Critical Analysis for Management
Introduction
Organizations are entities that comprise of people and/or systems. Organizations are neither a completely harmonious setting nor or they battlefields where conflicts define their structure. Instead, organizations can be stated as something which political negotiations define. Essentially, the very survival within an organization is an act that is heavily influenced by politics.
Human and material resources together form an organization. Out of these two most important resources, it is the human resources of the organization who work in transforming the material resources into an end- product or service. For transforming the material resources into finished goods or services, the human resources of the organization are required to make a myriad choices, which inevitably involve politics in order for the choices to be accepted by the rest of the team or personnel within the organization. Thus, the life in an organization is certainly dominated by interactions that have a heavily political involvement.
The discussion about politics within an organization entails tactical utilization of power for either retaining or gaining control of the resources. Organizational structures are nothing but evolving units. They are basically the consequence of potential political choices of specific individuals within the organization.
With this brief introduction, this essay focuses on offering a detailed discussion of power and politics within organizations and further tries answer why believing in hierarchical structure is a weak form of management. In trying to answer this question, various acknowledged sources the position taken by the author.
Defining Power in an organization
Organizations, as stated earlier are a collective bunch of several individuals’ wills for accomplishing a common goal. Organizations can be deemed as a place that attempts to do anything ranging from challenging huge empires to conquering the whole world and the list of things that organizations can possibly do is infinite. As with a coin having two sides, even organizations have two sides to this accomplishment. To be precise accomplishments or the efforts towards accomplishment involve both positive and negative facets to them.
While organizations can achieve positive and amazing things using power like for instance successfully fighting competition, creating egalitarian entities, forging healthy associations or even establishing freedom; on the same breath though, organizations can even use the same power to accomplish the above, albeit with the use of violence, domination, or even manipulation. The use of such undesirable terminology and associating the same with power in an organization, might denote power as an undesirable element in an organization. This, of course, is not the reality.
Power in an organization need not be considered as antagonistic or undesirable, as it can also be creative, positive and even empowering, only if used in the right manner that it is ought to be used. The organizational resources (human resources) that use, condense, and dispense social associations tend to give a structure to power and this can be done in both the ways discussed above.
Power is an important requirement for an organization. Yet, though all forms of power do not need organizations, most organizations use power. Power for organizations is like oxygen for human beings, without which survival is impossible.
Politics are at the very root of public life and the expression of such politics is customarily reliant on organization. This is applicable to governments, business corporations, religion, education, and administration among a wide range of other things. Formal politics are typically systematic in nature and almost every organization in this world can be sought as being cauldrons of political life.
Discussing power in an organizational context
In one of the forums published by the Administrative Science Quarterly (ASQ) in the year 2002, it was noted by a prominent author that organization sociology is essentially defined as the investigation of the consequences of organizations’ existence. Such sociological investigation was profoundly imbibed in the works of Max Weber, one of the major founders of the organization theory.
In a number of works related to organizations which have been circulated globally, the dynamics of power were not given much of prominence in terms of analyzing the same; however, power was not overlooked completely too. For the few analyses that provided an explicit focus on the topic of power within organizations, simplified and under-theorized concepts were the most widely used elements.
Organizational power comes from both formal and informal mechanisms. Formal power is derived from the position or the title held by a person. Informal power is derived from the ability of an individual to convince a person in power or hold sway over groups of people within or outside the organization. Occasionally, power is also derived from the kind and size of network that an individual has, outside of the organization that influences his position within the organization.
Power, when attained, is supposedly be utilized for accomplishing a specific goal or goals. Proper use of power results in the accomplishment of desired goals and purposes. On the contrary, ineffective utilization of power or the failure to use power on a need-based situation has been described as most important reason for the defective operations of a system. This is a likely occurrence among managers who lack either experience or self-confidence and in a few cases where people lack both these. Such people who tend to avoid making use of power, and they often choose to “pass problems with difficult employees and the like to others.”
The repercussions of not making use of power appropriately within an organization becomes more and more distinct in the top management layer because in any organization that has an hierarchical power structure, authority abdications have downward effects and its runs till the lower management level.
Regardless of this, an effort to utilize power that an individual does not have, possibly because of legal constraints can also be equally unfavorable. This is a fact because managerial activities that are employees focused may be retreated because of the labor relations, decisions of the board (in case of its presence), the law court, mediators or even the public pressure at a reasons expense to the organization. Therefore, prudent and proper use of power is one of the most challenging lessons that is to be learnt by a manager in order to be successful in his role as a manger.
Various forms of organizational Power Structures
There are typically three common power structures that are prevalent in organizations globally. They are namely, “rational power structure, democratic power structure, hierarchical structure and Laissez-allure form of power structure.” It is widely believed that all these various forms of power are a result of discrepancies that exists in formalization, formation of informal groups within the organization, or the culture of the organization in itself.
Reliance on hierarchical power structure – a weak form of management
While hierarchical structures have a few benefits, there also have several disadvantages that make such a structure detrimental to the development of the organization.
Organizations that follow hierarchical structures have a slow degree of adaptability to the constantly changing market and customer demands. For instance, most governmental agencies follow this structure even today, and a majority of them are seen under fire for maintaining several bureaucratic layers that prevent or impede in the process of change. Entities that cannot acclimatize to the ever changing demands of the market or the customers or even to the emerging technologies at a faster pace or prior to their competitors often tend to get marginalized. This is a universal problem that is faced by a majority of organizations globally, because of which a completely new line of study or subject named ‘change management’ was developed to help such organizations.
Quality of communication, especially internal communication is one of the most crucial elements that helps organizations to succeed. Typically, organizations having a hierarchical structure follow a vertical channel of communication and eventually there are impediments that occur in almost every step of communication that happens between agencies or departments within the organization. “Departmental specialization can lead to communication barriers when no shared jargon exists that allows members of different departments to communicate on the same level.” There are even scenarios wherein departments intentionally hold back information that is essentially to be shared among each other.
Theoretically, organizations are defined as entities having group of individuals who work towards the accomplishment of common goals and objectives and in order for such an accomplishment to happen, these groups of individuals are required to be united and work as one team, rather than as independent entities. Departmentalization, which is common to organizations following hierarchical structures, more often than not, results in decision-making that is more department-focused rather than being focused on the overall organizational goal. Such disunity is one of the biggest disadvantages of hierarchical structures.
Reliance on the hierarchical structure to derive power is virtually a form of perversion, when negatively used. This is applicable both ways, up-down and down-up. An interesting spin-off in this kind of a scenario, which could have a dangerous impact on the structural stability of the organizations is the middle management layer getting sandwiched between the top and the bottom layers of management.
The top management could drive an agenda of extreme profiteering or colluding to eliminate personnel at the bottom management level. The bottom layer of management could literally gang up to wrest undue advantage from the organization’s management to their personal benefit. Thus, either way, reliance on hierarchical power structures are dangerous. The interesting spin-off as discussed earlier, is that the middle-management layers comes under pressure to implement top management’s unsavory briefs or convey the bottom-layer’s undue demands to the top management and tend to be misconstrued by the other party most of the time, leaving it pretty much in unenviable situations.
Other than in environments where there is a formal structure for negotiation, the situation could get out of hand and lead to unruly industrial relations environment. Management history has been a witness to this unfavorable outcomes and protracted negotiations and discussions that have even shook large corporates.
Another interesting aspect of a hierarchical system of management is that the organization’s ability to respond to hyperactive market dynamics could be impacted. This is especially so because every layer in the hierarchy looks upward for a decision. Depending on the number of layers present in the organizational hierarchy and the degree of responsiveness that each of these levels has, the decisions could take several days or months.
The above situation, when juxtaposed in a dynamic market, is dangerous to the organization and it would make an organization unresponsive and sometimes even blind to the changes that are happening. A very strong case towards this point is the example of Nokia – the Finnish multinational communications and information technology company, which at a point, held almost 60% of the market share that got erased without a trace due to its inability to foresee the coming of the smartphones and its inability to respond to this. Another case in example substantiating this argument is that of Eastman Kodak, popularly known as Kodak, which is a technology company in the United States. Kodak, at one point of time, held a virtual monopoly on the photography film industry. However, it was so enamored by its position and success that it was obstinately blind to the development of digital technology that invaded the photography market, which eventually led to the closure of the company itself.
As with any organization, even hierarchical organizations tend to grow and this eventually results in the growth of hierarchy as well. The consequence of this growth in the level or degree of hierarchy is bureaucracy, which inevitably slows down the process of decision—making within the organization, hinders effective communication, and impedes implementation of the decisions that are taken.
Ultimately, this would make the organization into a disorganized lot. The reason behind the various processes within the organization slowing down is due to the fact that communication of any form essentially needs to travel upward and also should come back downward. This process is mandatory because such organizational structures have a direct chain of command, wherein all crucial business decisions are taken by the top management alone and there is no empowerment that exists among the employees. Thus, bureaucracy is deemed as a highly destructive aspect in dynamic business environs that call for fast paced action or decision-making.
Conclusion
Reliance on a strict formal structure that is rigid and does not cut-across all levels of the organization towards customer intimacy could lead to dangerous situations, both within and outside of the organization. There is also an extremely tight degree of control that is common to hierarchical organizations. This form of power structure in any organization also leads to extraordinary reliance on informal organization and it creates the unsavory power centers within the organization. Therefore, hierarchical organization structures are slowly on the way out to meet the demands of the millennial customer.
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