Soc120Week4Paper

Evolution of Formal Organizations Ryon Groff Soc 120 This essay will revolve around the idea that formal organizations with conventional bureaucratic organizational structure could almost always benefit by changing to a much more organized structure. Certain topics that will be discussed are trends in formal organizations, the evolution of formal organizations over the past century, differences between formal and informal organizations, trends in formal organizations, characteristics needed for formal organizations to evolve and researched material on the rends in formal organizations. For years formal organizations, employers, and employees have all operated in a very similar fashion. (Kieser, A., 1989). There were many things that changed between the initial idea of the organization, and how things ended up being done. As long as there have been organizations, most formal organizations operated under what we call conventional bureaucracy. Conventional Bureaucracy is known for it’s many levels, in that we see as the pyramid (White, D 2004). The pyramid begins will high level employees, with most of the power and few people, and works its way down, becoming larger groups of people who have less authority in the organization. There are many challenges that these types of organizations face. To me it seems that the more a person showed a strong work ethic, the easier it was for them to move up the pyramid. In the past, most work was done by hand, really back-breaking work. More recently, there have been so many technological advances that it has eliminated some of this difficult work, and people have been replaced by machines, think about an automobile assembly line.With technology evolving, and work quickly changing, how we operate our organizations today will be nothing like the way we operate these organizations in the future, and are very different from the way it was done in the past. As stated in the paragraph above, technology has helped us to streamline our workloads, and almost everything is done differently, and more efficiently, than it was done years ago. In the past, these organizations worked based on the information and technology passed from generation to generation. The work was done, but with no change or new creative ideas, many employees felt that they were involved in dead end work, after all, they were at the bottom of the work pyramid, with little chance of advancement, and a seemingly less chance of workplace change. In the past there were many things that they lacked, that now are beneficial and a must have for formal organizations to operate more efficiently in our time. There are major differences between the technology that these people had access to, compared to what many people in the workforce today take for granted. Today, people are able to store vast amounts of information in databases, and computers and cellular phones makes the entire world smaller. It is much easier to communicate, especially in the business world, than it ever has been in the past. In the past these interactions would have been made face to face with more expenses. Some of these expenses could include air-fare, or other travel expenses, hotel stays, and everything else that goes with traveling. Another limitation that these companies face was the fact the tradition is strong in pre-industrial societies. This meant that their goal was to preserve their cultural systems and not to change them when it came to organizational issues (Kieser, A., 1989). Many of these reasons have caused past organizations to become inefficient. Formal organizations that practice conventional bureaucracy have many levels of authority with a clear chain of command (Kieser, A., 1989). Each level has certain expectations and authorities, and they all usually have a title that reflects those authorities. Each employee has a specific job that they are to perform and a manager or supervisor they will have to report to (Pugh, D 1989). These organizations have set standards, rules, policies and regulations that they have to follow, and now most organizations have industry regulations they must also obey. Enforcing rules and regulations is exactly what keeps these organizations working like well oiled machines.There are rarely strong relationships in this type of organization, and if they are they are usually involving people of the same level, or coworkers. The communications between employees at these types of organizations are usually through an email or a letter of some sort, there seems to be very little face-time. Bureaucracy is defined as an organizational model rationally designed to perform tasks efficiently (White, D 2004). Employees are given jobs with specific goals and standards, and they are expected to work hard to meet those standards. Employees also have certain managers and supervisors to immediately report to. This is how things were done with little to no change, during the 1900‘s. You would typically see white males in management or positions with more authority (Pugh, D 1989). Thankfully, this has changed in todays world. Now, there is an equal chance that a superior will be female as being male. There are now laws that prevent employers and organizations from discriminating on gender and race. As stated before, many things have changed, instead of using each employee’s talents individually, organizations use creativity and strengths, and allowing those ideas to create a better guide to create a better work atmosphere as well as a better final product. Many employers will consider any reasonable opinion from an employee in regards to improving the workforce. Most organizations want to find workers for the long run, not to just fill a responsibility (White, D 2004). They value the opinions of their employees. Luckily for the working class people like myself, the organization now has to share the top priority with the employees of the organization itself. This new type of work that many organizations are adapting is called open, flexible organization. The open flexible organization has flattened out the bureaucracy pyramid. This allows most employees to have similar pay scales and responsibilities. On a side note, I believe that this is also pushing our organizations to seek higher educated people to fill roles, thus increasing the pay scale and living standards of many people in the world today. Instead of the many different levels, they are a much more even level with each other. Using this organization model, employees can be much more creative; they are using greater flexibility, competitive teams, working together for the same goal. Organizations are now hiring new employees based off the ideas they have and the potential to grow with the organizations instead of hiring someone for the work they are able to perform (Pugh, D 1989). Organizations today want an employee for a lifetime, they are beginning to realize the amount of money needed to train new employees, and that a seasoned employee will have more ‘know-how’ and produce a stronger final product. The new model organization wants to invest in the employee, because they know they deserve nothing less, and an employee treated well will pour that much more into their work ethic. In the case of Micah’s company, there are several things that must happen for his company to begin making a change. Personally, I think that the most important change to make is to shift the focus of the organization to be more person-oriented. The better a company treats the employees, the better off a company is. A highly formal organization would benefit from breaking away from having everything in the company be highly specialized, when it can be warranted, and allow everyone to have an equal set of responsibilities, possible train different groups to understand parts of processes that they had been missing out on. In the future, I predict that many formal organizations will begin hiring people with more all-around knowledge, to prevent a certain person from being highly specialized. This is being done to protect the company, for example if a specialized person leaves the company, there would not be a void, it could simply be passed to another person. I think that it is a wonderful idea for organizations to begin to break away from all of the strong rules and regulations of formal organizations. Not all of the rules and regulations of course, as some of them are needed, but change is always a good thing. References Kieser, A (1989). Organizational, Institutional, And Societal Evolution: Med. Administrative Science Quarterly, 34(4), 540. Retrieved October 19, 2008, from Alumni - ABI/INFORM Research database. (Document ID: 147242). Pugh, D. (1989). Professionalism In Public Administration: Problems, Perspec. Public Administration Review, 49(1), 1. Retrieved October 19, 2008, from Alumni - ABI/INFORM Research database. (Document ID: 709277). White, D; Owen-Smith, J; Moody, J; and Powell, W. (2004). Networks, Fields and Organizations: Micro-Dynamics, Scale and Cohesive Embeddings. Computational and Mathematical Organization Theory: Special Issue on Mathematical Representations and Models ..., 10(1), 95-117. Retrieved October 19, 2008, from Alumni - ABI/INFORM Research database. (Document ID: 712911451).