Summary containing all the relevant theory discussed during the lectures of the course Organization Theory given in the first year of International Business Administration at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. By learning this summary I personally passed the final exam.
Lecture 1 Chapter 1&2
Organizations are tools: they are purposive, goal-oriented instruments designed to achieve a
specific objective. Tools are extensions of human agency.
Objective of universities: developing knowledge, transfer knowledge among students.
Objective military: safe keeping.
Essence of chapter 1:
- Organizations have tremendous potential to shape societies.
- With great power comes great responsibility.
- Organizations are complex + contexts – and interesting to study.
Organizational behavior refers to the study of human behavior in organizational contexts.
OB concerns itself with individual-level, group-level, and organizational-level processes and
practices that inhibit or enable organizational performance.
All management starts from perception because we manage what we think we perceive to be
happening.
- What is an organizational context, see chapter one
What are the three levels of analysis?
- What are processes and practices, formal and informal
- What is organizational performance
Lecture 2 Chapter 8
Power
Organizations live and breathe ‘power’.
Hard power police officer
Subtle power google for example, influences your decision making.
The servant leader (uses power to) ‘make sure that other people’s highest priority needs are
being served.’
- Power is inevitable in organizations (organizations are composed of relations of
power).
- Balance is key.
- Power belongs to a role, not a person.
- The role is more important than the person.
- The collective (team), and its objectives, typically is more important than individual
roles.
Organizations typically try to harness power in some way
Max Weber
- Power: the ability to force people to obey
o Force = hard or soft
- Authority: orders are voluntarily obeyed by others
- Sources of power
o Handed down
o Rational-legal
- The founding voice
- Structure implies that power is organized
,Bureaucracy is the form of government in which everybody is deprived of political freedom, of
the power to act; for the rule by Nobody where all are equally powerless, we have a tyrant
without a tyrant – Hannah Arendt.
Politics
- Mobilizing power is a process of organizational politics.
- Why politics/ power dynamics?
o Because organizations have finite resources.
Are politics bad?
- It’s inevitable
- Human negotiation on how to use/deploy resources
- ‘Shaping the agenda’
Organizational decision-making:
- Reality far messier than chess (more variables, more ‘squares’)
- Not entirely rational (‘boundedly rational’)
Way of decision-making to a problem
1. Problem definition
2. Collect relevant information
3. Reviewing the data
4. Solution development
5. Evaluating possible solutions
6. Management decides
7. Implementation of solution
8. Constant evaluation
Lecture 3 Chapter 9
Aphorism = concise statement of a principle.
Organizations are instruments ‘for doing’/ ‘for getting things done’
Communication is crucial, could be lifesaving.
What managers do? They communicate!
- Mintzberg highlighted that communication is the work of the manager.
o Likely to answers the question with plan, organize, coordinate, and control.
Basic model of communication:
, Problem: suits best to describing information exchange between machines.
Human communication is more complex (sensemaking + bounded rationality!)
Levels of communication
- Macro ecologies of organizations
o Mass communication
o Stakeholder communication
- Meso organization
o Interorganizational communication
o Intraorganizational communication
- Micro events within organizations
o Small group communication
o Dyadic communication
Mass communication is the process of creating, sending, receiving, and analyzing messages
to large audiences via verbal and written media.
Stakeholder communication occurs between organizations and relevant parties in the
environment of the organization, e.g.
- The Media
- Community groups
- Labor unions
- Politicians, etc.
Interorganizational communication targets audiences across different organizations.
- There could be many reasons for such communication/
o For example: coordinating supply chain across organizations in order to
improve efficiency + threatening competitors with law cases
- Communication can take place through various channels: face-to-face negotiations,
trade shows, conferences, mass media.
Intraorganizational communication targets an audience internal to the organization.
1. Upward communication from employees to managers
2. Downward communication from managers to employees (norms clan control)
Examples of organizational communication failures:
- The Bhopal gas tragedy
Management did not pay attention to bottom-up communication from employees.
- Nokia and the smartphone battle
Top management exerted power on middle managers.
Organizational silence
- There are often powerful forces in many organizations that refrain employees from
participation and that lead them to withhold information about potential problems or
issues.
- Withholding of information = organizational silence.
- When employees share a perception that speaking up is unwise or without any
consequence, they remain silent. Such silence in turn may mean that vital upward
information is not passed on to managers.
Open communication climate
- Allowing employees to communicate upwards is important because
o Employee’s ideas
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