Читать книгу Foundations of management - Juan Antonio Pérez López - Страница 9

We have seen that for a formal organization to exist in reality—to be a real organization—the results it intends to achieve must be explicitly defined (operational definition of purpose), each of the participants in the organization must know what he has to do (structuring the definition of purpose) and must want to do it (implementation of purpose).

These three processes—which we will call definition of purpose, communication and motivation, respectively—may be very simple or very complex. In an ephemeral organization, such as the one we mentioned previously (the group of people who agree to take a taxi so that they can get home sooner), these processes scarcely exist, occurring at the same time and with very little prior discussion.

In stable organizations which are expected to last for a longer period, the function of what we call management is to arrange matters so that these three processes are properly executed, because the survival of the real organization depends on them. Any serious error in the definition of purpose, communication or motivation will cause the organization to disappear. These processes are the true vital processes of any real organization.

We said previously that all the interactions that occur among the members of the organization are to be found in the real organization. We have included in what we called the informal or spontaneous organization those interactions which are not regulated by the formal system. Therefore, we can also say that in so far as these informal interactions influence those three vital processes, they will be interactions that affect the life of the organization, although they may not be defined or regulated in any formal manner. Of course, there will also be many other interactions in this spontaneous or informal world that have very little or no bearing on the organization's operation. The criterion for defining whether they have any importance has to be that of their possible influence on these basic processes. This criterion is not easy to apply.

For example, if two employees working together in a company department are football fans, there is no doubt that they will interact quite a lot by talking about the subject. At first sight, it would appear that these interactions would have little or no effect on the organization's functioning. In most cases, this may be so, but it would be advisable to bear in mind that this fact might have some influence on either communication or motivation (it would not be the first time a manager had problems trying to get certain employees to do some extra work the day after their local team has been beaten).

The example is a trivial one, but precisely for this reason it shows how apparently trivial things may come to affect the organization's vital processes. For these processes are truly vital, not only in so far as they determine the organization's life, but also in that other primary meaning we refer to when, in our attempts to express a complex reality, we say that it is “life itself’.

In a living, existing organization, the definition of purpose, communication, and motivation is not something done once and for all, nor only at certain times in accordance with a schedule. Rather, it is a continuous process. An organization is always defining purposes (identifying things that have to be done), communicating and motivating.

This should not be understood to mean that the organization is always changing its purposes, what it has to communicate, or the way it motivates: those kinds of changes are rather the exception, like social revolutions. The statement should be understood to mean that certain general purposes become more specific, and that more precise definitions are given regarding what should be done under the circumstances currently prevailing; refinements of the purpose along those lines must be communicated individually, and motivation also has to be secured in order for the organization to continue its operations.