Is Bureaucracy Good for Employees? Discuss
This essay focuses on the assertion that “Too much and too little bureaucracy in an organization demotivate employees and cause them stress.”
According to James & George (2008), bureaucracy is a formal system of organization and administration designed to ensure efficiency and effectiveness. Hanson (1979) defines bureaucracy as “an authority structure based on rational behavior”
The hierarchical authority that bureaucracy brings in may mean that employees do not contribute to decision making due to the setup. Ideas can be killed because they come from the “wrong” person and ideas may be supported because they are advanced by the ”right” person.
More so, workers feel that Data is used selectively, or distorted to make performance look better than it really is, Internal communications to employees are distorted to reflect what the organization would like to be, rather than what it really is, Mistakes and failures are denied, covered up or ignored, Responsibility for mistakes and failure tends to be denied, and where possible, blame is shifted to others, Decisions are made based on the perceived desires of superiors, rather than concern for mission achievement and Senior managers become so insulated from the realities of the front line that they may use stereotypical thinking and out-of-date experience in making decisions. All the feelings mentioned above may result in stress for the workers. Hierarchy is necessary because too little of it may cause discontentment and frustration among workers because a supervisor might make a clearly suicidal decision without informing his manager.
An example of the negative effects of too little bureaucracy is when a mechanic in a workshop decides to fix the crank shaft on a client’s vehicle that he has apparently discovered is malfunctioning. In an attempt to fix the car part, the mechanic succeeds in breaking a coil which costs even more that the initial job quoted. As a result, the organization incurs high cost and the
According to James & George (2008), bureaucracy is a formal system of organization and administration designed to ensure efficiency and effectiveness. Hanson (1979) defines bureaucracy as “an authority structure based on rational behavior”
The hierarchical authority that bureaucracy brings in may mean that employees do not contribute to decision making due to the setup. Ideas can be killed because they come from the “wrong” person and ideas may be supported because they are advanced by the ”right” person.
More so, workers feel that Data is used selectively, or distorted to make performance look better than it really is, Internal communications to employees are distorted to reflect what the organization would like to be, rather than what it really is, Mistakes and failures are denied, covered up or ignored, Responsibility for mistakes and failure tends to be denied, and where possible, blame is shifted to others, Decisions are made based on the perceived desires of superiors, rather than concern for mission achievement and Senior managers become so insulated from the realities of the front line that they may use stereotypical thinking and out-of-date experience in making decisions. All the feelings mentioned above may result in stress for the workers. Hierarchy is necessary because too little of it may cause discontentment and frustration among workers because a supervisor might make a clearly suicidal decision without informing his manager.
An example of the negative effects of too little bureaucracy is when a mechanic in a workshop decides to fix the crank shaft on a client’s vehicle that he has apparently discovered is malfunctioning. In an attempt to fix the car part, the mechanic succeeds in breaking a coil which costs even more that the initial job quoted. As a result, the organization incurs high cost and the