Organization Behavior:

2- Organization: social entity that is goal directed, designed as

deliberately structured and coordinated activity system, and are linked to
the external environment

The key element of an organization is not buildings, or policies and

procedure, but people and their relationships with one another.

3- Organizations exist when people interact with one another to perform

essential functions that help attain goals.

4- Managers deliberately structure and coordinate organizational

resources to achieve organization's purpose, however (even though) work
may be structured into separate departments or sets of activities.

Organizations are striving for horizontal co-ordinations.

5- Boundaries between apartments as well as between organizations are

becoming more flexible and diffuse as companies face the need to
respond to changes in the external environment more rapidly.

6- Importance of organizations:
- bring together resources to achieve desired goals of outcomes.
- produce goods and services efficiently:
1-Standard of living: a country's output of goods and services
that people can buy with the money they have.
2-Bussiness plays a key role in determining our quality of life.

7- By providing jobs, goods & services.

• Quality of life: refers to: general level of human happiness based

on: (life expectancy, educational standards, health, sanitation, and
leisure time).
• Creating quality of life is not without risks; risk is the potential to
lose time and money without accomplishing organizational goals.
• Facilitate innovation.
• Use modern manufacturing and information technology.
• Adapt to and influence a changing environment.
• Create value for stakeholders.
• Accommodate challenges of diversity ethics, motivation... etc.
8- Perspectives on organizations:
Two important perspectives:
1- Open system 2- Organizational configuration framework

1- Open system:
- must interact with the environment to service.
- Both consume resources and export resources to the environment.
- internal efficiency is just one issue, it has to find resources, interpret and
act on environmental change, dispose of output and control and
coordinate internal activities in the face of environmental disturbance
and uncertainty.

9- To understand the whole organization we must view it as a system: a

set of interacting elements that require transform inputs from the
environment and discharge outputs to external environment.

10-
Transform Products
Input From Output &
Processes Services
Product
Maintenance
Boundary Boundary
Adaptation Subsystems
Spanning Spanning
Managemen
t
Environment

11- Organization configuration: various parts of organizations are

designed to perform the key subsystem functions.

- One frame work that serves organization has live parts:

. Technical core
. Top management
. Middle management
. Technical support &
. Administrative support

12- Dimensions of organization design: Organizational dimensions fall

into two types: structural and contextual.
- Structural: provide labels to describe the internal characteristics of an
organization. They provide a basis for measuring and comparing
organizations.
13- Contextual Dimensions: characterize the whole organization; size,
technology, environment, goals. They describe the organization setting
that that influences and shapes the structural dimensions.

- It can be envisioned as a set of overlapping elements that underlie an

organizations structure and work processes.

14-Interacting structural and contextual dimensions of organization

design:

Environme
nt Goals and Strategy

Structure
Size

Culture
Technology

The
organization

- Formalization
- Specialization
- Hierarchy of authority
- Centralization
- Professionalism
- Personnel ratios

15- Structural dimensions:

1- Formalization: pertains amount of written documents include
(procedures, job descriptions, regulations, and policy manuals) that
describe behavior and activities.
- It's measured by counting the number of pages within organization
- Question: Do you consider it a "toe" or a "we sign"?

16-
2- Specialization: is the degree to which tasks are subdivided into
separate jobs.
3- Hierarchy of authority: describes who reports to whom and the span of
control for each manager.
4- Centralization: refers to the hierarchical levels that have authority to
make a decision.
5- Professionalism: Is a level of formal education and training of
employees.
6- Personnel Ratios.

17- Contextual Dimensions:

1- Size: number of people in the organization.
2- Organizational technology: tools, techniques, and actions used to
transform input into output.
3- Environment: all elements outside the boundary of the organization.
The key elements include (the industry, government, customers,
suppliers, and the financial community).

18-
4- The organization goals and strategy: define the purpose and the
competitive techniques that set it apart from other organizations.
5- Organization Culture: underlying set of key values, beliefs,
understandings, and norms shared by employees.

- Attitude reflects type of leadership

- The eleven contextual and structural dimensions are interdependent.

20- Performance and effectiveness outcomes:

- The whole point of understanding varying perspectives and structural
and contextual dimensions is to design the organization in such a way as
to achieve high performance and effectiveness.

21- Contemporary organization design: To a great extent managers and

organizations are still imprinted with hierarchical, bureaucratic approach
that arose more than century ago.

- Yet the challenges presented by today's environment: Global

competitiveness, diversity, ethical concerns, rapid advances in
technology, rise of e-business, shift.

22- For knowledge & information as organization's most important form

of capital and the growing expectations of workers for meaningful work
and opportunities for personal and professional growth: call for
dramatically different responses from people and organization.

23- The perspectives of the past don't provide a road map for navigating
the world of business today.
- Today managers must design and orchestrate new responses for a
dramatically new world.

24- The environment for today's companies is anything but stable, which
means that relationships in complex adaptive systems are non-linear and
made of numerous interdependent and divergent choices that create
uncertainties, unpredictability.

25- Managers can't measure, predict, and control in traditional way the
unfolding drama inside or outside the organization.
- Many organizations are shifting to flexible, decentralized structures that
emphasize horizontal collaboration and widespread information sharing.

26- In addition boundaries are becoming diffuse as even competitors

(coo-petition) from partnerships to compete globally, Sometimes joining
in virtual or modular organizations.

27- In the new environment managers are redesigning their companies

towards learning organizations ( that promotes communication and
collaboration so that everyone is engaged in identifying and solving
problems , enabling the organization to continuously experiment, improve
and increase it's capability.

28- The learning organization is based on equality, open information,

little hierarchy and a culture that encourages adaptability and
participation, enabling ideas to bubble up from anywhere that can help
organization seize opportunities and handle crises.
* In a learning organization the essential value is problem solving, as
opposed to traditional organizations designed for efficient performance.

29- Efficient performance versus the learning organization as managers

struggle toward the learning organization they are finding that specific
dimensions of the organization has to change:
a) From vertical to horizontal structure: (traditionally, the most common
organization structure has been one).

30- Activities are grouped together by common work from the bottom to
the top of the organization.
Generally, little coordination occurs across functional depts. And the
whole organization is coordinated and controlled through vertical
hierarchy.
31-With Decision- Making authority residing at upper – level managers.
This structure could be quite effective. It promotes efficient production
in- depth skill development, and the hierarchy of authority provides a
sensible mechanism for supervision and control in large organizations.

32- However in a rabidly changing environment, the hierarchy becomes

overloaded, top executives are not able to respond rapidly enough to
problems or opportunities.

1-1- In the learning organization

1- The vertical structure: that creates distance between top management
and technical core is disbanded.
2- Structure is created around horizontal work flows or processes.
3- The vertical hierarchy is few executives in support functions
dramatically flattened.
- Ownership of processes  teams

1.1- Self-directed teams are the fundamental work unit in learning

organizations.
- Boundaries between functions are practically eliminated.
- From routine tasks, (narrowly defined and controlled by top
management) empowered role allows a person to use his discre.