I began a self-study of my learning organization’s growth and flexibility, in hopes to better understand and articulate challenges we faced in adapting new educational paradigms and standards. These postings cover not only the daily occurrences at my college of education, but also some of the experiences I have had while working at other organizations. If you have questions or thoughts please email me at nsabir@indiana.edu.
Institutes of education managing change and shift: A reflective piece utilizing Daft’s framework (part II)
Structure, control & culture
At my current job, we have a fairly decentralized system (for immediate interactions) which leads to a series of issues. In an effort to empower the workers and support their professional development management takes a more horizontal approach. However, we our departments have major communication issues and because some people are so attached to their work/frame of mind this has also lead to discrepancies in polices. Since all parties are not on the same page this imposes stagnant approaches to problems.
In our organization the most frequent trap is, “people don’t have enough time to learn.” Because our organization experiences a disruptive environment that requires constant reevaluation our employees are always having to relearn skills and procedures. For example, just last week a peer created a learning module that involved a specific set of software and today we discovered that our student-consumers don’t have access to it. This required a complete revamp of the module and all our staff had to learn new material and procedures in the span of a couple of days.
I think the most difficult step I have seen organizations encounter is the first step, setting up procedures and guidelines. My experiences have shown me that a lack of clear vision often makes the initial process difficult. I have seen firms have a vague vision of execution, access to resources, and reflection but in the process of establishing these steps the organization distinguishes their current direction from their ideal process. That said, I believe that the research findings lack one step, reevaluation of the model or steps. Somewhere along the process there should be a place for leadership to pause and assess if their current process is allowing employees to learn in the most effective and efficient means possible, and if the scaffolding holds up to desired outcomes.
I believe that organizations’ design and structure should be drive by their goals, needs and access to resources, rather than what is considered “best practice.” The text talks about how vertical structures are more efficient and horizontal structures encourage more personnel growth so I think that leveraging both aspects would be a good approach. Our process aligns more with virtual network grouping’s model. While this approach enables flexible and is responsive to changes in the environments, it can be difficult to coordinate and communicate with all member of the organization. The only times I have seen this grouping truly be effective/efficient is when someone very motivated, organized, and patient took the role of integrator.
For day-to-day operations the college of education functions as a pooled Interdependence system; however in the large scale it serves as a reciprocal interdependent system. All of the departmental outputs and procedures feed into one another at the end of the terms however weekly operations allow individual offices and departments to function as separate entities with standardized procedures. This multifaceted approach requires our organization to function with a very high level of communication and collaboration. More often we feel like a cross departmental team working as a single entity rather than separate offices. The logistics trains are not felt by most of the employees but rather the supervisors take on the initiatives to collaborate all of the reciprocated activities.
I think that organizational decisions should be driven by needs, and not what the managers see working at another organization and hope to replicate in their own. Before an organization (re)creates a hybrid structure leadership should consider the weakness that need to be addressed.
I used to freelance for a Country B’s pharmaceutical company, Company A, working with both the local branch and the overseas offices. In Country B the organization is very centralized and represents a typical functional grouping model, however the counterpart organization in State Z is completely different. Because the US branch is considerably smaller it outsources most of its marketing and large-scale production, and much of the staff work across several departments. As citizens of Country B liaisons come to State Z for a year or two many of them actually struggle with adapting to “lack of structure” and several have even opted to return to the Country B’s company because the hybrid model in the US organization was uncomfortable for them. I think it is interesting how an environmental culture impacts an organization’s culture so heavily.
The term effectiveness and measuring an organization’s effectiveness does seems to get a bit ambiguous without a bounded case paired alongside. The goal based approach focuses more on the holistic meeting of an overarching organizational goal while the internal process approaches focuses more on internal workings, such as positive work environment and organizational morale, and not on the organization’s output. One of the great features about using a resource-based approach is that it includes the initial bargaining mix and can include the environment-organization factors.
At my current position several leadership department and offices have a very centralized command structure, which is bounded by accreditation, fiscal and international policy constraints. This bureaucratic system constrained employees to follow set protocols and stifled creativity. Several supervisors and office directors have shifted organizations’ directions by changing their leadership style to account for employee empowerment by moving from a bureaucratic to clan style of leadership and management. This transformation has been a slow progress with slight changes over several years and plenty of employee turnover. This shift allowed employees to further bring their expertise into the design of services.
To be continued…
Najia's Reflexivity Archive (Status: Hiatus) 