Topic 3. Managing the Organizational Environment

1. Organizational environment is the set of forces and conditions that operate beyond an organization’s boundaries but affect a manager’s ability to acquire and utilize resources.

Task environment is the set of forces and conditions that originate with suppliers, distributors, customers, and competitors and affect organization’s ability to obtain inputs and dispose of its outputs because they influence managers on a daily basis.

General environment is the wide-ranging economic, technological, sociocultural, demographic, political and legal, and global forces that affect an organization and its task environment.

Suppliers – individuals and organizations that provide an organization with the input resources that it needs to produce goods and services.

Distributors – organizations that help other organizations sell their goods or services to customers.

Customers – individuals and groups that buy the goods or services that an organization produces.

Competitors – organizations that produce goods or services that are similar to a particular organization’s goods or services.

Economic forces - interest rates, inflation, unemployment, economic growth, and other factors that affect the general health and well-being of a nation or the regional economy of an organization.

Technological forces – outcomes of changes in the technology that managers use to design, produce or distribute goods or services.

Sociocultural forces – pressures emanating from the social structure of a country or society or from the national culture.

Demographic forces – outcomes of changes in, or changing attitudes toward, the characteristics of a population, such as age, gender, ethnic origin, race, sexual orientation, and social class.

Political and legal forces – outcomes of changes in laws and regulations, such as the deregulation of industries, the privatization of organizations, and increased emphasis on environment protection.

Global forces - outcomes of changes in international relationships; changes in nations’ economic, political, and legal systems and other.

2. Social responsibility is a manager’s duty or obligation to make decisions that promote the welfare and well-being of stakeholders and society as a whole.

Form of socially responsible behavior:

• Provide severance payments to help laid-off workers make ends meet until they can find other jobs

• Provide workers with opportunities to enhance their skills and acquire additional education so they can remain productive and do not become obsolete because of changes in technology

• Allow employees to take time off when they need to and provide health care and pension benefits for employees

• Contribute to charities or support various civic-minded activities in the cities and towns in which they are located

• Decide to keep open a factory whose closure would devastate the local community

• Decide to keep a company’s operations in a country to protect the jobs of national workers rather than move abroad

• Decide to spend money to improve a new factory so that it will not pollute the environment

3. Ethics – moral principles or beliefs about what is right or wrong.

Societal Ethics – standards that govern how members of a society are to deal with each other on issues such as fairness, justice, poverty, and the rights of the individuals.

Professional Ethics - standards that govern how members of a profession are to make decisions when the way they should behave is not clear-cut.

Individual Ethics – personal standards that govern how individuals are to interact with other people.

Organizational culture – the set of values, norms, standards for behavior, and shared expectations that influence the ways in which individuals, groups and teams interact with each other and cooperate to achieve organizational goals.

Topic 4. Communication.

1. Communication is the sharing of information between two or more individuals or groups to reach a common understanding.

Three types of Communication:

• Communications between the organization and its environment

• Communications across departments and groups of organization (vertical and horizontal communications)

• Informal Communications (grapevine)

2.

The Communication Process consists of two phases. In the transmission phase, information is shared between two or more individuals or groups. In the feedback phase, a common understanding is assured.

Four Elements of the Communication Process:

• Sender is the person or group whishing to share information

• Message is the information that a sender wants to share

• Medium is the pathway (a phone call, a letter, a memo, or face-to-face communication) through which an encoded messages are transmitted to a receiver

• Receiver is the person or group for which a message is intended

Three stages of the Communication Process: