IO-psych

Recovered from the older tannerjc.net wiki snapshot dated January 23, 2016.

dysfunctonal organizations

• http://www.usfa.fema.gov/pdf/efop/efo36368.pdf blockquote In discussing the difficulties of determining organizational effectiveness, Bedeian (1986) says, “Although effectiveness is a central theme in the study of organizations, it remains one of the most frequently cited yet least understood concepts in organization theory” (p.186). Bedeian continues to say that failing to consider organizations goals, characteristics, and constituents lead to faulty assumptions of performance. (p. 190) /blockquote blockquote Andrews (1995) says, “Without clearly defined roles and responsibilities, any organization structure becomes dysfunctional” (p.1). /blockquote blockquote Based on the literature, organizational dysfunction is one result of ambiguity in performance expectations and role assignments /blockquote

• http://www.peace.ca/organizationdysfunction.htm

• ADD: Attention Deficit Disorder. Senior management cannot seem to focus on any one primary goal, strategy, or problem long enough to gain momentum in solving it. Typically, the CEO or the top team will hop around from one new preoccupation to another, often reacting to some recent event, such as a hot new trend, a key move by a competitor, or a change in the marketplace. A variation of this syndrome, the too many irons in the fire syndrome, involves a whole raft of programs, or initiatives, most of which squander resources and dilute the focus of attention.

• 3. Anemia: Only the Deadwood Survives. After a series of economic shocks, downsizings, layoffs, palace wars, and purges, the talented people have long since left for better pastures, leaving the losers and misfits lodged in the woodwork. They have more at stake in staying put, so they outlast the more talented employees. When conditions start to improve, the organization typically lacks the talent, energy, and dynamism needed to capitalize on better times.
• 6. Despotism: Fear Trembling. A tyrannical CEO or an overall ideology of oppression coming from the top causes people to engage in avoidance behavior at the expense of goal-seeking behavior. A few episodes in which people get axed for disagreeing with the chief, or for questioning the lack of ethics and leadership, and everybody soon learns: keep your head down and don’t draw attention to yourself.
• 12. The Monopoly Mentality: Our Divine Right. When an organization has long enjoyed a dominant position in its environment, either because of a natural monopoly or a circumstantial upper hand, its leaders tend to think like monopolists. Unable or unwilling to think in competitive terms, and unable to innovate or even reinvent the business model, they become sitting ducks for invading competitors who want their piece of the pie.
• 14. The Rat Race: They Keep Moving the Cheese. The culture of the enterprise, either by design or by the style of a particular industry or business sector, burns out its most talented people. A prevailing notion that one must sacrifice his or her personal well being in order to get ahead, possibly in pursuit of big financial rewards, definitely creates a goal focus, but at the expense of cooperation, esprit de corps, and individual humanity. A reduction in the commissions or other elements of the financial cheese creates a sense of victimization and resentment, not a sense of shared fate.

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http://www.iim-edu.org/dysfunctionalleadershipdysfunctionalorganizations/index.htm

• Dictatorial Leadership: Management that does not allow disagreements out of insecurity or arrogance.

• Political Compensation: Stock options, bonuses and perks are not fairly linked to performance.

• Unequal Workload Distribution: You’ll find some departments are underutilized while other departments are overloaded.

• Too Much Talk: Plans are heavy on talk but light on action. In a political corporate culture, image management becomes far more important than actions.

• Ineffective Meetings: Argumentative and heated cross-divisions meetings with discussion and language focusing on point scoring and buck-passing rather than sharing responsibility and collaborating to solve the problem

• Highly Stressful Workplace: There is a high rate of absenteeism and a high employee turnover rate.

• 4. Bad Politics and Performance Risks

• When employees feel discriminated against, abused or unappreciated, they may resort to one or more of the following harmful options:

• Defecting to competition

• Resort to sabotaging the company, e.g., by sharing confidential information with competitors or the media

• Employees may become emotionally distant and have no interest in the success of the company

• They will display passive-aggressive behaviors, become uncooperative, work less or produce substandard results

• Key talent will leave the company. Good honest workers generally don’t have the skills or disposition for functioning in a highly political environment.

• Company develops a reputation for being political and an unpleasant place to work, making it more difficult to recruit good talent to compete effectively.

• Employees will lose faith and motivation. When the leadership comes up with good initiatives, they are met with skepticism and resistance

• The worst thing that could happen to a company is when the staff loses confidence in the leadership team.

blockquote Realistically, it is not possible to have a politics-free organization. The desire for power is part of human nature, our business, and our world. Seeking power and politics in any company is neither inherently good nor bad. However, successful leaders know how to leverage politics by setting performance-oriented instead of resources-oriented political goals and rewards. Successful leaders set fair rules for the political game, reward collaborative performance and penalize animosity and negative behavior. /blockquote

• To cure the organization from bad politics, the board of directors and investors can choose from the following list of recommendations:
• The CEO must recognize the criticality of the political problem and its impact on the business performance. S/he must commit to change and be its leading champion.
• The CEO can use independent and qualified advisors and facilitators to support the change program (outsiders who have no internal agendas or biases).
• The most powerful leaders are almost always the role models for the change they seek. If the CEO practices bad politics, no amount of training or coaching will change the management team.
• Do not tolerate bad behavior. Realize that both bad and good behaviors are contagious. It is a proven sociological fact that people will imitate the behavior that appears to be socially acceptable, even if it is not their normal behavior. If you allow some people to get away with bad political behaviors, other people will follow.

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http://www.coopercomm.com/ppr-dys.htm

blockquote In the early days before personal computing, organizations had “word processing centers” responsible for churning out the paperwork that keeps an organization running. There were supposedly two classes of work going through the center, normal work with a two-day turnaround and “rush” work that had to completed ASAP.

It became a quick indicator of how well an organization was run to merely ask the Center Manager, “What percentage of your work comes in as a ‘rush’ job?” In many workgroups, it hovered around 20 percent, but in some it ran as high as 80 percent. /blockquote

• many organizations have settled into a permanent crisis mode. Management is continually unhappy with performance, everything is always over budget, all projects need to be done faster and cheaper, people’s jobs are constantly in jeopardy, etc.

• Stress management experts tell us that, to stay healthy, for every period of stress, there must be an equal period of “Whew!” to break the pressure.

• The predicable consequences of unremitting stress are:

• (1) people try harder as long as they can,

• (2) people burn out or break down and

• (3) people ultimately give up.

• A fear-driven, unhappy, pressured, can’t-win environment generates employees who check their brains at the door.

• Organizations cannot survive in a continuous crisis mode. Management must either provide breaks in the crisis or else develop established processes for handling day-to-day requirements without merely applying more pressure to workers.

• In many organizations nearly everyone is clueless, i.e., pluralistic ignorance.

• Effective organizations are open to reality. blockquote As a banker who specialized in helping companies work through loan defaults said, “No matter how bad it looks, it’s always worse.” He was an expert at getting clients to pay attention to the facts and draw rational conclusions from them. His job was to make certain executives “got it.” /blockquote

• In many organizations, there is a fundamental assumption that if each department is maximizing its effectiveness (sub-optimizing), then the organization as a whole is optimized.

• Dysfunctional organizations have a high tolerance for failure, as long as the attitude is right and “lessons have been learned.”

• Dysfunctional organizations are infected with a morality of selective absolutes.

• In other (good)organizations, even very large ones, the company President can be seen lugging his plastic tray at lunch in the company cafeteria. Executives park out with everyone else. Everyone is on a first-name basis. While there are obvious organizational differences in title, pay and power, the overall impression is one of a class-free society and culture.

• In functional organizations, there is a rational action-reward system in operation. People are incented to achieve because there is a commensurate payoff to be gained.

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http://andrewhargadon.typepad.com/my_weblog/2012/01/the-normal-dysfunction-of-organizations-.html

• The more corporations grow in size, power, and political rights, the greater our need to understand them. The greater our need, particularly, to understand how they so easily go bad.
• A normal level of ignorance, obfuscation, and self-interest keeps organizations functioning. Until it doesn’t.

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http://www.systemdynamics.org/conferences/2001/papers/Han_1.pdf

• structural inertia theory assumes that organizations need to reproduce themselves so as to maintain reliability and accountability. The reproducibility, however, tends to generate strong inertial forces and resistance to change.
• Few people, however, have clearly illustrated the relationship among size, flexibility and performance with convincing evidence.
• (Havemen 1993) market power and bureaucratization are two major forces that determine organizational capability to respond to change.
• (Havemen 1993) market power tends to dominate bureaucratization in the change process.
• (Havemen 1993) post that an inverted U-shaped relationship exists between organizational size and the capability to change.
• Hypothesis 1: medium-sized organizations are relatively more flexible than either large or small organizations
• Hypothesis 2: flexible organizations will perform better than the other organizations

• ** the capability to respond to change is determined by two factors**
• generalizable resources
• resistance to change
• The most flexible organization as identified in previous analysis does not seem to have the best performance
• We may assume that flexibility is not a matter of simply responding to uncertain environment by innovation.
• The improvement of production processes which can lower the price and speed up the production is equally import for organizations
• flexibility is determined by generalizable resources, response capability, resistance to change, and reengineering of processes (which is determined by specialized resources and the total resources available to an organization)
• ** organizations which intend to improve their response capability by allocation more generalizable resources should also pay more attention to their employees welfare and needs**

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