Introduction
Almost all entities, be they business organizations or government bodies, grapple with the questions of how much organizational control, and in inverse proportion, how much individual freedom. There is no simple answer to these questions as the variables involved in the functioning of these entities are usually complex and involve human, material and financial resources. To make optimum use of these resources for the highest possible profits or the best possible results and services often needs a mix of both organizational control and individual freedom.
What is organizational control?
Organizational control occurs when the top management has the major role in most functions of the company such as decision making, evaluating the performances, managing the resources etc. Companies with larger revenues tend to be more centralized.
What is individual freedom?
Individual freedom is present in an organization when employees at all
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It gives rise to individual creativity within acceptable limits of trial and error. Such a development of the skills and talents of employees also evolves a great degree of self-confidence. These employees become invaluable assets of the organization as they are well versed with the organizational goals, both short term and long term.
Nevertheless, top management has the inevitable responsibility of training and preparing employees on how to use individual freedom. Having individual freedom is meaningless if the employees are not prepared and trained to use it in the right direction.
5. Ownership of decisions and achievements
Individual freedom results in employees taking ownership of decisions and the resulting achievements. On the contrary, centralized organizational decisions do not crown the rank and file employees with a sense of achievement. Such a sense of achievement is essential to generate loyalty among employees
6. The closed
The assignment will seek to explore the extent to which team work leads to empowerment. An organisation can only achieve its fullest potential if its’ employees are motivated towards doing so. Team work is an excellent s strategy which can be adopted in today’s labour market; however, this strategy can be more effective if its employees are empowered to make decisions. CLMS 2006M1:U4:6 describe empowerment as being associated with some redistribution of power. It can be argued that teamwork leads to autonomy to make decisions (excluding some corporate level decisions). This not only s...
This method also empowered the employees giving them an opportunity to increase their skill levels and an opportuni...
Management control strategy is not a one dimensional formulae of labour controlling, other than controlling employees, it is also about exploiting employees' discretionary effort and creativity as a prime interest. In the Webboys article, Barrett (2004: 787) demonstrated how different strategies have been manipulated separately and simultaneously to control the labour process of developing primary software. This essay is going to investigate various directions of management strategies, which incorporate with radical approaches of control in response to the dilemma between offset the notions between "direct control" and "responsible autonomy dichotomy" (Friedman in Barrett 2004: 38). Based on the argument that there is "no best way" (Hyman in Barrett 2004: 38) of management strategies, which Barret contend in the Webboyz case study. This essay is concerned that autonomy can never be fully implemented without direct control. Furthermore, we can never separate the various management strategies fads with their perpetual aim- controlling employees to achieve the best result. I will examine the particular approaches of classical scientific management has been applied to the fast food industry, in terms of controlling by financial incentives, rigid task design. Therefore, team is sought to be a "substitute for a more indirect forms of integration and supervision."(Fulop and Linstead1999:220)
In my opinion, I do believe in free agency. I think in this day in age things are changing, as they do all the time. The people in the world today are all worried about being ahead of the competition, and in order to do that you have to be a step ahead of your competition. This means you need the best in the business, or certain individuals to get the job done. I don’t think that this can be done by just an individual though. I think
I believe that managers should capitalize on the uniqueness of each employee. You need to discover the abilities of each employee and integrate them into your system. By doing this, you can turn their talent into performance. This may require constantly tweaking roles to capitalize on the uniqueness of each person. I believe in sometimes looking outside of the box.
An example of a company that found success by giving employees autonomy is a start-up company by the name of Bellhops. Bellhops allows employees to make their own schedules, choose the people they would like to work with, and even allows them to turn down a job. Additionally, in part of these liberating policies they have had an increase of employees from 2,000 to 10,000. Therefore, autonomy theory style management has really been a success for the Bellhops company and their employees are very satisfied (INC.).
Companies that apply autonomy in their businesses have advances in their jobs. Employees will be able to breathe in work because having autonomy will let workers do their job in peace and willingly. Pink mentions, "Zappos doesn 't monitor its customer service employees ' call times or require them to use scripts. The reps handle calls the way they want. Their job is to serve the customer well; how they do it is up to them” (Pink 102). This shows that some companies would rather give their employees freedom than a totalitarian environment. When employees feel free they have a positive attitude, which will reflect on their work ethic. In fact Pink also mentions that "... Zappos consistently ranks as one of the best companies for customer service in the United States...” (103). This is in indicator that autonomy worked for Zappos and made them surpass their rival companies that did not use autonomy in their field of work. Autonomy doesn’t let excessive routine into work and makes humans into workers that strive for
TEOCO was known to have a unique employee ownership where all employees have a responsibility to participate and control the company’s matters. This is also referring as “employee empowerment” which describes the ability to give employees the power and autonomy to control and make decision regarding their organizational tasks. However, what would happen to the CEO’s power if authorities are given to all employees? The case describes TEOCO’s slogan as “We’ll take care of our employees, they’ll take care of our clients, and that will take care of the business.” (Calo et al., n.d.) If Atul gave all his employees the power to control the organization, it was likely that the relationship and boundaries between the upper and lower levels would become broken. Even though TEOCO successfully acquired a larger target company like TTI Telecom, the impact on the culture of employee empowerment/ownership and TEOCO’s strategic HR policy would even pose a greater challenge because TEOCO had to manage another 300 employees from a different
We can define freedom in a positive or a negative manner. The former would be related to self-realization and being free from internal obstacles, while the latter definition concentrates on being free from external constraints, that is no one interfere with our freedom, at least not arbitrarily, since we need some rules to live in a society. In this essay, I will assume a negative concept. Philosophic value may be split into two types of value. Non-independent value, which is specific instrumental value. If something has non-independent value, it is valuable in re...
...f skills and abilities that form different beliefs and opinions among its members. These diverse views lead to an increase in creativity. An increase in creativity allows the organization the flexibility to adjust to new situations.
Management maintains the right to direct all business activities. In order to retain as much authority as possible in the direction of the workplace, management has sought to include certain provisions in collective bargaining agreements. Management has no rights over individual people within the organization, but does maintain rights to property, which are real and legally enforceable. Management has sole discretion and flexibility in deployment and discipline issues and maintains the right to assign measures to people within the compa...
In conclusion to this essay on “what is autonomy”, I think that some people may argue that autonomy, competence, freedom, self-determination and self-respect have a lot of pro’s and con’s. These are values that give us meaning to our life whether it is done autonomously or not. A person that has self-respect will sooner or later realize that they also have freedom to make choices that are autonomous. These values will always remain related to each other somehow, so therefore, separating an autonomous person, a self-determined person and a freedom person will never exist.
Employee empowerment can be described as giving employees' accountability and ability to make choices about their work without managerial authorization. Good managers are expected to assist employees to improve job success by supporting, training, leading and giving advice. Employee empowerment can increase employees' motivation, job satisfaction, and loyalty to their companies. The power that managers comprise should now be shared with employees with confidence, assertion, inspiration, and support. Work decisions and the ability to control an individual’s amount of work are now being relied upon at lower-level management positions (Fragoso, 1999). Groups of empowered employees with little or no supervision are now being formed and these groups are being called self-managed teams. These groups can now solve work problems, make choices on schedules and operations, learn to do other employees’ jobs, and are held accountable for the quality of their finished products.
Managers have a degree of choice in how they deal with their employees. (Purcell, 1987) Some may see them as a commodity while others may see them as an important and valuable resource needing to be developed. (Purcell, 1987) Managerial prerogative is defined by Bray, Waring and Cooper (2011: pg 332) as “those areas of decision-making within an organization over which managers claim to have an unfettered right to decide as they see fit.” It is important to define managerial prerogative so that we can establish whether the legislation has increased or diminished it. Defining managerial prerogative is also important as we look at the different managerial styles and strategies and observe if they play any role in increasing or minimizing managerial prerogative. Managers will always have some degree of control over their employees because most of the day to day tasks in the workplace such as rules and procedures of the workplace, tasks, and which employee performs which tasks are decisions made by the manager without consultation with employees and unions. (Bray, Waring and Cooper, 2011) The laws and regulations surrounding managerial prerogative have only seemed to rule in favour of employers being the sole decision makers in an organisation and decrease the amount of bargaining power unions and employees have towards pay and conditions. (Bray and Waring, 2006)
“Freedom is having autonomy over one’s daily work” (Williams, 2017, p. 140). It allows for workers to have a sense of belonging and to make decisions that affect their work daily. For example, at Atlas, we operate on schedules with in departments to accomplish work most efficiently throughout the day. However, workers are not assigned to specific job function, they asses the priorities in each area and make the decision to work where they are going to be most productive. At times, redirection is required and we use it as a training opportunity. We do everything we can to avoid micromanaging our staff as we cannot afford for someone to not to be part of the work