Chapter Five: Alternative Theories of Organizational Behavior

Key Terms:


Key Terms:

• Administrative Doctrine: The rules and standard operating procedures of an organization that embody its basic values and tenets.
• Authority: The rightful power to make decisions within legally defined limits, with the expectation of widespread compliance.
• Bureaucracy: The totality of government offices or all government employees; also used as a dictionary term to refer to an inefficient organization plagued by red tape or calcified into an inflexible structure.
• Bureaucratic Dysfunction: Pathological aspects of bureaucracies that make them inefficient; unthinking adherence to rules as ends rather than as means; a source of red tape.
• Charismatic Authority: Authority that rests on personal devotion to individuals because of their sanctity, heroism, or exemplary character.
• Classical Theory: The original theory about the organizations that closely relates them to military organizations and emphasizes hierarchical structure, chain of command, division of labor, formal authority system, and bureaucratic behavior.
• Closed System: An organization made analogous to a physical system, such as a machine, whose operation is unaffected by its environment.
• Efficiency: Accomplishing production-related economic goals in the most expeditious manner and at the least cost.
• Esprit De Corps: Group spirit; a sense of team shared by those in the same group or undertaking.
• Feedback: the positive or negative effects of the outputs of a system on its environment.
• Group Cohesion: Shared assumptions, beliefs, and values that help organizational members operate as a team.
• Group Dynamics: A subfield of organizational behavior that stresses how groups develop and behave internally and externally.
• Hawthorne Experiments:  a set of management studies conducted by Elton Mayo and associates from the Harvard Business School in the late 1920s and the early 1930s at the Hawthorne Works of the Western Electric Company near Chicago; instrumental in developing the human relations school of organization theory.
• Humanistic Theory: A reaction to the overly authoritarian perceptions of classical organizational theory; approach emphasizes the creativity of human behavior and views efficiency and productivity as strongly influenced by informal aspects of organization; humanists stress noneconomic needs as motivating workers’ performance.
• Inputs: Resources such as equipment, supplies, and the energy of employees used by an organization.
• Learning Organization: Peter Senge’s term for an organization that nurtures new patterns of thinking so that its members learn together to improve both the organization and their personal lives.
• Legal-Relation Authority: Based on a legally established impersonal order-the rule of law.
• Motivation: All of the factors of the working environment that either positively or negatively affects on an individual’s work.
• Needs Hierarchy: A set of five goals or basic needs arranged in a hierarchical order; associated with Abraham Maslow and the human relations school of organization theory.
• Neoclassical Theory: A perspective that revises and expands on classical organization theory.
• New Public Management Theory: A school of organization that advocates a shift from administrative bureaucracy to entrepreneurial organization and the use of the public choice model of decision making that views decisions as market driven.
• Open System: An organization made analogous to a biological entity that lives in and exchanges inputs and outputs with its environment.
• Organization: A group of people structured into a division of labor and working together to achieve common goals.
• Organizational Development: An approach to organizational management that focuses on analyzing organizational problems and findings solutions.
• Organization Theory: A set of laws or propositions that explains how people and groups behave in various organizational structures.
• Outputs: Products or services of a system that affect its environment and create feedback.
• POSDCORB: An acronym for planning, organizing, staffing, directing, coordinating, and budgeting; the term was coined by Luther Gulick in 1937 to stress the essential elements of the work of the chief executive.
• Principles of Management: Fundamental “truths” or working hypotheses that shape management thinking and action.
• Quality Circles: Small groups of 3 to 15 workers who meet regularly to discuss, analyze, and solve problems they experience on the job.
• Scientific Management: An approach to managing people in an organization that believes there is “one best way” to do any task; it is the fastest and the most efficient method to do so and is discovered through a scientific process of observation.
• System: Any organized collection of parts united by prescribed interactions and designed for the accomplishment of a specific goal or task.
• System Theory: A theory of organization that emphasizes in interactive and interrelated set of elements- an environment, input, processes, output, and feedback.
• Theory X: A term coined by Douglas McGregor that describes as set of assumptions about human nature that guide an individual on how to manage people; it emphasizes that people dislike work, must be threatened to perform, prefer to be directed, and avoid responsibility.
• Theory Y: A term coined by Douglas McGregor that describes as set of assumptions about human nature that guides management of workers; it holds that work is natural, workers can be self-directed, and imagination, ingenuity, and creativity.
• Theory Z: Patters of organization and operations of contemporary Japanese corporations that assume productivity is a function of social or managerial organization and can be greatly enhanced by communication, feedback, and worker involvement.
• Total Quality Management (TQM): A new phrase for equality control in its most expanded sense of total and continuing concerns for quality and production of goods and services; seeks organizational performance at an optimal level
• Traditional Authority: Authority that rests on the belief in the sacredness of immemorial traditions; obligation of personal loyalty to chief selected in the traditional way.