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The Threads of Organization: Theories

Because organizations are different creatures to different people, organizations are “defined” according to the contexts and perspectives peculiar to the person doing the defining.

Nevertheless, we can, at least, posit certain characteristics that are common to all organizations.

Organizations:

■ are purposeful, complex human collectivities;

■ are characterized by secondary (or impersonal) relationships;

■ have specialized and limited goals;

■ are characterized by sustained cooperative activity;

■ are integrated within a larger social system;

■ provide services or products to their environment; and

■ are dependent upon exchanges with their environment.

Organization theorists, using essentially this list of characteristics but stressing different items in it,

have produced a vast body of literature on the nature of organizations.

THE CLOSED MODEL OF ORGANIZATIONS

Closed model of organizations, which goes by many names are Bureaucratic, hierarchical, formal, rational, and mechanistic.

Characteristics of the Closed Model of Organizations We rely on a classic analysis in listing the principal features of the closed model of organizations:

■ Routine tasks occur in stable conditions.

■ Task specialization (i.e., a division of labor) is central.

■ Means (or the proper way to do a job) are emphasized.

■ Conflict within the organization is adjudicated from the top.

■ “Responsibility” (or what one is supposed to do, one’s formal job description) is emphasized.

■ One’s primary sense of responsibility and loyalty is to the bureaucratic subunit to which one is assigned (such as the accounting department).

■ The organization is perceived as a hierarchic structure (that is, the structure “looks” like a pyramid).

■ Knowledge is inclusive only at the top of the hierarchy (in other words, only the chief executive knows everything).

■ Interaction between people in the organization tends to be vertical (that is, one takes orders from above and transmits orders below), but not horizontal.

■ The style of interaction is directed toward obedience, command, and clear superior/subordinate relationships.

■ Loyalty and obedience to one’s superior and the organization generally are emphasized, sometimes at the expense of performance.

■ Prestige is “internalized,” that is, personal status in the organization is determined largely by one’s formal office and rank.

Note: No organizational model meets all twelve of its features in practice.

Among organizations that are widely known, the Department of Defense likely comes closest to accomplishing the requisites of the closed model, but the Pentagon’s exceptions to the model are obvious, such as highly unstable conditions during wartime.

There are at least three theoretical threads that have thrived within the closed model’s framework.

Bureaucratic Theory, Scientific Management, and Administrative Management

The Backbone that Binds the Closed Model…..

There are at least three theoretical threads that have thrived within the closed model’s framework.

Bureaucratic Theory,

Scientific Management,

Administrative Management

Bureaucratic Theory

The earliest school of the closed model is that of bureaucratic theory, or the study of the impersonal organization, and the execution, and enforcement of legal rules in organizations.

Its best-known representative is Max Weber, a remarkable German sociologist who wrote around the turn of the twentieth century. Although “bureaucracy” is common in all sectors, Weber cast his theory of bureaucracy squarely in the public one.

The features of a bureaucracy include the following:

■ hierarchy;

■ promotion based on professional merit and skill;

■ the development of a career service;

■ reliance on and use of rules and regulations; and

■ impersonality of relationships among career-professionals in the bureaucracy and with their clientele.

To Weber, an impersonal, rule-abiding, efficient, merit-based career service provided the surest way of fulfilling the public interest in the face of a politically fragmented Germany

and its arrogant, powerful, yet somewhat silly aristocracy.

Weber’s rigidly rational theory was warmly welcomed by the first American public workers, who embraced it as a justification of their values, all of which shared an abhorrence with messy politics.

Scientific Management

Another rivulet of research in the closed model is scientific management (more popularly known as “time-motion” studies), which is the analysis of workflow processes as the means of raising organizational productivity.

Workers as “Gear Wheels” Scientific management’s overriding concern is to increase production, and it does this by making human beings as efficient as,

and more like, machines.

Key representatives of the scientific management school include Frederick Taylor (who gave this school its name with his 1911 volume, Principles of Scientific Management),

and Frank and Lillian Gilbreth.

Similarly, the Gilbreths developed the concept of the “therblig,” each one of which represented a category of eighteen basic human motions—all physical activity fell into a therblig class of one type or another.

Rendering workers more physically efficient could benefit the workers (who, in the early twentieth century, were commonly paid on a piecework basis), as well as their bosses, and even clients.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Therblig

Note; the impact of scientific management was stunning, and in every sector. Herbert Hoover, as commerce secretary (1921–1928) and later as president, took Taylor’s writings to heart, declaring a “war on waste” in both government and business.

Taylor was central in organizing America’s first graduate school to offer a degree in business . His theories underlay the Soviet Union’s first five-year economic plan. They were given their “fullest application by Henry Ford, who,” following Speedy Taylor’s example, “measured his workers’ movements on the assembly line with a stopwatch.”

Administrative Management

Our final literature of the closed model is administrative management, also called generic management, which is the discovery and application of universal, scientific, administrative principles that can improve any organization’s efficiency and effectiveness.

Unfortunately for this school, there are no universal, scientific, administrative principles, however every school, has made some contributions of consequence.

The scholars of administrative management devoted their energies to the discovery of managerial principles that worked in any and all institutional settings

Writers in this stream usually offered up very specific principles of administration: The public administration scholars, Luther Gulick and Lynda11 Urwick listed seven “principles”; James D. Mooney and Alan C. Reiley, in their aptly-titled and influential work, The Principles of Organization, found four; another, Henri Fayol, unearthed fourteen. Among the premier scholars in this tradition,

Mary Parker Follett was one of the few who fudged when it came to enumerating principles of administration, but then she was unusually ahead of her time, perhaps because her intellectual roots were deeply planted in public administration.

Henri Follett’s ideas (as channeled through W. Edwards Deming, of total-quality-management fame) were implemented by Japanese automakers, who applied them with enormous success, at least up to a point.

Japan’s Toyota, after faithfully following Follett’s philosophy for more than fifty years, abandoned it in favor of overtaking General Motors as the globe’s biggest automaker (which it did) by embracing “disastrous policies adopted after 2000, when top management’s thinking changed sharply in a direction that, while consistent with that of most other Western companies, would never have been tolerated at Toyota in the past.”

With the emergence of administrative management, a hint surfaced that presaged a revolution in organization theory, one that ultimately would bluntly question a foundation of its two theoretical predecessors, bureaucratic theory and scientific management.

That hint was: underlings and toilers in organizations conceivably might have minds of their own.

As Follett exemplifies, the administrative management writers were among the first to express a dawning recognition that subordinates were people (like managers) and could think (almost like managers). This breakthrough provided a basis for organization theory’s next paradigm, the open model.

The Open Model Of Organizations

As with the closed model, the open model goes by many names.

Collegial, competitive, free market, informal, natural, and organic are some of them.

The origins of the open model actually precede those of the closed model by more than a century and a half, and can be traced to

Count Louis de Rouvroy Saint-Simon, and to his protégée Auguste Comte, the “father of sociology.”

Both speculated on administration of the future:

technology would spawn new professions;

administrators would be appointed on the basis of skill rather than heredity;

and organizations would be created spontaneously, evolve “naturally,” and be a liberating force for humanity.2

Characteristics of the Open Model of Organizations

The principal features of the open model of organization are:

■ Non-routine tasks occur in unstable conditions.

■ Specialized knowledge contributes to common tasks (thus differing from the closed model’s specialized task notion in that the specialized knowledge possessed by any one member of the organization may be applied profitably to a variety of tasks undertaken by various other members of the organization).

■ Ends (or getting the job done), rather than means, are emphasized.

■ Conflict within the organization is adjusted by interaction with peers, rather than adjudicated from the top.

■ “Shedding of responsibility” is emphasized (in other words, formal job descriptions are discarded in favor of all organizational members contributing to all organizational problems).

■ One’s sense of responsibility and loyalty is to the organization as a whole.

■ The organization is perceived as a fluidic network structure (that is, the organization “looks” like an amoeba).

■ Knowledge can be located anywhere in the organization (in other words, everybody knows something relevant about the organization, but no one, including the chief executive, knows everything).

■ Interaction between people in the organization tends to be horizontal (that is, peers interact with peers), as well as vertical.

■ The style of interaction is directed toward accomplishment, “advice” (rather than commands), and is characterized by a “myth of peerage,” which envelops even the most obvious superordinate/subordinate relationships.

■ Task achievement and excellence of performance in accomplishing a task are emphasized, sometimes at the expense of obedience to one’s superiors.

■ Prestige is “externalized” (i.e., personal status in the organization is determined largely by one’s professional ability and reputation, rather than by office and rank).

Note: The open model of organizations, which, like the closed model, does not exist in actuality, although a major university might come close (which is why the open model occasionally is called the “collegial” model).

As with the closed model, three threads comprise the open model of organizations.

The Backbone that Binds The Open Model…..

As with the closed model, three threads comprise the open model of organizations.

Human Relations

Organizational Development

The Organization As A Unit Of The Environment

Human Relations

The first of our three threads, human relations, is the study of people’s problems, opportunities, and interactions in organizations.

It focuses on organizational variables, such as personal motivations, never considered in the closed model.

The Hawthorne Experiments

In 1924, Elton Mayo and Fritz J. Roethlisberger began a series of studies (later known as “the Hawthorne experiments,” for the location of the plant) of working conditions and worker behavior at a Western Electric factory.

Ultimately, the research involved six massive, and hugely influential, studies conducted over eight years.

Their experiment was predicated on the hypothesis that workers would respond like “gear wheels” to changes in working conditions.

To test it, they altered the intensity of light available to a group of selected workers, expecting that the dimmer the light the lower their productivity. The lights were turned down and production went up. Mayo and Roethlisberger were disconcerted. They dimmed the lights to near darkness, and production kept climbing.

Among the explanations of this phenomenon that later came forth were: human workers probably are not entirely like machines;

the Western Electric workers were responding to some motivating variable other than the lighting, or despite the lack of it; and that the likely variable in question was that they had been told that they were being watched—a condition that became known as the “Hawthorne effect.”

The Hawthorne experiments have grown increasingly controversial over time.

Some re-examinations of the data conclude that factors other than human relations drove greater productivity, such as the observed workers’ fear of being laid off and that, unlike other workers, they were given rest periods and group pay incentives; others counter that the original findings remain valid.

Nevertheless, the experiments rooted the idea deep into management theory that unquantifiable relationships (or “human relations”) between workers and managers, and among workers themselves,

are significant determinants of workers’ productivity.

A Hierarchy of Human Needs: From Job Satisfaction to Self-Actualization

The Hawthorne experiments inspired much research on job satisfaction—that is, what factors contribute to, or detract from, employees’ acceptance of, and even happiness with, their employment.

An early and important contribution to this research is the “hierarchy of human needs” developed by A. H. Maslow.

Maslow perceived job-related human desires to be based, first, on physiological needs (such as eating), which provided the foundation for a person’s next greatest need, economic security, then love or belongingness, followed by self-esteem, and ultimately self-actualization.

Self-actualization refers to a person growing, maturing, and achieving a deep inner sense of self-worth as he or she relates to his or her job.

Maslow wrote that these “highly evolved” self-actualized people assimilated “their work into the identity, into the self, i.e., work actually becomes part of the self, part of the individual’s definition of himself.”

Hygienic Factors and Motivator Factors

Frederick Herzberg extended Maslow’s hierarchy of human needs to his “motivation-hygiene theory,” which holds that there are two classes of phenomena that make people feel good or bad about their jobs.

One class relates to the context of the job, and includes such factors as working conditions, organizational policies, and salary. Herzberg called these “extrinsic” dimensions hygienic factors, so named because they are needed to avoid worker dissatisfaction, but fail, in and of themselves, to provide satisfaction and engagement. Hygienic factors correspond, more or less, with the base of Maslow’s pyramid of human needs, where physiological and security needs are found,

Herzberg’s second category relates to the content of the job, and includes such factors as professional and personal challenge, appreciation of a job well done by supervisors and peers, and a sense of being responsible for important matters. Herzberg called these “intrinsic” aspects motivator factors.

Motivators relate, by and large, with the upper reaches of Maslow’s pyramid—belongingness and self-esteem, but not necessarily with self-actualization. Belongingness and self-esteem result in employees who are satisfied with their jobs, whereas self-actualization refers to one’s job becoming part of one’s definition of self, which is beyond mere job satisfaction; self-actualization verges on obsession.

Hygienic or Motivator Factors: What Matters to Public and Nonprofit Employees?

What matters more to public and nonprofit employees, hygienic factors, such as pay and perks, or motivators, such as praise and producing?

Hygienic factors do not count for much among these workers. Consider, for example, salary, perhaps the most definitively hygienic factor of all.

Large-scale studies have found that government workers are “significantly less motivated by salary” than are private-sector workers.

Without question, motivator factors dominate.

And they appear to be more important to government and nonprofit workers than they are to other and larger working populations.

For over three decades, roughly nine out of every ten federal employees have stated that “the work I do is meaningful” or “important” compared with about half of all Americans who state, in a similar vein, that “a feeling of accomplishment” is the “most important” single aspect of their jobs.

Federal managers are much more likely than their counterparts in business to “come to work” because of the “nature of their jobs.”

State government workers “are more motivated to perform their work when they have clearly understood and challenging tasks that they feel are important and achievable.”

Hygienic or Motivator Factors: What Matters to Organizations?

It may be comforting to know that motivators matter most to employees, but do they, or hygienic factors, matter more in advancing the interests of the organization?

Hygienic factors count, but not much.

There is simply no discernible relationship between generous hygienic policies (e.g., lengthy vacations, etc.)—or stingy ones—and more profitable companies. Hygienic factors “are like tickets to the ballpark—they can get you into the game, but they can’t help you win.”

Motivator factors are more complicated.

In and of themselves, they add more to employees’ job satisfaction than do hygienic factors, and job satisfaction can be, but not necessarily is, a positive component in organizational productivity.

But job satisfaction is merely that; one can be satisfied with one’s job, but contribute to one’s organization so minimally that it suffices only to avoid dismissal.

Enter Employee Engagement

The multitude of acolytes spawned by Maslow and Herzberg eventually began concentrating on what can help organizations win.

Their answer is: employee engagement.

Employee engagement holds that workers have a rational commitment (that is, employees’ logical understanding that their employment benefits them financially and professionally—

basically, an extension of Herzberg’s hygienic factors) and an emotional commitment (i.e., the visceral pride and enjoyment that employees derive from their work and organization—

arguably an extension of Herzberg’s motivator factors) to their organization that inspire them to exert their very best effort on their organization’s behalf.

Employee engagement expands the employee’s psychic bonding with his or her job (that is, Maslow’s self-actualization, should it be realized) to the whole of the organization.

A variety of large-scale analyses show that “employee engagement surpasses satisfaction as an indicator of [individual and organizational] productivity.”

And an individual’s job satisfaction per se was about all that Maslow and Herzberg were really concerned with, but it is insufficient as a prod of productivity.

What Engages Workers?

Six conditions of employee engagement are the factors most clearly associated with organizational productivity. They are:

when employees feel that they know what is expected of them at work;

have what they need to do their jobs right;

have the opportunity “to do what I do best every day”;

receive recognition for work well done over the last seven days;

believe that someone at work cares about them as a person

and think that there is someone at work who encourages their development

Companies that fulfill these conditions score markedly higher on the four critical measures of corporate strength:

productivity, profit, employee retention, and customer satisfaction.

Rude, Crude, and Lewd: What Disengages Workers?

“Toxic workers,” or employees who are thieves, fraudsters, sexual harassers, or similar sociopaths can infect colleagues with their toxicity and result

in massive employee disengagement from their jobs and organizations.

Hence, neutralizing toxic workers “enhances performance to a much greater extent than

replacing an average worker with a superstar worker.”

Two types of toxic workers are, unfortunately, common:

uncivil boors and unconstrained bullies.

Uncivil Actions

Organizational incivility is “the exchange of seemingly inconsequential inconsiderate words and deeds that violate conventional norms of workplace conduct.”

Incivility’s presence may veil deeper pathologies, such as racism and sexism;

once started, rudeness spreads quickly, “like catching a cold”;

and it can morph into an “incivility spiral” of “increasingly intense aggressive behaviors.”

What happens to the perpetrators of incivility? On the surface, not much.

Only 1 percent to 6 percent of employees who experience incivility report it.

Dig a bit deeper, however, and the uncivil suffer.

Three-fifths of perceived incivility is inflicted by supervisors on their subordinates, and their subordinates sneakily subvert them;

a fifth of those miffed workers stall in responding to their supervisors’ requests, and a third spread unflattering rumors about them.

Whether civil or uncivil, managers and executives in Fortune 1000 firms report that

they spend 13 percent of their work time (or seven weeks per year) dealing with the turbulent wake of incivility.

Bullying is incivility on steroids, and refers to overbearing and intimidating behavior.

The organizational costs of bullying are far higher than those of incivility.

Organization Development

Another important subfield of the open model is organization development (OD), which is a planned, organization-wide attempt directed from the top that is

designed to increase organizational effectiveness and viability through calculated interventions in the active workings of the organization, using knowledge from the behavioral sciences.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organization_development

OD: Mission and Methods

The mission of organization development is to:

improve the individual member’s ability to get along with other members;

legitimize human emotions in the organization;

increase mutual understanding among members;

reduce tensions; enhance “team management” and intergroup cooperation; develop more effective methods of conflict resolution using non-authoritarian and interactive methods;

and evolve less structured and more “organic” organizations.

“The basic value underlying all organization-development theory and practice is that of choice.

Through … the collection and feedback of relevant data to relevant people, more choices become available and hence better decisions are made.”

The Executive’s Dilemma

OD’s prime value seems to be less one of organizational productivity

and more one of employee happiness.

In fact, some of the field’s adherents worry that the very idea of using OD to boost organizational performance is

a sell-out of the field’s mission of improving individual lives in the workplace.

The bottom line and “the mind-set of management” have perverted organization development;

as a consequence, employees trapped in “the grubby realities of work life soon figure out whose side [these] breezy, self-assured, and excessively articulate” OD consultants are truly on.

They are, contemptibly (in this perspective), on management’s side.

The Organization as a Unit in Its Environment

Our third school of the open model can be traced at least as far back as the 1930s, and this theoretical thread is undergoing a significant revitalization

Adapting to the Environment Organization theorists often refer to this literary stream as adaptive systems or contingency theory, which holds that organizations are themselves, and function in, dynamic networks in which forces act and react to one another,

and are able to cohere and stabilize only when their competition and collaboration achieve a rough balance.

Adapting Biologically One school, known as population ecology or organizational ecology, holds that organizational adaptation is a biological, evolutionary process;

organizations that cannot adapt die.

Adapting Rationally Organizations are not happy families, but rather pastiches of passive and aggressive, astute and dumb, and ethical and unethical people, groups, and divisions,

each with its own goals and methods.

Adapting Politically The political approach to organizational adaptation is realistic in that,

first, it recognizes that organizations are highly diverse, with multiple divisions of labor and vastly different goals held by their members, and,

second, with few exceptions (e.g., prisons), their members are free to leave.

The Closed And Open Models: The Essential Differences

We have reviewed two, eminently disparate, models of organizations, but they do share a pair of basic assumptions:

Both models assume that organizations are not suicidal, and that they will try not only to survive, but to thrive.

Beyond these commonalities, however, the models split over five assumptions about how the world works. These are

Assumptions about the Organization’s Environment

Assumptions about the Human Condition

Assumptions about the Role and Legitimacy of Organizational Power

Assumptions about Manipulating Members of Organizations

Assumptions about the Moral Significance of Organizations in Society

1. Assumptions about the Organization’s Environment

One such difference is the models’ assumptions about their respective external environments. Each works in the environment posited for it, but not in the other.

A closed-model organization, with its tall, many-layered hierarchy, inflexible bureaucracy, and rigid routines, is superbly suited for its posited environment—

one that is stable and devoid of surprises.

Should its environment be shattered, however, and a chaotic environment, replete with swirling and confusing forces, smashes in, then our closed organization would perish from its own rigidities.

By contrast, the open-model organization— with its flat hierarchy, flexible responses, and minimal, if any, routines—is supremely suited for its posited environment—

one that is tumultuous and replete with surprises.

The open organization’s inherent ability to nimbly respond to fast-paced, one-of-a-kind changes in its turbulent environment assures its survival.

Should it find itself, however, in a new environment that is characterized by stability, slowness, repetition, predictability, and boredom, then our open organization

would die from its inability to tighten up, bureaucratize, and routinize in ways that efficiently correspond to its new environmental realities.

2. Assumptions about the Human Condition

The second difference between the closed and open models parallels the first, in that their respective models of human beings differ but are appropriate for each.

Theory X and Theory Y Douglas McGregor famously named these models “Theory X” and “Theory Y.”

Theory X assumes that motivation to work is an individual matter, and that most people do not like work, prefer close supervision, cannot contribute creatively to the solution of organizational problems, and are motivated by the threat of punishment.

It is apparent that organizations exemplifying the closed model not only would fit, but possibly might be appealing, to Theory X people.

Theory Y, by contrast, assumes that motivation to work is a group matter, and, given the right conditions, most people can

enjoy work as much as play, exercise self-control and prefer doing jobs in their own way, solve organizational problems creatively, and often are motivated by social and ego rewards.

It is apparent that organizations predicated on the open model likely would attract Theory Y people.

The Riddle of Rational Interest

A related facet of human nature posited by the two models is the problem of rational interest (choice), or how people define their self-interest and the rationale that they use to fulfill it.

In the closed model, rational interest means

that everyone in the organization has the same goal (that is, the organization’s official mission) and agrees on how to achieve that goal in an optimal fashion.

In the open model, however, rational interest means

that each person in the organization has his or her own unique goals (e.g., getting ahead, enjoying work), and has his or her own personal way to achieve those goals.

However, each person’s real goals are not only disparate, but often in conflict with the goals of other members

and possibly with the mission of their own organization.

Note: The way in which each person chooses to fulfill his or her goals is unique to that person

Happily, in most agencies, public administrators’ “self-interests do not necessarily run counter to the organization’s overall interests,

in that they reflect a desire to make a useful contribution to the performance of their organization….

The assumption of an inherent conflict between self- and collective interests is not always valid, particularly in a public sector context.”

3. Assumptions about the Role and Legitimacy of Organizational Power

Power, in an organizational context, simply means

getting people to do what you want them to do.

The models divide not only on how to exercise organizational power, but also on

whether it should be exercised at all.

Power in the Closed Model The closed model has no qualms about employing power.

Its theorists believe in orders and obedience, rules and regulations, punctuality and punctiliousness.

Power in the Open Model These folks view coercion as reprehensible, and, indeed, the open model occasionally appears to argue against the presence of organizational power altogether.

Relying on it is condemned as dehumanizing and not at all nice.

Power in the Closed Model

The closed model has no qualms about employing power.

Its theorists believe in orders and obedience, rules and regulations, punctuality and punctiliousness.

The callous use of authoritarian coercion is seen as entirely legitimate.

Power in the Open Model

In complete contrast to the closed model, the open model views coercion as reprehensible, and, indeed, the open model occasionally appears to

argue against the presence of organizational power altogether. Relying on it is condemned as dehumanizing, “brutalizing,” and not at all nice.

However the question remains: Is the individual autonomous or is the organization dominant?

Regrettably, the open modelist’ distaste for power leads to a contradiction in their theory of organizational behavior.

On the one hand, they argue that the exercise of authoritarian power makes people miserable, and misery undermines the attainment of organizational goals;

ergo, terminate the use of power and unhappy-unproductive workers will blossom into “happy-productive workers” who will fulfill those goals. Maybe?

What is Collective Action?

Collective action refers to action taken together by a group of people whose goal is to enhance their status and achieve a common objective.

A collective action problem is a situation in which all individuals would be better off cooperating but fail to do so because of conflicting interests between individuals that discourage joint action.

Even though all organizational members would benefit from attaining the collective good (that is, by fulfilling their organization’s mission), it is nonetheless irrational for

any one member to voluntarily sacrifice to achieve that collective good.

Why, for example, would an employee voluntarily work without compensation? Better to let other employees work for free so that the non-volunteer can freeload.

And, unless the organization is composed of “altruistic” or “irrational” employees, no one else in the organization will volunteer, either.

The open modelist’ contradictory and hopeless task suggests that large organizations, such as governments, face severe challenges in

motivating their employees to work for the benefit of the whole organization—that is, for the common collective good.

The Inescapability of Organizational Power

If organizations depended on each member’s unique rational interest to attain their common goals, as advocated in the open model, then organizations would be pushed toward actions that are collectively ruinous. Hence, coercion is mandatory in any organization whose members are rational and self-interested if the common good—the organization’s stated purpose—is to be realized.

Power is fundamental to the very idea of organization. Most open-model theorists seem to accept, if poutingly, the immutable reality of organizational power. But some seem not to.

4. Assumptions about Manipulating Members of Organizations

Manipulation is the techniques employed to exercise organizational power.

In closed-model organizations, manipulation is obvious, coercive, and legitimate. The human and organizational dysfunctions of authoritarian manipulation are clear:

fear, rigidity, secrecy, narrowness, alienation, falsification, and stultification number among them.

people in closed-model organizations “know where they stand, "and it’s for people who like things straightforward and clear-cut.

Manipulation in the open model is discreet, disguised, and complicated.

It must be noted that whatever path that is chosen it must be “appropriately” tailored in tone to each of their recipients if

one wishes to smooth the way for attaining organizational goals.

5. Assumptions about the Moral Significance of Organizations in Society

The final distinction between the closed and open models can be understood best by comparing Max Weber views and the moral views with the larger society.

A “closed modelist” Max Weber, believed that bureaucracy, replete with its own internal injustices, dehumanizing rules, and monocratic arbitrariness, was vital, in its very rigidity and rationalism, in mitigating the unorganized societal lunacy that surrounded it.

If Weber’s notion of the bureaucracy’s stand-alone station in society could be illustrated, it would look something like this:

The Moral View of the Open Model

In marked contrast, the open-model theorists hold that every citizen, bureaucrat and non-bureaucrat alike, is encased in some sort of bureaucratic organization.

Society is a series of overlapping and interacting organizations, and there is no unorganized, irrational society “out there,” roiling beyond organizational boundaries.

The open model’s concept that society is bureaucracy looks like this.

Reconciling the Open and the Closed Systems

Reconciling the open and closed models begins with the open model’s world view—that is, organizations are spontaneous collectivities of people with their own goals and drives, who are operating uncertainly in an unstable environment.

This is not a bad set of assumptions about any organization that is just getting started.

But no organization can last long in a state of near nature.

Nature is unpredictable and uncertain, and all organizations are extraordinarily averse to uncertainty.

So organizations are possessed by an overpowering need to reduce uncertainty—

that is, to routinize and rationalize the organization’s internal workings and its relations with its environment whenever and wherever possible.

Note: The organizational need to reduce uncertainty reflects the deeply human need to do the same:

psychologists tell us that the more certain we are, the happier we are.

Responses to Internal Sources of Uncertainty

If the sources of organizational uncertainty are internal, then

the organization will strive to reduce uncertainty by centralizing.

Centralizing techniques include:

indoctrinating all members of the organization “to respond only to commands from the central leadership and from no other source”;

controlling all communication involving “vexing sub-organizations” in an effort to nip “nonconforming thought” and “deviant behavior”;

intensifying surveillance of troublesome subunits; “detaching key operations,” such as the control of funds, from deviating departments, “thus reducing their self-containment and increasing their vulnerability to central direction”;

and, finally, expelling offending units, a radical act that amounts to “a contraction of boundaries constituting a withdrawal from internal sources of uncertainty.”

Responses to External Sources of Uncertainty

If, however, the sources of organizational uncertainty are external—that is, they are in the organization’s task environment—then the organization will seek to

reduce that uncertainty by absorbing the outside sources of uncertainty into the organization itself.

It does this by expanding its boundaries—by growing.

Co-optation, described earlier, is one form that this incorporation of external uncertainties might take;

the effort by an organization to control some facet of the natural environment (for example, to engage in flood control) is another form;

to merge or ally with competitive organizations is yet another.

Ironically, decentralization often is required if an organization is to expand, and decentralization can result in

new, internal sources of uncertainty.

If the expansion of an organization’s boundaries is blocked, then the organization will seek to reduce its exchanges with its environment—“withdrawal from the source of uncertainty, as it were.”

A firm uncertain about its future supplies might decide to stockpile or produce its own manufacturing components.

The Public Organization and Environmental Uncertainty

In the public sector, those administrators who perceive high levels of political, social, and economic uncertainty in their organizations’ environments also harbor

concerns about their organizations’ “inertia”;

consult with citizens a lot;

and maintain a responsive, curious, and exploratory “strategic stance” relative to their external environments.

When these public administrators worry about environmental uncertainty,

the public can benefit.

Public agencies “that perceive high levels of uncertainty in their external political environment perform better than those that perceive that environment to be certain,” and this linkage is “positive and statistically significant….

even when controlling for past performance, service expenditure, and external constraints.”

Folks you will love…..Maybe

Max Weber https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Weber_bibliography

Frederick Taylor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frederick_Winslow_Taylor

Frank and Lillian Gilbreth https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lillian_Moller_Gilbreth

Henri Fayol https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henri_Fayol

Mary Parker Follett https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Parker_Follett

W. Edwards Deming https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._Edwards_Deming

Hawthorne effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawthorne_effect

A. H. Maslow https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abraham_Maslow

Are Public And Nonprofit Organizations Different?