Organisation's goals
Organizational goals – the goals that the organization tries to achieve, intentions on which the organization's decisions and actions are based.[1]
An organization can also have official goals, which are meant for use outside the organization, when the organization claims to try to achieve them, although they do not correspond to its actions.[2]
Classification of goals
By measurability, an organization's goals are classified into operational goals that can be formulated in a way that allows measuring of their achievement and nonoperational goals that cannot be formulated in such a way.[2] However, according to Henry Mintzberg, no goal can be completely measurable; something is inevitably lost while moving to a measurable goal, leading to just an approximation.[3] He offers an example that even the goal of achieving a profit cannot be measured exactly, because measurement requires a time period (a long period makes it harder to notice the changes, while a shorter period encourages improvement of measurable results at the cost of future profit).[3]
Henry Mintzberg classifies organizational goals into four groups:[1][4]
- Ideological goals (emerging from the organization's ideology, especially the organization's mission)
- Formal goals (emerging from formal authority)
- Common personal goals
- System goals (emerging from willingness to keep the organization in existence)
Mintzberg lists four system goals of organizations:[5][4]
- Survival
- Efficiency
- Control of the environment
- Growth
According to him, although efficiency is usually defined as getting the most benefit with the least costs, in practice only measurable benefits and costs are taken into account.[5] Thus, since the costs are usually easier to measure than benefits, and economic benefits and costs are easier to measure than social benefits and costs, efficiency as a goal leads to economizing whenever the decrease of benefit is not noticeable (Mintzberg gives an example when an administrator of a university cuts costs of a study program, as he cannot measure how much the training will worsen), and ignoring of social benefits and costs.[5]
Interaction between goals
Henry Mintzberg lists five cases of reconciliation of goals:
- Concentration on achieving one goal
- Concentration on achieving goals in succession, in a preset order
- Concentration on achieving alternating multiple goals
- Concentration on achieving goals in succession, without a clear order
- Concentration on achieving all goals to some extent, as constraints
For example, the existence of concentration on achieving one goal, with other goals being treated as constraints, has been confirmed for resellers (franchisees).[6]
According to Henry Mintzberg, if some of an organization's goals are operational, when other goals are not, the organization tends to concentrate on achieving operational goals at the cost of nonoperational goals.[3]
Footnotes
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 Henry Mintzberg, "Power In and Around Organizations", Prentice Hall, 1983, p. 245-263 [1]
- ↑ 2.0 2.1 Henry Mintzberg, "Power In and Around Organizations", Prentice Hall, 1983, p. 1-7 [2]
- ↑ 3.0 3.1 3.2 Henry Mintzberg, "Power In and Around Organizations", Prentice Hall, 1983, p. 171-183 [3]
- ↑ 4.0 4.1 Rose Kearney-Nunnery "Advancing Your Career Concepts in Professional Nursing", 6th edition, 2015, F.A. Davis Company, p. 165-166 [4]
- ↑ 5.0 5.1 5.2 Henry Mintzberg, "Power In and Around Organizations", Prentice Hall, 1983, p. 264-290 [5]
- ↑ Ravi S. Achrol, Michael J. Etzel, "The Structure of Reseller Goals and Performance in Marketing Channels", "Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science", Vol. 31, No. 2, p. 146-163 [6]
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