The historical stages of organizational design theory and ph

The historical stages of organizational design theory and philosophy have transmuted from the ancient church and military models of vertical structure based on discipline and authority to a modern horizontal structure for the purpose of encouraging self-initiative and reducing response time. The design imperatives are early recognition of changing environmental situations and effective information flow. The critical element is communication—recognition, interpretation, and feedback. The Thatcher article supplements the discussion in Chapter 12 of your textbook with a report on the findings of a novel research project recently conducted at Intel with the objective of improving communications at the micro-level—the individual decision maker. Evaluate the method and merits of the research. Are these finding applicable to other organizations and to the world of organizational theory

Solution

Communication is the key factor of research in today\'s organization structure since there are various level of employment. The top management level which takes decision and views problem on a macro level and the middle level management which tries to implement the decisions of the top management and then the low level employees who execute the orders. They actually see the problem or a decision at the micro-level. They strive for recognition and interpret the orders as per their understanding. This is a key factor of consideration since sometime the instructions are not passed clearly from the middle level managers which will force the executives to think on their own and act as per their perception. This will be a key factor of consideration while the feedback is given to the mangement. This might sometime turn out to be in contradiction to what the management is expecting. Hence communciation plays an important role in any organization.

In the initial days when the organization had vertical structure of organization the communcation was literally bad as sometime the communication was missed among the employees. But in today\'s horizontal approach the time required for reaching the micro level employees has decreased to an extent to which the micro-level employees have started acting as individual decision makers by having a clear and direct directions. This will avoid interpretation and will also call for effective feedback.

The merits of the research are as follows:

1. The management was able to understand the thoughts of the micro-level employees.

2. There was effective feedback.

3. The was a good recognition for employees.

The above mentioned findings can definitely be appied to other organizations and to the world of organizational theory because this is a method to reach out to the employee in the micro-level who plays a crucial role in the company. Hence this kind of organization structure will be very effective and will in turn account for:

1. Employee satisfaction

2. Customer satisfaction

3. Profit maximization

4. On-Time employee recognition