Читать книгу Foundations of management - Juan Antonio Pérez López - Страница 6

We have already said that a human organization is a group of people whose efforts— actions—are coordinated to achieve a certain objective in which everybody has an interest, although their interests may be due to very different factors.

For an organization to exist, the mere existence of a group of people is not sufficient; it is not even sufficient that they all have a common purpose. The truly decisive factor is that these people organize themselves—coordinate their activity—by ordering joint action towards the achievement of certain results which, although perhaps for different reasons, they all consider it in their interest to achieve.

For example: the group of people on a street at a particular moment is a well-defined group—a set of specific persons—, but they do not constitute an organization. It is even likely that at least some of these people have a common purpose: to get to the other side of the city as quickly as possible. But this does not suffice for them to be considered an organization. However, if, while waiting for the bus, they start to talk about their problem and decide to share a taxi so as to avoid a wait and arrive at their destination sooner, they have now organized themselves: they will be an organization, even if only for a short period of time (as long as their cooperation lasts).

It is true that when we speak of human organizations, we are not usually referring to such ephemeral phenomena as the one just described: we usually have in mind something stable and lasting, such as families, businesses, town councils or sports clubs. Our common sense tells us-and rightly so—that for an organization to be stable and to last for a long period of time it requires certain mechanisms and the interplay of certain forces not present in ephemeral organizations, in which a group of people agree to solve a problem that affects them, their cooperation ceasing to exist once it has been solved.

However, the essential elements of an organization are already present even in these ephemeral organizations, in the same way that the basic elements of a large city are already to be found in a small village. These basic elements are: human actions, human needs and a formula or means of coordinating actions to satisfy needs. On this simple basis, we can already make an important distinction that is valid for any organization: the distinction between the formal organization and the real organization.