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Organizations as Organisms

Organizations as Organisms. Gareth Morgan. Discovering Organizational Needs. What was discovered in the Hawthorne Studies of the 1920s and 1930s?

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Organizations as Organisms

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  1. Organizations as Organisms Gareth Morgan

  2. Discovering Organizational Needs • What was discovered in the Hawthorne Studies of the 1920s and 1930s? • A new theory of organization built on the idea that individuals and groups, like biological organisms, operate most effectively only when their needs are satisfied.

  3. Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs

  4. How can organizations satisfy different levels of need? • Physiological • Salaries and wages • Safety • Pension and health care plans; job tenure • Love/Belonging • Office and factory parties; a work environment that promotes interaction with colleagues • Esteem • Creating jobs with scope for achievement, autonomy, responsibility; feedback on a job well done. • Self-Actualization • Encouragement for employee commitment; job a major expressive dimension of employee’s life.

  5. Organizations as “Open Systems” • What is the concept of the “open system”? • Continuous cycle of input, internal transformation, output, and feedback. • Emphasizes importance of relationships between the environment and the internal functioning of the system.

  6. Glossary of Open-System Concepts Can you explain each of the following? • Homeostasis • Entropy/negative entropy • Structure, function, differentiation, and integration • Requisite variety • Equifinality • System Evolution

  7. What are some of the main ideas underlying contingency theory? • Organizations are open systems that need careful management to satisfy and balance internal needs and adapt to environmental circumstances. • There is no “best way” of organizing. • Different approaches to management may be necessary to perform different tasks within the same

  8. What are “Matrix Organizations”? • Sometimes described as “project organizations,” adapt the functional-bureaucratic form to meet the demands of special situations through the establishment of subunits or teams with membership drawn from different functional areas or departments. • See diagram in text.

  9. Natural Selection: the population-ecology view of organization • How does this view relate to Darwin’s theory of evolution? • “Organizations, like organisms in nature, depend for survival on their ability to acquire an adequate supply of the resources necessary to sustain existence...The environment is thus a critical factor in determining which organizations succeed and which fail, ‘selecting’ the most robust competitors through elimination of the weaker ones.”

  10. Organizational Ecology: The creation of shared futures • What does Kenneth Boulding mean when he states that evolution involves “survival of the fitting” and not just “survival of the fittest? • How can this be seen in organizations today?

  11. Critical Analysis • What are the strengths and weaknesses of the organismic metaphor?

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