Bureaucratic Control And Clan Control example essay topic

Control is the process of monitoring activities to ensure that they are being accomplished as planned, and of correcting any significant deviations. The three approaches to control are market control, bureaucratic control and clan control. Market control is an approach that emphasises the use of external market mechanisms, such as price competition and relative market share, to establish the standards used in the control system. Bureaucratic control emphasises organisational authority and relies on administrative rules, regulations, procedures and policies. Under clan control systems, employee behaviours are regulated by the shared values, norms, traditions, rituals, beliefs, and other aspects of the organisational culture. Control is important because it monitors whether objectives are being accomplished as planned, and whether delegated authority is being abused.

According to the interview with Dave Rogers when he was asked why control is important, he replied by saying that in every organisation they have strict control measures, and that these apply to all staff, as every one has performance criteria which demanded that they be measured against their subset of the business plan. Without control there is no workplace, managers develop goals, standards, compare performance against them and ensure corrective actions are taken as needed. In the control process, management must first have standards of performance, which arise from the objectives formed in the planning stage. Then, management must measure actual performance and compare that performance against the standards. If a variance exists between standards and actual performance, management must adjust performance, adjust the standards or do nothing, according to the situation. The three types of control are as follows: feedback control is future-directed and prevents anticipated problems; concurrent control takes place while an activity is in progress; feedback control takes place after the activity.

An effective control system is accurate, timely, economical, flexible and understandable. It uses reasonable criteria, has strategic placement, emphasises the exception, uses multiple criteria and suggests corrective action. Controls can become dysfunctional when they redirect behaviour away from an organisation's goals. This outcome can occur as a result of inflexibility or unreasonable standards. In addition, when rewards are at stake, individuals are likely to manipulate data so that their performance will be perceived positively.

Every control system has imperfections, problems occur when individuals or organisational units attempts to look good exclusively in terms of the organizations goals. According to the interview with Dave Rogers one of the questions stated, was what are the Dysfunctional sides of control? He answered by saying that more often than not; dysfunctional control is caused by incomplete measures of performance. A example mentioned by Dave Rogers was an employee who worked at one of the Shell service stations working the register often did not seem to care very much about a customer's problem, they became so fixated on making sure that every rule was followed to the letter that they lost sight of the fact that their job is just to serve customers, not to hassle them. Current ethical issues in control are employee workplace privacy, computer monitoring of employees' work, and control of employees' off-the-job behaviour. These ethical issues are interrelated and concern the rights of employers.

Employees are concerned about protecting their workplace privacy, the stress of being under constant computer surveillance, and their employer's intrusion into their personal lives. Employers are primarily concerned with controlling employee healthcare costs, employee drug use and abuse, and employee work practices that might be potentially unethical or costly. When we asked Dave Rogers on his opinion on whether electronic surveillance devices such as computers, video cameras, telephone monitoring and off the job behaviour step over the line of control and lead to intrusions of employee's rights. He stated that although these measures of use are unfair and unjust, however they are still legal. We then asked Dave Rogers that if he thought that it is unethical for a company to tell its employees that they cannot ride a motorcycle or smoke in their in home, he replied by saying that in the united states, the legal principle that allows employers to establish rules of all kinds of off duty behaviours is the employment at will doctrine. This legal doctrine says that if employees do not like an employer's rules, they have the option of quitting.