The organizational perspective of management views management through the lens of the entire organization, focusing on how its structure, culture, processes, resources, and people interact to achieve strategic goals.
Understanding the organizational perspective means looking beyond individual tasks or departments to see how the various components of a company function as a cohesive whole. This perspective emphasizes the interconnectedness of different parts of the organization and how management decisions impact the system overall.
Key Aspects of the Organizational Perspective
From an organizational perspective, effective management involves understanding and optimizing several core areas:
- Structure: How the organization is formally arranged, including hierarchy, departments, reporting lines, and centralization vs. decentralization.
- Culture: The shared values, beliefs, norms, and behaviors that influence how work is done and how employees interact.
- Processes: The sequence of activities required to perform a specific task or achieve a particular outcome. This includes defining workflows and clarifying responsibilities. As highlighted in studies on process management, an organizational perspective defines persons or roles that are responsible for the execution of a given process, ensuring accountability and clarity in operations.
- Resources: The allocation and management of financial, human, physical, and technological assets to support organizational activities.
- People: The skills, knowledge, motivation, and relationships of the workforce, and how they are managed to achieve collective objectives.
Why the Organizational Perspective is Important
Adopting an organizational perspective is crucial for several reasons:
- Holistic View: It provides a comprehensive understanding of how different elements interact, preventing siloed thinking and decisions that might benefit one area but harm another.
- Strategic Alignment: It ensures that management decisions and actions are aligned with the organization's overall strategy and mission.
- Improved Efficiency: By analyzing and optimizing processes and structures holistically, organizations can identify bottlenecks and improve operational efficiency.
- Enhanced Adaptability: Understanding the interconnectedness of parts helps organizations become more agile and responsive to internal and external changes.
- Effective Resource Utilization: It allows for better allocation and management of resources across the entire organization.
Practical Applications
Applying the organizational perspective in practice involves various management activities:
- Process Modeling and Improvement: Analyzing workflows, identifying responsibilities (as mentioned in the reference regarding defining roles responsible for execution), and redesigning processes for greater efficiency and effectiveness.
- Example: Mapping out the customer onboarding process to identify which roles (sales, support, technical teams) are responsible for each step and how handoffs occur.
- Organizational Design: Structuring the company in a way that best supports its strategy, whether it's a functional, divisional, matrix, or flat structure.
- Change Management: Understanding how changes in one part of the organization will ripple through others and planning interventions accordingly.
- Performance Management: Evaluating performance not just at the individual or team level but considering how different parts of the organization contribute to overall results.
- Developing Organizational Culture: Shaping values and norms that support collaboration, innovation, and ethical behavior across the company.
Consider a simple table illustrating how different perspectives might view a problem:
| Perspective | Focus | Example Problem: Slow Product Development |
|---|---|---|
| Individual | Employee Skills/Motivation | "John needs more training." |
| Team | Team Dynamics/Collaboration | "The engineering team isn't communicating." |
| Organizational | Structure, Processes, Roles, Culture | "Our approval process is too complex, and there's no clear role responsible for pushing the product through." |
As the table shows, the organizational perspective identifies systemic issues, often related to processes, structure, or roles, rather than just individual or team failings.
In conclusion, the organizational perspective views management not just as controlling individuals or departments but as orchestrating a complex system of interconnected elements – structure, culture, resources, people, and crucially, processes where persons or roles are defined as responsible for execution – to achieve collective success.
