Organizational Change and Adaptability

Paper Summary:

Organizations must be flexible and adaptable to change if they are to survive in today's rapidly changing and competitive environments. Organizations that remain wed to the past may find themselves being left behind and their very survival threatened. Flexibility and adaptability can only be achieved through the commitment and mindset of the entire organizational culture. This paper examines various ways organizations organize themselves and how managing and leading these organizations play a role in how well these organizations adapt to change in reaching a level of relative equilibrium.

From the Paper:

"From a rational systems perspective, organizations are designed to attain specific goals by organizing in such a way to lead to maximum efficiency in attaining these goals (Scott, 2003). The focus is on organizational principles in achieving predetermined goals. Three early rational theories were Taylor's Scientific Management, Fayol's Administrative Theory, and Weber's Theory of Bureaucracy.
Taylor's Scientific Management was the belief that it was possible through scientific means to analyze tasks performed by individuals and to pick out those procedures that produced a maximum output with the least amount of energy and resources and that after these tasks were identified, they would become the standard performance measures. Taylor introduced an objective method for determining how fast a job should be done. Taylor's solution was to break down the work tasks into its constituent elements or motions so the work would be done in the "one best way" (Taylor, 1912/1970a, p. 85). Taylor also pushed strongly for standardization in the design and use of tools and advocated that each worker be assigned a specific amount of work based on the results of time study (Locke, 1982). Under Taylor's Scientific Management, the focus was on studying the best procedures at the worker level and then implementing these standards; a bottom-up approach to management was the rational (Scott, 2003)."

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