When people come together and have a common goal, an important first need arises, which is to know, at least:
1. what is to be done;
2. who are the most competent people to do those jobs;
3. who should do each of the necessary tasks.
These, of course, are not necessarily the "only" tasks that the group must perform from the point of view of "initiation of actions" that must then be sustained over time (Eric Gaynor Butterfield:
"Organizational Development Congress"; Argentina - 1997). One of the most important tasks is to decide what this total group should do within the context in which it is operating and as said context is changing, the need arises for some people - paradoxically - to do nothing, or rather, spend some of your time thinking about how to do things more effectively and efficiently in order to sustain competitive advantages (Michael Porter:
" The competitive advantage - 1995).
It is fascinating that little attention is paid to the three points that we have referred to initially, which implies that we generally assume “within ourselves” that things can be done “taking into account how events unfold.
This organizational and business practice can be given different names and we associate it with the thought that "melons adapt as the cart moves."
And in fact, if we throw all the melons on top of a cart and then start it, it is obvious that the melons have to be accommodated; our point is that they don't always fit together properly and many of the melons can get lost and hurt in the process.
A dynamic that we have effectively used as an experiential experience of what happens when the different complexities that arise when a group has to achieve objectives are not taken into account, giving an adequate response to at least the three points indicated, is related to what happens when high school students "go out to celebrate Spring day and spend a night camping."
They usually leave in the morning and arrive at the camping site during the day, and they begin to present a series of tasks to develop that usually had not been properly planned.
Someone has to choose the camping site and more precisely the specific site.
Is it convenient to settle on the plain completely or is it better to have a slope? It seems obvious that it is better to do it on the plain, but it turns out that a rain can make installing on a slope more convenient so that the water “runs”.
And you also have to decide who is to set up the tents, who is to cook and who is to be responsible for washing dishes.
Even assuming that all this was planned and developed effectively, all of us who have "camped" know that different deviations from our supposed original plan occur in time.
At the time of cooking many "do not appear", just as after eating we see how many participants move away to avoid washing dishes. Not to mention the need to gather branches to light the fire and the responsibility to extinguish the fire correctly, which is one of the most common causes of forest fire.
So if among people who know each other for a long time and who are in the company of a teacher or professor do not reach an agreement to develop the few tasks that are required in a camp, one can begin to have an idea of the implications that the job has, the design of it, the assignment of jobs and roles in a company where you must also:
1. compete with other contenders (campers are only after having a great time);
2. obtain the necessary financial resources;
3. distribute financial resources in the best possible way, among others.
So what it is about is building an organization so that there is an appropriate organizational design, people occupy jobs with predetermined roles and tasks are performed in a particular way and free will is minimized.
In the end, each of us also make a certain design for our life at work, and we predetermine roles as well as shape in a way that we recognize “as the best” which gives rise to many of our automatic behaviors. which psychologists refer to.
If this is so for us, then
Why can't this be the case for groups of individuals and organizations? We are going to work on this aspect where we have to explore to what extent automatic behaviors in organizations can be very useful on some occasions.
The job and the role are the simplest units of analysis and the organization is the largest unit - in this case -.
Let us begin by sharing what some notable experts have said about the latter, the organizations.
Organizations are actually "social" organisms and bear strong similarities to individual organisms in many of their characteristics regardless of the difference in size as highlighted by the sociologist and philosopher Herbert Spencer ("An autobiography" - 1904): "A social organism is like an individual organism in these essential traits:
- that it grows; that while growing it becomes more complex; and that while becoming complex its parts acquire increasing mutual dependency; and that its life is immense in length compared with the lives of its component units.
In both cases there is increasing integration accompanied by increasing heterogeneity ”.
These words help us to reference ourselves directly with the definition of one of the main dilemmas that organizations live and those that manage them at the top and that has been clearly explained by the President of General Motors Corporation who has been in power the longest. and greater degree of influence had on the fate of the company.
For Alfred Sloan ("My years with GM"; Sidgwick & Jackson - 1965) one of the main dilemmas that organizations and corporations experience in their growth and development process has to do with the choice between "decentralized coordination" or "coordinated decentralization "
And some years later, both Paul Lawrence and Jay Lorsch (“Organizations & Environment”; Harvard - 1967) return to the subject and, leaning on the contributions of evolutionary social theory, define a key aspect of any organization within a similar framework but with different words: the dilemma of dealing with the (necessary) processes of differentiation and integration.
And organizations like organisms have life.
Some may view organizations, companies, entities and institutions as rigid "pyramids"… and when they do so they operate "within said rigidity".
It is unfortunate that within Latin American cultures this thought can prevail among executives, executives, and managers, and also in many entrepreneurs.
A highly structured and rigid type organizational design does not present many opportunities to develop a flexible organization that operates as a living organism. Herbert Spencer in this regard (in "The principles of Sociology" - 1876) makes it clear that a society is actually an organism.
Austrian biologist and philosopher Ludwing von Bertalanffy ("General System Theory" - 1968) suggests that one of the fundamental problems confronting modern society relates to organizations and to the need for a general theory of organizations, which is related strongly with the greatest organizational complexity:
“The fundamental problem today is that of organized complexity. Concepts like those of organization, wholeness, directiveness, teleology, and differentiation are alien to conventional physics. However, they pop up everywhere in the biological, behavioral and social sciences, and are, in fact, indispensable for dealing with living organisms or social groups.
Thus a basic problem posed to modern science is a general theory of organization.
General system theory is, in principle, capable of giving exact definitions for such concepts and, in suitable cases, of putting them to quantitative analysis ”.
Classical theorists such as Frederick Taylor (“Scientific management”; Harper & Row - 1947) and Henry Fayol (“General and industrial management”; Pitman - 1949), among others, dedicated much of their energy to reducing the degree of vulnerability of organizations by foreseeing an organizational structure that they considered to be the most efficient, which contrasts with the perspectives of other experts such as Chester Barnard (The functions of the executive ”; 1938), Philip Selznick (“ TVA and the grass roots ”; 1949), Wilfredo Pareto ("Manual of political economy" - 1906).
What was perceived by Frederick Taylor and Henry Fayol as dysfunctional within companies was observed by Chester Barnard (1938 - already cited) from another perspective since the informal aspects within organizations were for Barnard different mechanisms that allowed adjusting divergences that were presented within the formal system:
“The functions of informal executive organizations are the communication of intangible facts, opinions, suggestions, suspicions, that cannot pass through formal channels without raising issues calling for decisions,
without dissipating dignity and objective authority, and without overloading executive positions; also to minimize excessive claques of political types arising from too great divergence of interests and views; to promote self-discipline of the group; and to make possible the development of important personal influences in the organization. ”
Philip Selznick (1949 - already quoted) has developed a case study in the TVA organization where he has analyzed the contingencies that organizations may be subject to as a result of their interaction with their context, which may even threaten their own existence, to which develops an “antibody” under the name of cooptation that, at the same time that it allows the organization to adapt to changing situations, may on the other hand come to question and put the organization at risk since “a new type of leadership emerges as a consequence of the same cooptation ”:
“Cooptation is the process of absorbing new elements into the leadership or policy-determining structure or fan organization as a means of averting tricks to its stability or existing.
The significance of cooptation for organizational analysis is not simply that there is a change in or a broadening leadership, and that this is an adaptive response, but also that this change is consequential for the character and role of the organization or governing body.
Cooptation results in some constriction of the field of choice available to the organization or leadership in question.
The character of the coopted elements will necessarily shape the modes of action available to the group which has won adaptation at the price of commitment to outside elements ”.
And the consequences of what happens within organizations as a consequence of co-opting society as a whole, is also explained by Selznick and that those interested in the processes of change, efficiency and organizational development must take into account within Latin America because to the strong composition of state contractors that hide under the name of entrepreneurs:
“We shall speak of organizations and organizational practice as weapons when they are used by a power-seeking elite in a manner unrestrained by the constitutonal order of the arena within which the contest takes place.
In this usage, “weapon” is not meant to denote any political tool, but one torn from its normal context and unacceptable to the community as a legitimate mode of action ”.
The aspect of force over persuasion is exemplified in the works of the Italian economist and sociologist Wilfredo Pareto ("Manual of Political Economy" - 1906), stressing that "
a great mistake of these times is to believe that people can be governed only through reasoning, without using force, and without taking into account that force is the very foundation of all social organization ”. And Robert Michels (born in Germany and Italian expert in political science and sociology) also seems to subscribe
("Political Parties" - 1911) to the classic model of organizations by highlighting its strong relationship with the leading "oligarchy":
“It is organization which gives birth to the domination of the elected over the electors, of the mandataries over the mandators, of the delegates over the delegators. Who says organizations, says oligarchy.
Organization implies the tendency to oligarchy. In every organization, whether it be a political party, a professional union, or any other association of the kind, the aristocratic tendency manifests itself very clearly.
The mechanism of the organization, while conferring a solidity of structure, induces serious changes in the organized mass, completely inverting the respective position of the leaders and the led.
As a result of organization, every party or professional union becomes divided into a minority of directors and a majority of directed. ”
Organizations are complex mechanisms made up of many people, and various organization theorists have emphasized cognitive and learning processes that become even more complex as a result of participation by their various members.
The economist of the United States of North America has placed special emphasis on these variables as well as the time factor that is linked to the sustainability of the organization, requiring then to privilege organizational change:
“” The purpose of organizations is to exploit the Fac. That many (virtually all) decisions require the participation of many individuals for their effectiveness. Organizations are a means of achieving the benefits of collective action in situations in which the price system fails ”(“ The limits of organization ”- 1974) and:
“There is one effect on organizations which has no parallel in individuals. An organization is typically composed of changing individuals.
Now any individual generally has access to many communication channels, of which this particular organization is only one.
In particular, education is such a channel. Thus, the organization is getting the benefit of a considerable amount of information which is free to it. Even though the code of the organization may make the internal transmission of such information costly, if there is enough of it, the behavior of the organization will change.
In particular, news items will appear on the organization´s agenda. If we think of education as the primary source of new information, then it is introduced into an organization by its youngest and newest members.
Thus we have the possibility of changes in organizational agenda induced by generational changes ”(“ On the agenda of organizations ”- 1974).
And who better than Herbert Simon to make a distinction between the organization and its organizational participants in addition to noting how limited we are people to make decisions in search of maximum effectiveness and efficiency within organizations:
“The capacity of the human mind for formulating and solving complex problems is very small compared with the size of the problems whose solution is required for objectively rational behavior in the real world” (“Rationality and administrative decision making” - 1957) and also:
“Since an organization is not an organism the only memory it possesses, in the proper sense of the term, is the collective memory of its participants.
This is insufficient for organization purposes, first, because what is in one man´s mind is not necessarily available to other members of the organization, and, second, because when an individual leaves an organization the organization loses that part of its “memory” ("Administrative behavior" - 1945).
Max Weber ("The theory of social an economic organization"; Free Press - 1947) has done an extraordinary job uniting the different units of analysis from the person, the organization and even society, but possibly one of his few inattentions has to do with a vital aspect within companies and entities that is related to the interests of an employee regarding the task they perform:
“The theory of formal organizations has been impeded by a fixation on Max Weber's theory of bureaucracy, a theoretical orientation that recognizes purpose only at the apex of an organization and ignores the problem of connecting extrinsic interests of an employee to job performance.
Also ignored are the free-rider problems created as externalities when government provides goods and services not contingent on an individual's own contribution.
The fixation on bureaucratic theory is part of a broader problem: Theoretical questions concerning social organization have seldom been couched in terms of how to best organize action in order to accomplish a specific task without generating undesirable externalities ”
(James S. Coleman: "Foundations of social theory" - 1990).
This last thought mentioned by James S. Coleman regarding the rewards offered by different government entities to their organizational participants where the payments made are not related to the benefits received from the members, is a factor that is not taken into account by most of political leaders within Latin American cultures.
This has produced major imbalances with significant dysfunctional consequences where many unemployed people prefer to work in these public bodies or receive their gifts for not working than fulfilling work commitments within national private companies, as in the case of the Argentine Republic.
Possibly one of the most devastating reasons for the enormous economic deterioration of the Argentine Republic that has no history in any other country on the planet (it belonged to the 10 richest nations until mid-1940 with development indicators similar to those of New Zealand, Australia and Canada with very little unemployment, while at present it is positioned economically and at levels of poverty below the first 40 or 50 nations).
And this is precisely where the design of work in organizations, the definitions of positions and roles, and the rewards in direct relation to levels of productivity, become vital elements in order to have a vigorous organization.
It is common for both within government and universities to criticize notable experts in work design, positions and organizational roles (such as Frederick Taylor and Henry Fayol among others) without taking into account at least the huge contribution - especially the first one - to reward organizational participants based on their output.
Frederick Taylor's talk to a professional association of Engineers in the United States of America at the beginning of the last century where it shows that there are very significant differences between two people doing the same job, in this case the work of "shoveling", is observed pejoratively by many Latin American observers and professionals who in this way ignore the proverb "There is nothing more unfair than treating - and rewarding - different people" (Eric Gaynor Butterfield: "Congress of Organizational Development", Argentina - 2001).
Daniel R. Ilgen & John R. Hollenbeck in “The structure of work: Job design and roles” (in Handbook of Industrial and Organizational Psychology, Volume 2; editors Marvin D. Dunnette & Leaetta M. Hough - Consulting Psychologists Press - 1991) highlight that “Organizations are structured systems.
Practically all large organizations specify and legitimize their structure by developing organizational charts with a certain degree of elaboration which are communicated to all the parties involved.
We can say that at the organizational level the elements belonging to the structure can be defined in terms of a certain number of companies, divisions, plants, departments, or some other type of position conglomerate.
These different elements are then chained by association rules that are typically based on authority relationships.
That is why at a level of abstraction, organizational structures are defined in terms of a set of elements and a set of associative rules that describe the nature of the different relationships between the elements. ”
The literature has specialized in finding different systems and sub-systems within organizations (as is the case among others by D. Katz & R. Kahn: “The social psychology of organizations”; John Wiley - 1978) but we can say that Two main groups of systems emerge that could be derived from:
1. system that relates to "the task"; and
2. the "social" system.
Eric Trist (“Organizational choice”; Tavistock - 1963) and the Tavistock Institute have been leaders in this regard through many of their pioneering work in behavioral sciences within organizations, being known under the name of “socio-technical school ”
Systems that focus on the task have an organizational perspective oriented to privilege the functions that must be carried out, which in turn are broken down into tasks and these are commonly grouped into what are usually jobs.
In this way, the main unit of analysis of the organizational structure has to do with the definition of said positions and roles with assignment of tasks.
An example of those who privilege this perspective is that of company managers and consultants who place special emphasis on the organizational structure of the company, dedicating much of their time to "organizational charts".
Many of the "reorganization" works that have been carried out within companies in Latin American cultures have been carried out under this scheme where the organization chart represented the cornerstone on which "the new building" was built.
However, it is unfortunate that this initially deductive approach was discontinued towards the lower levels of the organization, whose organizational participants also need to be effective in contributing to organizational effectiveness.
In general, the organization charts were accompanied by a “Manual of Description of Functions and Responsibilities” that did not go beyond the supervisor's level and it was very frequent to also find “Procedures Manuals” that did not always include precise detail regarding “what” should be done and "how" the task should be done.
Of course, under this perspective, due consideration is not usually given to the interrelationships between the different people who occupy the different positions and roles within the organization.
Daniel R. Ilgen & John R. Hollenbeck in “The structure of work: Job design and roles” (in Handbook of Industrial and Organizational Psychology, Volume 2; editors Marvin D. Dunnette & Leaetta M. Hough - Consulting Psychologists Press - 1991)
They make special emphasis of the little interest that in this perspective is usually given to the interrelationships between the different units and also alert us to the fact that this system tends to strengthen the hierarchical pyramidal organization that favors developing links between positions to consolidate a system of control with clear and defined lines of authority and responsibility: “The basic unit of analysis in the structure is that of jobs or positions.
The relationships among units in such systems often get far less attention than the unit themselves.
To the extent that the relationships are delineated, they are often dictated by the coordination requirements among positions for the accomplishment of general tasks or goals.
Relationships among jobs or positions are also dictated by power and authority differences among positions linked to maintain control through lines of authority and responsibility. ”
What are the tasks that are carried out in organizations? They are many and varied and depend largely on the size of the organization, its technology, the ratio of employees to workers, the degree of competitiveness required for the organization to survive and even grow, the stage the organization is in, and many other additional elements.
CJ Thachenkary & DW Conrath (“The office activities in two organizations” - 1982) identified a typology of tasks, differentiating how management and non-managers dedicate their time to each of them. It is included below:
1. Advising, advising, helping, recommending, solving problems, giving instructions and acting as a "bond";
2. Doing the accounting and bookkeeping, calculating, inventorying and invoicing;
3. Deciding, authorizing and giving approval;
4. Evaluating, auditing, controlling and coordinating;
5. Completing forms, filing, making records
6. General administration and “stationery” work;
7. Human Relations, supervising, evaluating performance, assigning personnel, motivating;
8. Informing and reporting;
9. Participating in formal informational meetings;
10. Making orders, invoices and other receipts;
11. Planning, budgeting, analyzing;
12. Arranging and scheduling meetings as well as meetings and appointments;
13. Selling, convincing, persuading, advertising;
14. Typing, transcribing, copying, writing.
Managers tend to spend more time on activities included in items 7., 4., 11., 1., 3., and 13 in that order and do not spend any time on tasks in groups 5., 10., and 14.
On the other hand, non-managers tend to spend more time on those included in items 2., 4., 5., 7., and 12. in that order and do not spend any time on tasks in groups 6. and 9.
In carrying out different tasks, there are advantages and disadvantages depending on whether they are carried out by man or by machines, as demonstrated by GA Bekey: “The human operator in control systems” (Systems psychology - 1970) who has been based on work Lyman & Fogel original - 1961.
In tasks related to "information sensitivity", people are able to effectively unmask signals when overlapping noises are given and are also in a position to acquire and report "incidental" information towards primary activity.
In addition it is not so subject to jams. On the other hand, the machines are limited in handling certain complexities and unexpected results.
In information processing tasks people seem to be in a better position to recognize and make use of information, while machines generally have little or no perceptual constancy, nor do they have the ability of people to recognize similarities of patterns. within spatial or temporal domains.
People are in a good position to make inductive decisions in new situations and can also make generalizations of little information, compared to machines that have virtually no capacity for the development of inductive or creative functions.
People are not very strong in terms of computational information processing activities and they are not always accurate, also characterized by the fact that the optimal strategies of game theory cannot be achieved "under routine".
The information processing capacity of human channels is limited, while machines have practically no limit.
Furthermore, people's short-term memory is relatively poor, while in the case of machines it is excellent, as are the times of access to information.
The machines offer reliability advantages over repetitive operation related to information processing.
As for the transmission of information, people can tolerate low rates and forces and generally only for short periods or periods compared to the machines that in the development of tasks can do it withstanding great forces and for long periods.
People are not as efficient as machines in tracking processes where frequent reprogramming is required.
In this transmission of information, people tend to deteriorate our performance and productivity due to different reasons such as boredom, fatigue or distraction, and only higher performance is recovered after a period of rest compared to machines whose behavior decreases very little. over time but on the other hand they require maintenance and quality control is necessary.
Regarding the properties and economic characteristics, people are relatively inexpensive for the levels of complexity available and there is also a great offer of them, but on the other hand they require training while complexity and the supply of the machines are only Limited by their cost and time, they are also characterized by the fact that their productivity is built “inside” the machine itself.
The economic properties of people are characterized by being light in weight, small in size in relation to the task to be carried out and by having power requirements of less than 100 watts, while machines for some similar complexity in As for the task, it must require heavier elements, greater power and also resources for cooling.
In relation to maintenance, people have to require a support system for their own lives, while machines tend to see their maintenance problems increase in a way that is totally disproportionate to their complexity.
People are emotional and interested in their personal survival while machines are non-personal and can produce without any distraction.
There are some related differences between who have been the professions that have studied the Tasks and who have done it with the Roles.
Both engineers and psychologists have initially focused on Tasks by trying to make descriptions of them and by trying to develop taxonomies of them. Identifying what needs to be done within each task, the knowledge, skills and abilities that are required of it are also very important to design the tasks as well as to redesign them.
Due to the magnitude of organizational participants, companies must develop a "salary and compensation grid" where tasks must be rewarded not only in relation to themselves but also in relation to other tasks.
Adams (1961) has been a promoter of the theory of motivation based on equity and shows how the compensations must take into account not only the balance of a person's contributions and their respective rewards, but also to what extent such a relationship for a person of contributions and rewards is related to that of "other" referents.
The definition of the Task is a vitally important requirement in order to later take into account the person who has to carry it out. And also the variable "time" and "change" must be taken into account.
Everyone within organizations can live with a difficult past and perhaps also with a hard present, but they must hope to improve (Eric Gaynor Butterfield: "Congress of Organizational Development"; Buenos Aires - 2003).
This means that managers and people at the top of the organization must plan how changes in tasks have to impact their staff, and vice versa.
E. Fleishman & M. Quaintance (“Taxonomies of human performance”;
Academia Press - 1984) exerted an enormous effort to develop a taxonomy of tasks but this strong work showed that perhaps the efforts should be channeled in a different direction as Daniel R. Ilgen & John R. Hollenbeck point out in “The structure of work: Job design and roles ”(already quoted):“ Like all taxonomic systems, cough for describing and analyzing jobs are arbitrary, with their value depending on the extent to which they are useful for the purposes to which they are applied.
Ideally, one taxonomic system for classifying jobs could be devised that would meet everyone's needs for information about jobs. Unfortunately, no such system exists, nor is one likely to emerge in the near future. Fleishman´s monumental work (summarized in Fleischman & Quaintance, 1984)
Began as an attempt to develop an overarching taxonomy of tasks that would provide a way to classify all kind of tasks, especially those that are an integral part of most jobs in the workplace.
This broad-based effort led to the conclusion that more than one taxonomic system was necessary to capture the important dimensions of tasks and meet the needs of the various constituencies interested in knowledge about tasks.
The five taxonomic systems Fleishman and Quaintance settled on wer5e the (a) criterion measures approach, (b) information-theoretic approach, (c) task-strategies approach, (d) ability requirement approach, and (e) task characteristics approach.
The same conclusion - that it is impossible to design one broad taxonomic system that meets the wide range of purposes that exist for its use - is equally relevant at the aggregate level of jobs as it is for tasks. The demands on a job taxonomic system are simply too diverse to be met by one system. ”
Daniel R. Ilgen & John R. Hollenbeck in “The structure of work: Job design and roles” (already cited) suggest that it is possible that the wide variety of approaches (mainly three) regarding Tasks may perhaps be due to the existence from different and diverse groups, one of which is made up of - according to the authors - the industrial engineers and the "human factors" who have been mainly interested in the design of the Tasks and then with the way or form in which they would have to distribute these tasks among everyone.
This approach is characterized by both authors as deductive since it is a normative theory regarding how the Tasks should be designed taking into account mainly the physical aspects in the search to achieve efficiency and higher performance.
The second approach falls under what is known as “job analysis”, which has more to do with the development of descriptive taxonomies with respect to existing jobs, which is frequently done through careful observations of the These are complemented by measurements for the different phases related to the job, such as selection, placement of personnel, and evaluation.
From a methodological point of view, this perspective differs from the previous one in that it is basically inductive since it is based on the collection of specific information and from there it looks for how performance can be improved. Eric Gaynor Butterfield ("Organization and Methods Workshop";
Buenos Aires - 1993) highlights that this approach has been very common in the practices of consultants involved in company reorganization processes until the end of the 70s of the last century, which was complemented by the development and “implementation” of a Manual of Functions and Responsibilities, and a Procedures Manual, among others. Eric Gaynor B. points out that this approach privileges what is known as “work simplification” or “work improvement”, which were practices aimed at simplifying work through new procedures, but one of its limitations is that under this practice it is generally It is not privileged to consider all the aspects that show inter-relationships between the different departments, along with their dysfunctionalities.
The orientation was towards improving the procedures “within” each of the departments and managements independently, and it was assumed that the existence of an Organization and Methods department was sufficient to take care of the rest, something that in practice did not turn out to be enough.
Gaynor shows that in many cases it has been much more efficient to work under the perspective of a “tabula rasa” starting from scratch where the perspective of the consultant and the change agent is oriented rather to the elimination of tasks and even processes, something that re-engineering was done many years later.
The Tasks have been subject to a third approach that relates to the motivational aspect that is based on the assumption that the skills to do the job exist anyway and can be determined by one.
Here the focus is on the desire of the organizational participant to carry out the work by investing time, effort, energy and resources for a certain prolonged period of time, for which those who propose this approach privilege the needs, values and preferences of people.
This component suggests that this third perspective is deductive since it is of a normative type since in its search for how to design tasks to achieve the most effective performance, it takes into account the motivation of the incumbent, this type of motivation usually being associated with what is known under the name of "intrinsic motivation" because it has more to do with what is "inside" the person than outside of it (see Frederick Herzberg:
"Managerial choice: to be efficient and to be human"; Irwin - 1976).
Taking into account that many times the differences between the Tasks and the Roles are not clearly defined, Daniel R. Ilgen & John R. Hollenbeck in “The structure of work: Job design and roles” (already cited) consider that there are two central concepts that can help regarding these distinctions and they are the following concepts:
- the main beneficiaries (prime beneficiaries);
- the universe of elements in the Tasks.
The authors highlight that it is not possible to completely separate the Tasks and Roles from the context where they operate and in this sense they feel comfortable based on the work of the authors PM Blau & RS Scott (“Formal organizations: a comparative approach”; Chandler publishing - 1962) who have postulated an organizational typology that is based on those who mainly benefit as a result of each social / organizational structure, in particular. There are the following main types of beneficiaries according to Blau & Scott (1962):
- mutual benefit associations where the members themselves are the main beneficiaries, such as professional associations and also unions;
- service organizations where the general public that is in contact with the organization must be, which turns out to be the main beneficiary, taking public hospitals and public schools as an example, resulting in patients / patients and students / parents The beneficiaries;
- general welfare organizations where it is practically the entire population that benefits, such as the fire brigade, the police and the military;
- organizations that represent businesses such as private companies that include both large corporations and small companies in the hands of their owners.
It is noteworthy that the enormous and enormous displacement from the business world to the world of finance, which has had enormous implications for people, their sources of work, their lifestyle and survival, has “surpassed” to some extent this original conception of Blau & Scott (1962 - already cited) but still represents a highly practical way to distinguish between Tasks and Roles of organizational participants since there are notable differences between what they do in day-to-day operations according to it is the prevailing organizational type.
In fact, one of the main dilemmas experienced by all those who occupy managerial, managerial and executive positions within organizations and companies, has to do with the design and analysis of their own work and - especially for those who have people under their command. - that of their subordinates.
It is notable that most of the Universities and Centers of Higher Studies, even those specialized in Administration and Business, do not spend much time training their graduates regarding the skills to analyze Tasks.
At the end of the day, the professional career of the Graduates and the success that they themselves must achieve is also related to how they are able to design and analyze the work of "others" (their subordinates).
Possibly one of the most comprehensive theories regarding Tasks is the one known under the name of “Job Characteristics Theory” that had its origins in the extensive and pioneering work of A. Turner & PR Lawrence ("Industrial jobs and the worker"; Harvard -1965) where the authors set out to study the relationship between Tasks and employee reactions.
That led them to build what they called the “requisite task attribute index” based on a sample of nearly 50 jobs that consisted of six Task attributes. As highlighted by Daniel R. Ilgen & John R. Hollenbeck in “The structure of work: Job design and roles” (already cited) the work of Turner & Lawrence (1965 - already cited) was continued later by JR Hackman & EE Lawler III (“Employee reactions to job characteristics”; Journal of applied psychology - 1971) who reduced the number of attributes to only four and in subsequent works the matter was further delved into (JR Hackman & GR Oldham:
"Motivation through the design of work: Test of a theory" - 1976 / "Work redesign"; Addison-Wesley - 1980). These last two authors proposed the existence of 5 characteristics that are presented at a general level and that have to do with 3 different psychological states, which in turn finally impact on the “outcomes of work and people”. The 5 main characteristics are:
1. The strength / importance in terms of the need for growth, 2. Satisfaction with the context in general, 3. Knowledge, skills and abilities.
The five variables mentioned above have to do with different psychological states, namely:
to. the sensation experienced by the staff regarding the meaning of the work;
b. the responsibility that the person experiences regarding the “outcomes” that are the result of the work;
c. knowledge about the results that are a consequence of activities at work. Daniel R. Ilgen & John R. Hollenbeck in “The structure of work: Job design and roles” (already quoted) summarize the theory of Hackman & Oldham (1976 - 1980; already quoted) as follows:
“Three psychological states - experienced meaningfulness of the work, experienced responsibility for the outcomes of the work, and knowledge of results of the work activities - are the core of the model.
It is postulated that an employee experiences positive affect to the extent that the three aspects are present.
The positive affect created by the presence of these psychological states is believed to be reinforcing and to serve as an incentive for continuing to try to perform the task.
The result is a self-perpetuating cycle of work motivation that is predicted to continue until one or more of the psychological states is no longer present or until the individual no longer values the internal rewards that derive from high performance. ”
The 5 characteristics of Hackman & Olden impact on psychological critical states where three of them are exclusively related to the first psychological critical state. It is worth going back to Daniel R. Ilgen & John R. Hollenbeck's description in “The structure of work:
Job design and roles ”(already cited) in this regard:“ The three job characteristics that are predicted to combine additively to determine the psychological meaningfulness of the job are as follows:
* Skill variety - the degree to which a job requires a variety of different activities to carry out the work; in addition, the activities must require the use of a number of different skills and abilities of the person
* Task identity - the degree to which a job requires completion of a whole and identifiable place at work
* Task significance - the degree to which the job has a substantial impact on the lives or work of other people, whether in the immediate organization or outside the organization
The job characteristic predicted to prompt employee feelings of personal responsibility for the work outcomes is autonomy. Autonomy is defined as the degree to which the job provides substantial freedom, independence, and discretion to the individual in scheduling the work and in determining the procedures to be used in carrying it out.
Knowledge of results is predicted to be prompted by the amount of feedback the employee receives from doing the work. Feedback, in turn, is seen as the degree to which carrying out the work activities required by the job provides the individual with direct and clear information about the effectiveness of his or her performance.
Initially, feedback was seen as solely a characteristic of the task or job itself. More recently it has been expanded to include job performance information available both from doing the job and from others in the job environment.
On the other hand, social systems focus on relationships and from this perspective they are not necessarily interested in a particular person but to the extent that the organizational participants are members of a group, a unit or a department within the organization..
The organizational perspective oriented to privilege the tasks - as we have seen in the first case - privilege the aspects related to the elements of the structure (unity of command, hierarchies, authority, control, among others) while the orientation from the point of view of the social system places particular emphasis on the relationships between these elements.
Possibly one of the most important works regarding the perspective of a social system has been the one carried out by Roethlisberger & Dickson in the renowned Hawthorne studies that found wide repercussion within what has been known as the school of human relations. Later we have to see how perhaps it is preferable to think - and operate - from the perspective of the dual importance of the “task” and the “social”. The “task” should not necessarily be perceived - and operated - as the opposite pole of a dimension where the social is found, but rather it can be two different dimensions with which one can privilege both aspects (Eric Gaynor Butterfield: "Organizational Development Congress; Argentina - 2001).
Again we will turn to the authors Daniel R. Ilgen & John R. Hollenbeck in “The structure of work: Job design and roles” (already cited) who describe the social system in this way: “Social systems consist of individuals and relationships among individuals. Individuals represent the elements of social systems, and the interactions among individuals functioning alone or in clusters or groups are the focus of attention.
Theories of social systems are not interested in particular people that make up the organizational structure. When individuals are addressed, often they are viewed in terms of attributes of either individuals or members of identifiable groups (eg, union members, blue collar or white collar workers, minorities, women, or older workers). Whereas task / functional systems place much emphasis on the elements of the structure, social systems focus more on the nature of the relationships among elements.
At the most general level, these relationships are ones of status as reflected in power and influence differentiations among persons and groups ”.
Daniel R. Ilgen & John R. Hollenbeck in “The structure of work:
Job design and roles ”(already cited) point out that it is common that the literature has not properly superimposed and integrated the interactions between the physical context of the task with the social context, thus keeping the literature related to the“ tasks ”separate. "Of the literature that has to do with" roles ".
It should be noted that in addition to Frederick Taylor and Henry Fayol (already cited), possibly Max Weber (already cited) has been one of the exponents most strongly related to roles within organizations.
Thereafter, that is, from the 1950s onwards, and to the extent that some limitations were observed, behavioral variables and intra and interpersonal relationships as well as intra and interdepartmental relationships began to take precedence.
In any case, we want to highlight the importance of the role - which the authors Katz & Kahn (already quoted) have privileged regarding its importance - adding a quote from the German sociologist Ralf Dahrendorf;
"The proposition that implicitly or explicitly underlies all research and theoretical work in modern sociology is:
Man behaves in accordance with his roles. Thus man figures in sociological analyzes only to the extent that he complies with all the expectations associated with his social positions.
This abstraction, the scientific unit of sociology, may be called homo sociologicus ”(“ Sociology and Human nature ”- 1958).
Before specializing in some of the two main approaches based on the Tasks or on the Social, we cannot leave out the particular orientation that the analysis of the Tasks (Job Analysis) has taken into account since it has been widely disseminated and has also had strong implications within the processes of Organizational Change and Development.
At the beginning of this Workshop, many have asked us if it was justified to carry it out over several days and I think that at this moment, each one of you, as a participant, has been able to familiarize yourself with the complexity related to the perspective of the Tasks (which not even It has been fully completed) and it is necessary to delve into the “Roles” approach as well as the contributions of those who apply within the perspective of “Job Analysis”.
Taking into account that we have extended beyond what was foreseen in terms of content and its subsequent time, we are going to make a short break of no more than 15 or 20 minutes - at most, please, and on the return we have to organize ourselves to work in groups of about 5 people to experience some "experiences" regarding the content we have discussed.
