People and Organizations: Dynamics and Interactions
Chiavenato
People and Organizations
To overcome their personal limitations, people come together to form organizations aimed at achieving common goals. If they grow, organizations must include more people, who pursue different individual goals. This makes organizational objectives (production, profitability, cost reduction, market expansion, etc.) move away from the individual goals of the new entrants. The individual-organization relationship is not always cooperative and successful; it is often tense and confrontational. Organizations with a formal and rigid structure tend to generate in employees a sense of frustration, conflict, loss, and a short-term perspective of tenure. This is caused by tasks that do not allow employees to demonstrate responsibility, self-confidence, and independence, resulting in frustration and disinterest. Most of the responsibility for integrating both objectives rests with top management. Human resources are invaluable and indispensable, and both objectives are closely related. The individual provides skills, knowledge, ability, and talent. The organization imposes responsibilities, some within the employee’s capacity and others raised as challenges. It is a reciprocal process, a psychological contract, an implied contract between the individual and the organization. The individual must be effective (achieve organizational objectives through their participation) and efficient (meet individual needs with their participation) to survive within the system.
The interaction between people and organizations can be explained by the exchange of incentives and contributions. Incentives (or inducements, rewards) are “payments” made by the organization to its employees (salary, rewards, benefits, opportunity for advancement, job stability, praise, etc.). Contributions are “payments” that each worker makes to the organization (work, effort, dedication, punctuality, etc.) in exchange for incentives. Organizational balance reflects the success of the organization in “rewarding” employees with appropriate incentives and encouraging them to continue contributing to the organization, thereby assuring its survival and effectiveness. Incentives should be useful for participants, and contributions should be useful for the organization to remain solvent.
Edgar Schein
Organization
An organization is the planned coordination of the activities of a group of people to work toward achieving a goal or stated purpose, common through the division of labor and functions, and through a hierarchy of authority and responsibility.
Individuals alone are unable to meet all their needs, but when several people coordinate their efforts, they discover that together they produce more than each one separately. For this coordination to be useful, these people should have common objectives. If different parties are doing something different, an integral role is needed to ensure that all elements are seeking the same common goals, the most typical being the hierarchy of authority.
This is a formal organization. We can distinguish two types of organizations: social organizations, which are patterns of coordination that arise spontaneously or by implication of human interaction, and informal organizations, which are coordination patterns that emerge among members of a formal organization and are not specified in the manual.
Formal organizations do not conform fully to reality due to various factors such as internal dynamics or the influence of the environment. Organizations should be seen as sociotechnical systems, complex, in which social, environmental, and technological factors interact in complex ways with the organization.
Psychological Contract
It is about creating conditions to maintain a high level of efficiency over time and allow each employee to meet their most pressing needs through encouragement and incentives to increase their motivation. A key element of the psychological contract is that employees adhere to the existing authority system.
Deboard
General Systems Theory
It defines the system as a whole composed of parts in an orderly manner according to a scheme or plan. A series or set of things connected to form a complex unity. There are two types of systems:
- A closed system is independent of its environment.
- An open system is in continuous contact with its environment.
The individual exists as an open system and must interact with the surrounding world, involving multiple tasks. To carry out specific tasks, the individual must also assume a specific role. Each of these tasks requires a combination of different attitudes and aptitudes. The success of each role in terms of effectiveness and integration depends on the balance maintained between the needs and resources of the individual and the demands of the outside world.
The organization is an open system as it exists within a given environment and continuously imports materials and people from that environment. Such imports are used to produce goods or services exported to the environment with added value.