out their duties. Bureaucracies typically
  recruit new members according to set criteria and
  regularly monitor their performance.
• 5. Impersonality- Bureaucracy puts rules ahead
  of personal whim so that clients as well as
  workers are treated uniformly. From this
  detached approach stems the faceless
  bureaucratic.

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• 6. Formal written communication- According to an
  old saying, the heart of bureaucracy is not
  people but paperwork. Rather than casual
  face-to-face talk, bureaucracy relies on formal
  written memos and reports. Which accumulate in
  vast files and guide the operation of the
  organization.

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Organizational Environment

• Organizational Environment- factors outside the
  organization that affect its operation. Include
  technology, economics and political trends,
  population patterns, other organizations.

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Problems of Bureaucracy

• Bureaucratic Alienation
• Weber was keenly aware of bureaucracys ability
  to dehumanize the people it is suppose to serve.
  The same impersonality that fosters efficiency
  also keeps officials and clients from responding
  to each others unique personal needs.
• Although formal organizations are intended to
  benefit humanity, Weber feared that people could
  end up serving formal organizations.
• Beaucratic Inefficiency and Ritualism
• Inefficiency- the failure of an organization to
  carry out work that exists. Some times it takes
  up to three years or receive a computer.

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• Red tape- refers to a tedious preoccupation with
  organizational routine and procedures.
• Bureaucratic ritualism- designate a preoccupation
  with rules and regulations to the point of
  thwarting an organizations goals.
• Bureaucratic Inertia- the tendency of
  bureaucratic organizations to perpetuate
  themselves. Formal organizations tent to take on
  a life of their own beyond their formal
  objectives. For example, the U.S. Department of
  Agriculture has offices in almost all U.S.
  counties, even though only one county in seven
  has working farms.
• Oligarchy- the rule of the many by the few.

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The Evolution of Formal Organizations

• The problems of bureaucracy stem from two
  organizational traits hierarchy and rigidity.
• I. The First Challenge Race and Gender
• During the 1960s big businesses exclude women
  and other minorities. As a result, the vast
  majority of managers were white men.
• Women are found to be more information focused
  rather than imaged focused as men tend to be.
  Secondly, women place greater value on
  communication and share information than men do.
  Women are flexible and can give employees greater
  autonomy. Thirdly, women emphasize the
  interconnectedness of all organization operations.

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• II. The Second Challenge The Japanese
  Organization
• Japanese organizations reflect that nations
  strong collective spirit.
• 1. Hiring and advancement- U.S. organizations
  hold out promotions and raises in salary as
  prizes to be won through individual competition.
  In Japanese organizations, however, companies
  hire new school graduates together, and all
  employees in the group receive the same salary
  and responsibilities.

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• 2. Lifetime security- Employees in the U.S.
  expect to move form one company to another to
  advance their careers.U.S. companies are also
  quick to layoff employees during an economic
  setback. By contrast, most Japanese firms hire
  workers for life, fostering strong, mutual
  loyalties. If jobs become obsolete, Japanese
  companies avoid layoffs by retraining workers for
  new positions.
• 3. Holistic involvement- Whereas we tend to see
  the home and the workplace as distinct spheres,
  Japanese companies play a much larger role in
  workers lives. They provide home mortgages,
  sponsor recreational activities, and schedule
  social events.

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• 4. Broad-based training- U.S. workers are highly
  specialized and many spend an entire career doing
  one thing. But a Japanese organization trains
  workers in all phases of its operation, again
  with the idea that employees will remain with the
  company for life.
• 5. Collective decision making- In the U.S. key
  executives make the important decisions.
  Although Japanese leaders also take
  responsibility for their organizations
  performance, they involve workers in quality
  circles to discuss decisions that affect them.
• These organizations are characterized by
  organizational loyalty.

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• III. The Third Challenge The Challenge of Work
• Many of todays jobs are different from a
  century ago The work of designers, artists,
  writers, composers, programmers, business owners,
  and others now demand creativity and imagination.
• Ways work differs
• 1. Creative autonomy-Executives can set
  production goals but cannot dictate how to
  accomplish tasks involving imagination and
  discovery. Highly skilled workers have creative
  autonomy, which means they have little day-to-day
  supervision as long as they generate good ideas
  in the long run.

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• 2. Competitive work teams- a strategy first used
  by Japanese organizations, draw out the creative
  contributions of everyone and, at the sane time,
  reduce the alienation often found in conventional
  organizations.
• 3. A flatter organization- The pyramid shape of
  conventional bureaucracy is replaced by an
  organizational form with fewer levels in the
  chain of command.
• 4. Greater flexibility- The typical industrial
  age organization was a rigid structure guided
  from the top. The ideal model in the information
  age is a flexible organization, one that both
  generates new ideas and, in a rapidly changing
  global marketplace, adapts quickly.

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The McDonaldization of Society

• Our culture is becoming McDonaldized an awkward
  way of saying that we model many aspects of life
  on this restaurant chain.
• McDonaldization Four Principles
• 1. Efficiency-
• 2. Calculability-
• 3. Uniformity and predictability-
• 4. Control through automation-