we discuss the relationship between strategy and organizational structure, and the use of work-flow analysis.

I. Work: The organizational Perspective

Organizational structure refers to the formal or informal relationships between people in an organization. Work flow is the way work is organized to meet the organization’s production or service goals. In this section, we discuss the relationship between strategy and organizational structure, and the use of work-flow analysis.

· Strategy and Organizational Structure:

· An organization develops a business strategy by establishing a set of goals based on:

· An analysis of environmental opportunities and threats.

· A realistic appraisal of how the business can deploy its assets to compete most effectively.

· The business strategy selected by management determines the structure most appropriate to the organization. Whenever management changes its business strategy, it should also reassess its organizational structure.

· A company would select a defender strategy when it is competing in a stable market and has a well established product.

· Work can be efficiently organized into a structure based on an extensive division of labor , with hierarchies of jobs assigned to functional units such as customer services, power generation, and accounting.

· Management is centralized and top management has the responsibility for making key decisions.

· Vertical (Top-Bottom) organizational structure.

· A company would select a prospector strategy when operating in uncertain business environments that require flexibility.

· Control is decentralized so that each division has some autonomy to make decisions that affect its customers.

· More flatter organizational structure.

· Management select HR strategies to fit and support its business strategies and organizational structure.

· Designing the Organization: Designing an organization requires choosing an organization structure that will help the company achieves its goals most effectively. The three basic types of organizational structures are

· Bureaucratic Organization:

· A pyramid-shaped organizational structure that consists of hierarches with many levels of management.

· Likely used by companies that adopt a defender business strategy.

· Top-down management approach.

· Based on a functional division of labor.

· Rigid boundaries that separate workers from one another caused by work specializations .

· Specific job description.

· Flat Organization:

· An organization structure that has only few levels of management and emphasizes of decentralization.

· Encourage high employee involvement in business decisions.

· Likely to be divided into units or tams that represent different products, services, or customers.

· Boundaries are reduced because employees work as team.

· Horizontal career bath that cross functions.

· General job description.

· Boundary-less organization:

· An organizational structure that enables an organization to form relationships with customers, suppliers, and/or competitors, to pool organizational resources for mutual benefit or encourage cooperation in an uncertain environment.

· Emphasis on teams whose members may cross-organizational boundaries.

· Share many characteristics of flat organizational structure.

· Work-Flow Analysis: is the process of examining how work creates or adds value to ongoing process in a business. Work-flow analysis looks at how work move from the customer (who initiate the need for work) through the organization (where employees add values to the work in a series of value-creating steps) to the point at which the work leaves the organization as a product or service to the customer. Work-flow analysis can be used to tighten the alignment between employees’’ work and customers’ need.

· Business Process Reengineering: Is a fundamental rethinking and radical redesign of business processes to achieve dramatic improvements in cost, quality, service, and speed. By taking advantage of computer technology and different ways of organizing human resources, the company may be able to reinvent itself.

II. Work: The Group Perspective

A team or a group is a small number of people with complementary skills who work toward common goals for which they hold themselves mutually accountable. In the flat and boundary-less organizational structures, teamwork is an imperative. Teams can vary significantly in size, from 2 to 80 members. Most teams have fewer than 10 members, with 5 to 6 members considered to be an optional team size.

· Self-Managed Teams (SMT):

· Are responsible for producing an entire product, a component, or ongoing service.

· In most cases, SMT members are cross-trained on different tasks assigned to the team.

· Members of SMT have many managerial duties

· Work scheduling.

· Selecting work methods.

· Ordering materials.

· Evaluating performance.

· Disciplining team members.

· HRM practices are likely to change in the following ways when SMTs are established:

· Peers, rather than supervisors, are likely to evaluate individual employee performance.

· Pay practice are likely to shift from pay based on seniority or individual performance to pay focused on team performance (bonuses for example).

· Rather than being based solely on input from managers and HR staff, decisions on new hires may include a decisive amount of input from team members.

· Teams’ leaders are likely to step forward and identify themselves.

· Shared leadership practice among team members.

· Because team members often initially lack the skills necessary for the team to function successfully, it may take several years for an SMT to become fully operational. A company can hasten this evaluation by using its HR department to train employees in different skills:

· Technical Skills.

· Administrative Skills.

· Interpersonal Skills.

· Problem-Solving Team: A team consisting of volunteers from a unit or department who meet one or two hours per week to discuss quality improvement, cost reduction, or improvement in the work environment.

· The special-Purpose team: A team or task force consisting of workers who span functional or organizational boundaries and whose purpose is to examine complex issues. For example, introducing a new technology, improving the quality of a work process that span several functional units, or encouraging cooperation between labor and management in a unionized setting.

· The Virtual Team: A team that relies on interactive technology to work together when separated by physical distance.

III. Work: The Individual Perspective

Motivation can be defined as that which energize, direct, and sustains human behavior. In HRM, the term refers to a person’s desire to do the best possible job or to exert the maximum effort to preform assigned tasks. Motivation theories seeks to explain why employees are more motivated by and satisfied with one type of work than another. It is essential that managers have a basic understanding of work motivation because highly motivated employees are more likely to produce a super-quality product or service than employees who lack motivation.

· Two-Factor Theory: The two-factor theory of motivation, developed by Frederic Herzberg, attempts to identify and explain the factors that employee find satisfying and dissatisfying about their jobs.

· According to Herzberg, there are two set of factors that motive employees:

· Motivators: are internal job factors that lead to job satisfaction and higher motivation. In the absence of motivators, employees will probably not be satisfied with their work or motivated to perform up their potential. Some examples of motivators factors are:

· The work itself.

· Achievement.

· Recognition.

· Responsibility.

· Opportunities of advancement.

· Hygiene or Maintenance : are external factors to the job, they are located in the work environment. The absence of hygiene factor can lead to active dissatisfaction and demotivation and, in extreme situations, to avoidance of work altogether. Hygiene factors include:

· Company policies.

· Working conditions.

· Job security.

· Salary.

· Employee benefits.

· Relationship with supervisors and managers.

· Relationship with coworkers.

· Relationship with subordinates.

· According to Herzberg, if management provides the appropriate hygiene factors, employees will not be dissatisfied with their jobs, but neither will they be motivated to preform at their full potential. To motivate workers, management must provide some motivators.

· Work Adjustment Theory: Since every worker has unique needs and abilities, the work adjustment theory suggests that employees’ motivation levels and job satisfaction depend on the fit between their needs and abilities and the characteristic of the job and the organization.

· Goal-Setting Theory: This developed by Edwin Locke, suggests that employees’ goals help to explain motivation and job performance. According to Locke, managers should apply this theory taking into mind the following:

· Goals should be clear and specific.

· Difficult goals yet attainable.

· In many cases, employees’ self-established goals motiving them more than managerial-assigned goals.

· Using feedback as a source to increase employees’ motivation.

· Job Characteristic Theory: Developed by Richard Hackman and Greg Oldham, job characteristic theory states that employee will be more motivated to work and more satisfied with their jobs to the extent that jobs contain core characteristics. These core job characteristics create conditions that allow employees to experience critical psychological states that are related to beneficial work outcomes, including high work motivation. The strength of this theory is determined by the intensity of the individual employee’s need for growth.

· Five core job characteristics activate three critical psychological states. The core job characteristics are:

· Skill variety: The degree to which job requires the person to do different things and involves the use of number of different skills, abilities, and talents.

· Task Identity: The degree to which a person can do the job form beginning to end with a visible outcome.

· Task signification: The degree to which the job has a significant impact on others (both inside and outside the organization).

· Autonomy: The amount of freedom, independence, and decision the employee has on the job.

· Feedback: The degree to which the job provides the employee with clear and direct information about job outcomes performance.

· The three critical psychological states affected by those core characteristics are:

· Experienced meaningfulness: The extent to which the employee experience the work as important, valuable, and worthwhile.

· Experienced responsibility: The degree to which the employee feels personally responsible for the result of the work.

· Knowledge of results: The degree to which the employee understand on a regular basis how effectively s/he is performing the job.

· Skill variety, task identity, and task significant are all linked to experienced meaningfulness. Autonomy is related to experienced responsibility. Feedback is related to knowledge of results.

· A job characteristics that enable an employee to experience all three critical psychological states provides high internal work motivation, high quality work performance, high satisfaction with the work, and low turnover and absenteeism.

IV. Designing Jobs and Conducting Job Analysis

All the theories of employee motivation suggest that jobs can be designed to increase motivations and performance.

· Job Design: Job design is the process of organizing work into the tasks required to perform a specific job. There are three important influences of job design. Work-flow analysis, Business strategy, and Organizational structure. There are five approaches to job design:

· Work Simplification:

· Work simplification assumes that work can be broken into simple, repetitive tasks that maximize efficiency.

· This approach to job design assigns most of the thinking aspects of work to managers and supervisors, while giving the employee a narrowly defined task to perform.

· Work simplification can utilize labor effectively to produce a large amount of standardized product.

· This approach can be efficient in a stable environments but less effective in a changing environment where customers’ demands custom-built product of high quality.

· Leads to high-level turnover and low level of satisfaction.

· Does not provide value to customers.

· Job Enlargement:

· Job enlargement is the process of expanding a job’s duties.

· Used to redesign jobs to reduce fatigue and boredom among workers performing simplified and highly specialized work.

· Job Rotation:

· Job rotation is the process of rotating workers among different narrowly defined tasks without disrupting the flow of work.

· Used to redesign jobs to reduce fatigue and boredom among workers performing simplified and highly specialized work.

· Job Enrichment:

· Job enrichment is the process of putting specialized tasks back together so that one person is responsible for producing a whole product or an entire service.

· This approach is directly applies job characteristics theory.

· Team-Based Job Designs:

· This approach focus on giving a team, rather than individual, a whole and meaningful piece of work to do.

· Team members are empowered to decide among themselves how to accomplish the work.

· Likely to be used in flat and boundary-less organizational structure.

· Job Analysis: is the systematic process of collecting information used to make decisions about jobs. Job analysis identifies the tasks, duties, and responsibility of a particular job. A task is a basic element of work that is a logical and necessary step in performing a job duty. A duty consists of one or more tasks that constitute a significant activity performed in a job. A responsibility is one of several duties that identify and describe the major purpose or reason for the job’s existence.

· Methods of Gathering Job Information:

· Interviews

· Observation

· Diaries

· Questionnaires

· Internet-based data collection

· The uses of job analysis:

· Legal Purpose

· Recruitment

· Selection

· Performance appraisals

· Compensation

· Training and career development

· Job Description: Job description is a summary statement of the information collected in the job-analysis process. A written document identifies, defines, and describes a job in terms of its duties, responsibilities, working conditions, and specification. Job description can be general or specific.

· Elements of job description:

· Identification information

· Job title

· Location

· Sources of job analysis information

· Job Summary

· Short statement that summarizes the job’s duties, responsibilities, and place in organizational structure.

· Job duties and responsibility

· Explain what is done on the job, how it is done, and why it is done.

· Often lists the job’s three to five most important responsibilities.

· Job specifications and minimum qualifications

· Job specification lists the workers knowledge, abilities, and skills (KSAs) that is needed to perform the job.

· Minimum qualification are the basic standards a job applicant must have achieved to be considered for the job.