Towards an interactive management approach to performance improvement in bureaucratic organization
Doctoral Thesis
2002
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University of Cape Town
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Abstract
Organization science is not a new discipline. However, it persistently attracts many researchers to explore new concepts for coping with the increasing complexity in our society. The exploration is in transition, from mechanistic doctrine to systemic and humanistic notions. The mechanistic view is still prevailing and playing a dominant role, but, owing to its increasing critics, appeals for renovation of mechanistic principle incessantly arise. The tendency induces diversified approaches for intervening in the situation of bureaucratic context. This research investigates the features of organization from three angles - on the one hand, the structure and process (functional) aspects, and on the other, the purposeful behaviour of humans. Many works see the three components as separate, and deal with them accordingly. However, we contend that the three aspects are interrelated and that they should be integrated. The integration suggests that multiple views of organization are adequate because it embodies the attributes of purposeful behaviour and functional characteristics. Problems within an organization can be seen as the mutual influence of these parts. They can mutually aggravate and impede the performance of an organization. On the one hand, we contend that bureaucratic organization is inadequate, owing to its fragility in functional components of processing information to adapt to environment change. On the other hand, its rigid essence causes an inability to deal with human dimension problems. The problematical elements present a systemic relation. In turn, we attempt to explore the essence of organization's complex problems. The exploration concludes that both complexity and problems are cognitive phenomena. The illustrations suggest that the unearthing of organization problems should be grounded in the 'interaction' and 'consensus' 'model interchanging' of stakeholders. Based on this idea, we propose an intervention framework for diagnosing pathological pattern within bureaucratic organization. The framework is applied to one of South Africa's biggest local governments (the City of Tygerberg). The research result shows that the most significant problem within the City of Tygerberg is in the information-processing subsystem- associator. Besides, the 'mental pathology' locates on the 'sink' stage of the structured problem model.
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Bibliography: p. 213-220.
Reference:
Tuan, N. 2002. Towards an interactive management approach to performance improvement in bureaucratic organization. University of Cape Town.