Organizational design is an ongoing process as well as challenges faced by executives managing small or global enterprises. Manages must assess their organizations to determine the influence of worldwide competition, globalization, changing technologies and deregulation. The outcome of such an assessment is organizational design. The changing environment challenges the traditional ways of organizing for efficiency as well as effectiveness. Companies must continue interrogating their goals, basic tasks, decision makers, structures of communication and the incentive structure. The concept and principles of organizational design are essential in modern enterprises and their future operations (Burton, Obel & DeSanctis, 2011). The purpose of this term paper is to discuss how managers can design adaptive organizations which will guarantee current and future success. Organizational design needs to be selected from its unique context which should be multidimensional and include the structure and human elements of a company. The structure should include goals, strategy and the structure of the company. The human element includes coordination and control, people, work processes and the incentive mechanisms.
Need for adaptable organizations
Many organizations operate in a volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous environment. The environment is rapidly changing where it is difficult to identify the appropriate information for decision making. It is therefore critical for organizations to identify threats and opportunities likely to affect their performance. It is also necessary to figure out the dangers of unpredictable environments and therefore determines the appropriate ways to survive in the ever-changing environment. Companies must, therefore, be adaptable to the prevailing environmental conditions. It is difficult to predict the future but being adaptive makes it possible for businesses to continue with their operations with minimal or no interruptions (Cichocki & Irwin, 2011). Effective managers try to understand the environment and to develop appropriate strategies that will ensure the success of an organization irrespective of any occurrences that might affect its operations. The organization must, therefore, anticipate any occurrences likely to undermine their current performance. They should develop adaptive approaches that allow them to adjust their operations to take advantage of an opportunity or to deal with a threat.
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Some managers do not try to understand the environment that they are operating from and assume that they can predict the future with certainty. Such managers, therefore, design rigid structures that make it impossible for the company to institute significant changes in its current operations in response to a changing environment. Such structures limit the flexibility of an organization and its ability to exploit emerging opportunities or to counter a negative environment likely to have adverse effects on its future performance. , in this case, are unable to predict future occurrences which might determine its prospects for growth.
Organizational design starts with the goals of the company then move from top to bottom where issues like strategy, structure, people, processes, coordination, and control are considered. Similarly, design can be bottom-up but such an approach can easily eliminate the good design as the tasks of the company can easily be affected by its goals and strategy. A top-down approach which is complemented by the incorporation of issues from the lower level can be the most appropriate (Burton, Obel & DeSanctis, 2011). However, implementation and political issues can force the management to adopt a bottom-up approach while doing a top-down approach in an iterative way.
Information Processing
Companies use the information to coordinate and control their activities in a changing environment. Information can help organizations to observe the happenings in the surrounding environment and to analyze their current problems and make decisions on what they will do and to communicate to their stakeholders. Information procession is an approach for viewing an organization and its design. Channels for the information can be created or even abandoned where their capacity, as well as the type of signal that must be transmitted in them, is selected based on the cost-benefit analysis (Burton, Obel & DeSanctis, 2011; Cichocki & Irwin, 2011). Information systems and people can process information but their capacity is limited where the inability to handle some of the information is a significant feature for understanding the behavior of an entity and its people.
Effective managers are exploiting the power of information to predict future occurrences and the .potential impact that they might have on the performance of an organization. The ability to gather timely and relevant information enhances management decision making and helps them to develop responsive organizations that adapt to the changing environment. Internal information can help the management to determine areas of weaknesses that need to be addressed and the strengths that must be exploited for the success of an entity. The management can also determine human resource needs and the skills required to develop innovative approaches that can be used to counter emerging threats (Hron & Macak, 2011). The management of an organization must, therefore, be able to collect relevant and timely information which can be used to support decision making. The information can also help in strategic planning and conflict management.
Adaptive organizations must work as a unit where all departments and employees are working towards a common goal. Such organizations exhibit healthy competition in the different departments but such competition only enhances the performance and are not perceived as an avenue for conflicts. Healthy competition enhances team spirit and the performance of individual teams which contributes to the overall performance of an organization (Hron & Macak, 2011). Strong team share information and addresses identified challenges to achieve a common goal.
How to Create Adaptive Organizations
The adaptive organizational design has the ability to ensure that organizations survive in a competitive environment and to remain profitable and to have a sustainable future through actions that are executed today. It is, therefore, necessary to understand the attributes of adaptive organizations and how managers can make their organizations more adaptive. The main attributes that allow an organization to adapt to the changing economic, societal and other forces affecting them include; the ability to collaborate effectively throughout the organization. Employees at all levels of the organization must be able to network with others outside an organization and therefore be able to gain useful information and as well as helpful perspectives. The employees must be able to network with customers as well as other stakeholders, competitors and external industry experts (Cichocki & Irwin, 2011; Kenney, 2018). Employees at all levels must be able to experiment and innovate without the fear of reprisal or being marginalized. The organizational culture of an adaptive organization should reward innovation and adapt to solve emerging issues that the organization is facing.
Creating an organization with the above attributes embedded in its structure and empowering the employees from the bottom up can be done in three ways. The management should create self-directed teams where empowerment starts from self-motivated and self-directed teams. The structure of an organization and its rules can inhibit creativity and the ability to be adaptive a good example is a hierarchical structure. Effective collaboration can be achieved through voluntary informal as well as self-supervised approaches. Establishing good personal relationship has the potential for successful collaboration as employees feel less commanded. It is a challenging tasks for teams to develop an open mind towards their environment as familiar assumptions as well as conventional approaches emerge (Kenney, 2018). Smaller self-generating groups have the potential to challenge the existing paradigms and develop new ways to adapt to changing environments.
The existing segmentation in the departments, units, and divisions in an organization should be addressed to iron out any differences leading to the development of a team. It is difficult to adapt to adapt to new challenges if vital information is held by some groups (Cichocki & Irwin, 2011). The ability to exchange insight and ideas in different groups and subgroups within an organizational setting can enhance the comprehensive understanding of the environment and generate appropriate solutions and adaptation.
To achieve the above goal, organizations should develop open standards for their teams and build trust, collaboration and shared ideas in the entire organization. It is necessary to develop common methods of communication, problem-solving and modes of behavior to eliminate the restriction on the flow of information and knowledge which is essential in understanding the changing environment while adapting to new challenges and opportunities. Such approaches must include all teams in an organization and transcend its boundaries (Kenney, 2018).
An organization should create an appropriate environment where employees can implement adaptive thinking. The management must establish the space and time for innovation by shaping the organization to enhance the ability of the employees to think outside the box. Such approaches allow them to create new ways of doing things. Employees should feel the practical and psychological safety to collaborate and pursue new ideas. They should also deal with unfamiliar perspectives while encouraging responses that respond or anticipate the unknown. An appropriate approach is to establish a safe place to innovate in an organization but out of the normal organizational form (Cichocki & Irwin, 2011; Kenney, 2018). The top management and supervisors must demonstrate their commitment to ideas from the top, down or even from across the organization. They should reinforce positive behavior when employees use their safe venues to formulate new ideas on how the organization can adapt to the changing environment.
The management must ensure that the culture of the company encourages creativity, healthy competition, and teamwork. The culture should ensure that the employees perceive each other as part and parcel of an organization with the same objective. The management should, therefore, ensure that employees are free to develop working relationships that promote cohesion and encourage team spirit. Employees must understand the culture and how it can enhance their performance and that of the entire organization. The culture must also promote fairness throughout the organization to reduce any conflicts that might arise once employees feel that they are not treated fairly or some individual or teams in the company are receiving more praise than others (Cichocki & Irwin, 2011).
The management must address conflicts in the organization as they can affect its ability to be adaptive. Conflicts between groups, employees or even departments lead to the hoarding of information which is relevant for the performance of an organization. Conflicts also affect creativity and performance as the warring parties focus on addressing the pertinent issues between them rather than working as a team to address the issues faced by the organization (Burton, Obel & DeSanctis, 2011). It is, therefore, necessary to identify conflicts in the organization and their causes and to address them before they affect the performance of the entire organization. Adaptive organizations cannot be designed if there are conflicts in the different ranks.
The management must rethink its structure and how it can enhance or impede its ability to counter external forces. A complex structure, for example, makes it difficult to change current operations by conducting significant changes in the entire organization. It makes it hard to respond to emerging threats that might have far-reaching effects on the performance of an organization. The structure also affects decision making which makes it difficult for timely decisions to be made when needed. A hierarchical structure, for example, can have a long chain of command which makes it difficult to make an important decision when they are needed such a structure can impede the ability to adapt and therefore makes it hard for an organization to respond to the changes in the environment (Burton, Obel & DeSanctis, 2011). A flat structure reduces the time taken to make decisions and therefore, can enhance the ability of an organization to adapt to the changing environment.
The management, therefore, must consider the structure and redesign it to ensure that the company can easily adjust to the changing environment. Organizations must, therefore, g=have the right employees with the appropriate training and the right attitude if it is to adapt to the changing environment. Its culture must promote and reward creativity while taking information from the external environment for decision making.
References
Burton, R., Obel, B., & DeSanctis, G. (2011). Organizational Design: A step by step approach (2nd ed.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press Textbooks.
Cichocki, P., & Irwin, C. (2011). Organization Design: A Guide to Building Effective Organizations . London: Kogan Page.
Hron, J., & Macak, T. (2011). Adaptive organization design based on system integration. Agricultural Economics (Zemědělská Ekonomika) , 57 (No. 12), 565-572. doi: 10.17221/200/2011-agricecon
Kenney, S. (2018). Creating Adaptive Organizations. Retrieved from https://www.amanet.org/training/articles/creating-adaptive-organizations.aspx
