Understanding the role of each stakeholder is essential factor towards ensuring the success of an institution. Organizations have different stakeholders; from within the institution and from without the institution. Employees’ within the organization are as important element towards the organization’s success as customers, suppliers, shareholders and owners. An organizations that seek to enhance its efficient and effective productivity, needs, therefore, to formulate strategy that will enhance the motivation, growth and prosperity of the institution as well as person’s desire. Contemporary organizations therefore undertake different approach when dealing with different stakeholders to ensure they maintain or even improve their loyalty towards company’s products and success. This report seeks to analyze how the contemporary organizations are undertaking their operations and the shift in operational activities from yester decades with regards to Angus Dairy Company in Australia. The report will analyze in details the contemporary organizational structures and design, human resource management practices, and the marketing and financial practices in the modern organizational setting.
Contemporary Organizational Structure and Design
Most organization are reversing their organograms from bureaucratic where decision had to go through several level of management to be accepted or implemented. These bureaucratic organizational structure made it difficult to encourage the spirit of innovativeness and creativity among the employees. The organization structure and design of most contemporary organization are flat, with few management level. From the case study, Angus Dairy Company has a flat organization structure that make it easy to implement decision. For instance, they devised a way of rewarding farmers who had produce more milk with high quality. Most organizations are avoiding tall organograms because it also impedes communication within the organization. Flat structure reduces bureaucracy and encourages teamwork and interaction amongst the stakeholders.
Communication is an important aspect that determines the success of an institution. When an organization has adopted a tall organogram, it is inevitable that the communication channel and information flow within and without the organization will be compromised. It is therefore, evident that most contemporary organization prefer flat management structure to improve on their communication within and without the organization.
Contemporary organizations have also embraced diverse business model. The modern organization do not only depend on their internal/ in-house staff but also on external staff. Angus Company works collaboratively with both farmers corporative society and other firm’s which they outsource their services. The diverse business model enable the organization to access diverse alternative and opinion before undertaking a task. Most firms nowadays are outsourcing the non-core duty from other firms which have specialization in the outsourced services. For example, Angus Dairy Company being a dairy firm, might lack expert in marketing or recruitment sectors so they therefore outsource these services from other firms. The diverse business model provide the organization with opportunity to reinvent themselves and ensure that the organization achieve competitive advantage. (Bovee & Thill, 2013, 36).
Adopting organization structure that integrates other external service is the system that current organizations are implementing. For instance, organizations may develop a team tasked in ensuring the completion of a given project working along with an outsourced team. Outsourced form provide technical and expert advice to the firms to enhance the efficiency of their services. When a firm outsources it services, it encourages change of competency, experience, skills and knowledge between the staff within and the outsourced firms. It, therefore, means that the quality of the
performance increases and intern the company’s bottom-line increases.
Figure 1: Contemporary organizational Structure
The organization are not only concerned about the boundary-less management system but also organization that embrace learning. Contemporary organizations have realized that learning enables employees to acquire new skills and competencies that enable them to work efficiently and effectively therefore producing high quality services and [products. L3earning within the organization can take various form, first through on the job training, seminars and conferences, etc. Organization place learning as a premium activity that enable the organization adapt to the changing market dynamics and the test and preferences of the consumers. Learning can also take in the form of research. Through research the organization is able to get up to date information regarding management and improving firm’s profitability and productivity.
The human resource management field has experienced radical transformation in the contemporary world. The core function of human resources is to ensure recruitment and selection of competent personnel, training and development, rewards management, and evaluation of employee performance. The current organizational structure facilitates access to skilled human resources. The methods used in recruiting and motivating employees to ensure the quality of organization’s productivity has greatly been transformed. People management is considered as the most critical sector within an institution. Because a motivated workforce and client will lead to increased productivity and profitability.
Organizations are mobilizing resources to ensure that the employees continuous acquire new skills and competency (Fineman, Gabriel & Sims, 2010, 17). Employee training and development is an important aspect towards people management. Through training and development, employees are able to understand the current policies that govern their operations. Through training programs, the employees can gain knowledge on employment policies such as workplace health and safety policies, labor laws, organization’s policies. The organization is able to comply with the statutory policies and other legal requirement.
The system of employee motivation and reward has changed. The organizations are developing strategies that can motivates the employees towards working productively. The rewards system developed should ensure fairness and objectivity. The rewards can either take the form of financial incentives or non-financial incentive. Organizations have developed specialize bonuses which they award the employees that perform better or those who achieve the organization’s goals. Reward management system ids the primary source of motivation to the employees
Organization use various methods to evaluate the performance of employee visa Vis the organizational target. There are many forms of employee performance evaluation. Traditionally, organizations have been using methods such as. Grading system, management by objective and rating system to gauge the performance of employees so as to objectively reward them. However, this methods did not provide an all-round view on the employee performance. This limitation is what the contemporary organization’s to adopt a 360 degrees model of evaluation. Recognizing the fact that all stakeholders within the institution play important role in ensuring the success of the institution. The 360 degree feedback involves assessing an individual employee using different approaches. The 360 degree evaluation model enables the management to be evaluated by all stakeholder including their juniors.
Organizations have also learned to embrace diversity. Traditionally, organization perceived diversity as a threat towards the success of the organization, but in the contemporary organization, diversity is viewed as an opportunity that the institutions have to embrace to enhance their productivity and success. Diversity is described contemporarily as ‘new and different. Organization no longer discriminate their employees based on gender orientation, religious affiliation, social background or race. Through embracing diversity, organization is able to reinvent itself and achieve success. Contemporary organization have harnessed diversity through developing policy that encourage teamwork and discourage workplace discrimination (Kuhn, 2009).
The contemporary organizational design has encouraged autonomy amongst different department within the organization. Most of the multi-national companies and other big companies have embraced autonomy of tasks to ensure proper running of organizational process. An autonomous institution places the responsibility and performance of the organization under each department. Department are supposed to set target which are intended with organizational goal and work both collaboratively and individually to ensure the success of the institution. Autonomous institution have no centralized control nor central allocation of resources. Angus has adopted a semiautonomous design in which each de3partment are free to develop their own operational model but are interdependent. An autonomous institution has department which has been given specific role and adequate resources that will enable them to achieve.
Apart from the autonomous organization structure that contemporary organizations have embraced, there is also a matrix structure and project structure. The matrix structure is used when the organization has several projects and tasks that need to be accomplished. From the case study, Angus firm had outsourced marketing research services from on other firm. This is a specialized task that makes the institution to changes its organizational design to a matrix form. The outsourced firm reports directly to the management without following other procedures. As shown in the figure 1 above, outsourced service providers report directly to the top management without engaging the middle level management, however, they are required to work collaboratively with the organizational employees to enhance knowledge exchange, innovativeness and creativity.
In conclusion, there is vast change in the organogram of contemporary organizations. The traditional organizations strongly encouraged tall structure with many level of management. This encouraged bureaucracy and thus, slow making and implementation of decision. There are different designs of organizational structure that contemporary organizations have adopted, for example the autonomous organizational structure and matrix organizational structure. Most organizations prefer flat structure because they are flexible and enhance faster decision making and decision implementation.
Reference
Bovee, C. & Thill, J. 2013 ‘Chapter 1 Developing a Business Mindset’ in Business in Action, Pearson, New York.
Fineman, S, Gabriel, Y & Sims, D 2010. ‘Chapter 3 Lifelong learning’ in Organizing and organizations, SAGE, Los Angeles.
Kuhn, L 2009. ‘Chapter 1 Introduction’ in Adventures in complexity, Triarchy Press, Axminster.
