Allegories in organisation theory

Among other approaches, such as economic (e.g., economy of labour, economics, theory of firm), managerial (e.g., governance), cultural (organisational culture), social (organisational behaviour), etc. we would like to start the course with the metaphoric approach[17].

“All theories of organisation and management are based on implicit images or metaphors that persuade us to see, understand, and imagine situations in partial ways. Metaphors create insight. But... in creating ways of seeing, they create ways of not seeing. Hence there can be no single theory or metaphor that gives an all-purpose point of view. There can be no 'correct theory' for structuring everything we do”[18]. The metaphors are vital to understanding and highlighting certain aspects of organisations, while at the same time they restrict understanding by back grounding or ignoring others.

There are 8 methaphos used for organisations:

Machine (engine)

The first idea of a machine is distinct functioning, clear order. Once designed, it works. But it needs maintenance – regularly or in case of a breakdown.

Frederick the Great of Prussia developed his army as a prototype of mechanistic organisation. He proposed to use the interchangeable components, to replace the units without any damage for functioning and for result.

The machine use fixed input and output, usually it has only one set of input and one of output. A machine requires precise resources to treat, in case of organisation there are capital, labour (human resources, which are calculated in clockwork, hours and not in quality of work) and information, which is one of the resources that keeps the wheels ticking over. Machine can produce only one kind of product – it is possible to adjust, if you need to produce another type of product.

It is possible to invite a specialist and repair the machine – when the occaion requires, an organisation invites the consulting agency and “adjust” the functioning. Frederick taylor created the Scientific organisation of work, as the industrial engineer task. He descrideb the work in an organisation, especially, assembly line. It needs control, measurement, quantitative evaluation.

The essential criterion of a machine is efficiency, ability to achieve goals with the most reasonable use of resources.

Max Weber defined perfect bureaucracy as a form of organisation emphasizing precision, speed, clarity, regularity, reliability, and efficiency achieved through the creation of a fixed division of tasks, hierarchical supervision, and detailed rules and regulations.

This kind of organisation is the most efficient in mass production, where the standardisation is a key-factor and the departments of organisation are compared with cogs in a wheel.

Organism

In the difference of a machine, an organism has very important capacity to react, including the skill of analysing itself and the environment and of change its behaviour according the detected changes. Information management has a critical role in drawing in information about trends and developments in the external environment.

An alive organism or living system is able to auto–manage, to repair itself, to recover.

According the environmental conditions, it has the skill of adaptation. In this metaphor, the organisation should respond to changes triggered by social, economic, technological and legislative forces.

The alive organisms knows the evolution, development, the organisation sees or even creates the changes of needs and offers the goods and services to reply to the new needs. An the same time, the evolution means also the principle of survival of the fittest.

There are life cycles, which also describe the organisations as alive organisms. There are the notions of recycling and restructuring for organisations.

Homeostasis

This image implies that information from internal and external sources is required to keep the organisation in a state of equilibrium.

We can use the words such as health or illness to describe the desequilibrium or dysfunctioning of an organisation.

Differentiation

In unicellular (single-celled) organisms, the single cell performs all life functions. It functions independently. However, multicellular (many celled) organisms have various levels of organisation within them. Individual cells may perform specific functions and also work together for the good of the entire organism. The cells become dependent on one another.

Multicellular organisms have the following 5 levels of organisation ranging from simplest to most complex:

1) Cells

Are the basic unit of structure and function in living things.

May serve a specific function within the organism

Examples – blood cells, nerve cells, bone cells, etc.

2) Tissues

Made up of cells that are similar in structure and function and which work together to perform a specific activity

Examples - blood, nervous, bone, etc. Humans have 4 basic tissues: connective, epithelial, muscle, and nerve.

3) Organs

Made up of tissues that work together to perform a specific activity

Examples - heart, brain, skin, etc.

4) Organ Systems

Groups of two or more tissues that work together to perform a specific function for the organism.

Examples - circulatory system, nervous system, skeletal system, etc.

The Human body has 11 organ systems - circulatory, digestive, endocrine, excretory (urinary), immune(lymphatic), integumentary, muscular, nervous, reproductive, respiratory, and skeletal.

5) Organisms

Entire living things that can carry out all basic life processes. Meaning they can take in materials, release energy from food, release wastes, grow, respond to the environment, and reproduce.

Usually made up of organ systems, but an organism may be made up of only one cell such as bacteria or protist.

Examples includes bacteria, amoeba, mushroom, sunflower, human.

The complex structure of an organisation also reflect the specialisation of people involved in the organisation’ functioning (as cells) and the hierarchie which is formed by categories of resources, the departments (as organs) and the functional divisions (as organ systems).

Brain (learner)

This metaphor was introduced in works of 1990s[19].

In this image, the organisation has quite special skills and caracteristics:

Ø Intelligence, knowledge

l It operates with information’ flows ; parallel information processing

l Data & images (not only simple numbers), associations…

l Feedback

l Adopt a forward-looking approach

Ø A community which regenerates itself through

l the creation of knowledge,

l the outcome of learning

Ø Requisite variety

l distributed control

l adapting itself to the ambiguity and uncertainties found in these environments

l mindsets

Ø For the correct functioning, it needs

l huge energy – different kind of resources in important volume

l the information and the capabilities to continuously adapt to its changing internal and external environments

Ø Key-words: Learning, networks

In the brain there is the very special possibility of inter-replacing among similar cells. «Cells that work together to perform a particular function are organised into Tissues»[20].

Culture

First of all, the notion of culture refers to the whole understanding of what is the society and how it transfer the regulative mechanisms by the means of declared Ideology or of families and their everyday life. This cognitive framework is the organisational culture. This universe consists of attitudes, values, behavioral norms, and expectations shared by the organisation’s members.

On market, we need to articulate. But in organisation, we have common understanding, common view of the world around us:

l myth, meaning – representations

l values, shared beliefs – directions, the desired points, results, states

l norms, rules, laws, traditions, ritual, history – ways to achieve values

(to achieve the positive values and to avoid the negative ones)

l language, symbol, sign

The making decision and the use of information will have cultural aspects, in contrast to the assumption that it is essentially a rational human activity:

l pressing of the history, the images, the limits

Organisational cultures help to establish a sense of identity for employees within the organisation and therefore can facilitate comfort and a greater likelihood of internalising organisation goals. Organisational culture also provides a status quo and maintains stability in processes, communication and role interaction.

Ø Key-words: shared vision and mission, service, understanding

The organisational culture reflects the ideas of the specific regulative principles and tools used in each concrete organisation.

In the experiments, sociologists have proven, that the group culture of an organisation or a department, is a powerful tool of influence on productivity.

In Hawthorne study, regardless of quota set by the company, the empoyees neither under- nor over-produced. Work output was equal for all members of the group. Why?

The workers created informal groups between themselves and their superiors, which tightly regulated production in order to maintain a group identify where no man excelled beyond the others.

According to Ch.Handy, there are 4 stages of group growth:

¨ forming – in this stage relationships are being built through the establishment of goals, role definition and time-line formation;

¨ storming – quickly groups move into the phase, where roles, procedures and goals are questioned. It is vital at this stage that conflicts be resolved effectively and efficiently;

¨ norming – in this phase, members establish a formal or informal set of rules and procedures for group members to incorporate into their work. This is the stage, which creates culture of the group;

¨ performing – only when the previous phases are completed, groups will be able to move into a performing stage of growth.

During the forming and storming stages leaders should assist group members by encouraging participation and viable communication. Leaders are key in maintaining group stability through effective negotiation during the storming phases. As the group matures, reaching the norming phase the leaders should practice foresight, promoting the next level of action by introducing effective evaluation methods and standard setting adjustments as necessary.

So, according this logic, the culture is the exclusive and completed basis for any efficient collective activity.

Psychic prison

There are some questions which are put by psychologists, and some mechanisms described by phsychology:

Ø Organisation – non human place?

· only rational calculating in “predicament of human beings as prisoners of their thoughts and actions”

· Affects spoil the business, decrease the results – it is necessary to restrain them

As early as 1920, E.L. Thorndike used the term “social intelligence” to describe the skill of understanding and managing other people[21]. In 1983, Howard Gardner[22] introduced the idea of multiple intelligences which included:

Ø interpersonal intelligence – the capacity to understand the intentions, motivations and desires of other people, and

Ø intrapersonal intelligence – the capacity to understand oneself, to appreciate one's feelings, fears and motivations.

“Emotional intelligence”[23] is the ability to identify, assess, and control the emotions of oneself, of others, and of groups.

Organisations are ultimately created and sustained by conscious and unconscious processes, with the notion that people can actually become imprisoned or confined by the images, ideas, thoughts, and actions to which these processes give rise. The psychic prison metaphor alerts us to pathologies that may accompany our ways of thinking and encourages us to question the fundamental premises on which we enact everyday. The psychic prison mentality exists when people become trapped or caught in favorite ways of thinking and acting that confine individuals within socially constructed worlds and prevent the emergence of other worlds. Preconceived ideas become traps for people when they begin to hold onto their preconceived notions and biases that eventually become their reality.

According the Behavioural economics, individual and group economic behaviour is not always rational.

Organisations are seen as socially constructed realities based on unconscious preoccupations of people in the organisation. These socially constructed realities or cultures may be experienced as problematic and confining, which is the reason why Morgan uses the term psychic prisons. Morgan subsumes several explanations of human behaviour based on psychological mechanisms under the psychic prison metaphor, including the theories of Janis, Freud, Becker, the Tavistock school of psychoanalysis, Jung, and Mitroff. Most of these theories assume that people develop unconscious mechanisms, and construct realities, in order to handle anxiety and desire, and that these mechanisms and realities are reflected in organisations.

An example of a phenomenon that restricts thinking is groupthink (Janis, 1972). In groupthink, the members of a group develop shared illusions as a result of self-affirming processes that produce conformity, and screen group members from information that might damage the shared beliefs. Freud's (1953) theory is based on the idea that the unconscious is created by the repression by humans of their innermost desires and anxieties. A person's personality results from the way he or she learns to control his or her impulses from early childhood on. Freud believed that "...in order to live in harmony with one another, humans must moderate and control their impulses, and that the unconscious and culture were thus really two sides of the same coin" ”[24].

Freud and his followers distinguish a rich repertoire of mechanisms that people use for controlling their impulses: denial, displacements, fixation, projection, rationalisation, regression, sublimation, and so on. In Organisational psychology there are:

l denial – e.g., innovation

l projection – e.g., motivating

l coping mechanisms – e.g., alliances ; deviance

l defence mechanisms – e.g., making decisions procedures

l repression & regression – e.g., objective’s management.

A special type of dealing with impulses is learnt by people in patriarchal families, leading to a persistence of male dominance and male values in society: "...patriarchy operates as a kind of conceptual prison, producing and reproducing organisational structures that give dominance to males and traditional male values”[25].

Becker (1973) explains human culture and human artifacts, such as organisations, based on the way people handle a special kind of fear: the fear for death. "Though we may in quiet times confront the fact that we are going to die, much of our daily life is lived in the artificial realness created through culture. This illusion of realness helps to disguise our unconscious fear that everything is highly vulnerable and transitory." (Morgan, 1986, p. 213) It is interesting to note Bridger's theory about transitional phenomena in organisational life. This theory states that "Just as a child may rely on the presence of his or her doll or teddy bear as a means of reaffirming who and where they are, managers and workers may rely on equivalent [transitional] phenomena for defining their sense of identity”[26]. If people or organisations keep clinging to a special privilege, structure, task, or other phenomenon in a way that cannot be explained by rational motives, this may be due to their status as transitional phenomena.

Ø How to use the psychic phenomena?

l motivating

• employees,

• partners,

• investors

l communication between departments

l communicating with clients; advertising; …

It is also usefull to know the personalities specific features as of types A vs. B. Type A personalities are competitive, impatient, seekers of efficiency and always seem to be in a hurry. Type B personalities are laid back and possess more patience and emotional stability, but tend to be less competitive. In a work environment Type A’s tend to be more productive in the short term and pursue more challenging work. However, they also have a greater tendency towards health risks and are less likely than Type B’s to be in top executive positions: Daniel Goleman might suggest that the difference in performance by classic Type A vs. Type B personalities is less due to fixed personality traits as they are for propensities to grasp the concept of emotional quotient (EQ). Unlike IQ, EQ is the “capacity for recognizing our own feelings and those of others, for motivating ourselves, and for managing emotions well in ourselves and our relationships.”[27]

Ø Pain & pleasure principle, or carrot-and-stick approach

Example of problems to solve is the Suicide at work place or for work reasons, as in Japan (30 thousand of people 2008-2010) or in France (most well-known case, due to mass media, France Telecom).

Another example is the Resistance to innovations, the conservative preference for “old good methods” and rejection of newest technologies or ways of doing.

Ø Key-words: conscious & unconscious processes, dysfunction, workaholic

The psychic prison metaphor depicts a layer of organisational reality that is uncontrollable by nature, and, therefore, should be used in a descriptive and interpretative way: in highlighting the role of the unconscious in organisation, there is a danger that many will now want to find ways of managing the unconscious as well. This, of course, is impossible, because the unconscious is, by nature, uncontrollable.

Political system

French schools of psychology and of regulation describes the specific internal processes inside organisations, which relates to the collective action.

Usually it is easier to achieve the Individual goals by group efforts:

l Interests – of professional group, social class…

l Rights – obtained in collective fight

Ø Group behaviour

l Alliances permit to strength individual position it can be reasonable to enter a group

Ø Power is represented by different ways:

l hierarchy, position

A Chief Executive Officer easily wields decision-making power because it stems from his appointment responsibilities.

l dimension

l Authority

l charisma

Ø Political model

l Democracy / authoritarian governance

Ø party-line

Ø Roles:

l Gatekeepers

l Leaders; …

The roles we carry shape the way we see ourselves and help to define the behaviors we should exhibit, and those we should not. Roles also help us to communicate responsibilities and set expectations for appropriate responses from others. In an organisation roles can help to clearly define boundaries between individuals and locis of power according the social-economic status and hierarchical position.

Ø Conflict management

Role ambiguity occurs when either the focal person or others around him/her are unclear about the nature or expectations of a role.

Role conflict may arise when two roles intersect creating tension or difficulty fulfilling one or both roles.

E.g., when a mother returns to work and attempts to maintain breast-feeding. Management may not support the amount of time taken during the day to pump milk, leaving the mother at a hazard of not meeting both role expectations fully.

Role incompatibility may occur when the expectations/nature of the role is clear but is incompatible with other roles or a person’s sense of self.

Employees manage many roles and problems or conflicts can arise since role conflicts create tensions that can change the ability of the individual to reach their goals.

Organisations should be sure to support their team members in meeting new roles by giving time for transition, or offering training and support. In addition, the organisation can nurture employee’s ability to relieve tension by allowing time to devote to caring for roles outside the office.

E.g., support for a breast pumping station in the office and management support of breaks for pumping.

Ø Key-words: hidden agendas, back room deals, censorship

Domination’s tool (instrument of domination)

Influence is the action or force by an individual that modifies another person’s activity or behavior. Power is the force behind influence to make it effective. Negative power is the ability to not do something, and in so doing prevent another person(s) from gaining what they want.

Power is relative, it can be exerted only when those to whom someone is trying to wield power, recognize the source of it.

Ø Organisation is only one of the forms of economic activity

· Corporate interest

· Alternative – chaos of individual acts at the market (stock exchange)

Ø Organisation permits to different society’s classes to co-operate:

· to create goods

· to exchange producing factor (labour – capital)

Ø Power of property on a resource

Resource power derives from the control of wealth and resources:

· Capital as an investment

• For the employee, this power leads to Alienation
(from resources, producing means, results, personality)

· Labour – exceptional competences

Example 1: qualified workers in Russian labour market in 2000s.

Example 2: sale managers, who comes in (and out of) a company with his/her Data bases and personal contacts with potential clients.

Ø Authority of managers – power of employees (trade-unions)

· exploitation

· divide and rule

· discrimination

Compliance is the agreement to a behavior because of force – the “I have to” response. This implies the lack of self-initiated behavior because the person “has to” rather than “wants to”. Generally compliance will be the result of methods of force, rules and procedure and sometimes exchange methods, and must be maintained with continual supervision.

Unlike compliance, identification and internalisation have some degree of acceptance of the new behavior, however the sustainability of the behaviors are not the equal.

Identification is a behavior adopted out of a desire to please or admiration for the person wielding the power.

The manager exerting this type of power has great magnetism but must constantly be present for the behavior to continue. The organisation becomes dependent on the power figure, making the employee action not sustainable independently.

Internalisation is for most situations the most desirable response because it is independent of the source of influence and is self-sustaining

Ø Organisation vis State

• Example: GasProm, lobbying potential increasing of taxes

Ø Key-words: charisma, maintenance of power, force, repression, imposing values, compliance

Date: 2016-03-03; view: 716