THEORETICAL APPROACHES OF ORGANIZATIONAL EFFECTIVENESS

1. THEORETICAL APPROACHES OF
ORGANIZATIONAL EFFECTIVENESS
ORGANIZATIONAL EFFECTIVENESS:
Organizational effectiveness is the concept of how effective an organization is in achieving the
outcomes the organization intends to produce. Organizational Effectiveness groups in
organizations directly concern themselves with several key areas. They are talent management,
leadership development, organization design and structure, design of measurements and
scorecards, implementation of change and transformation.
Roles of Organizational Effectiveness:
 Examines alignment between the areas and improves them
 Improves trade-offs between reliability, speed and quality in the above areas
 Strategizes for higher adoption rates in these areas
 Facilitates/initiates/catalyses capability building : structure, process and people.
TYPES OF ORGANIZATIONAL EFFECTIVENESS:
Organizational effectiveness divided into four approaches. These are as follow:
 Goal Approach.
 System Resource Approach.
 Internal Process Approach.
 Strategic Constituent Approach.

2. GOAL APPROACH:
In the earliest theories of organizational behavior, organizations were viewed as rational
institutions whose primary purpose is to accomplish objectives. The more efficiently and
effectively an organization can achieve its goals, the more successful it is according to this
approach. It includes:
 This approach focuses on the goals or output of an organization and on evaluating how
well the organization meets those goals.
 The more efficiently and effectively an organization can achieve its goals, the more
successful it is according to this approach.
 Goal approach is worried with the output side and whether or not the organization attains
its goals with respect to preferred levels of output.
 It sees effectiveness with respect to its internal organizational objectives and
performance.
 The key constraint of this approach pertains to the content comparability of
organizational goals.
 Organizations formal goals are typically dependent upon its standards of social
desirability.
 Organizations short-term goals are usually not the same as their long term goals.
 The utilization of goals as a standard for assessing Organizational Effectiveness is
challenging.
 The goal approach presumes consensus on goals. Considering the fact that there are
numerous goals and varied interests inside an organization, consensus, is probably not
possible.

3. SYSTEM RESOURCE APPROACH:
The systems resource approach to effectiveness views the organization as an open system.
Whereby the organization acquires inputs, engages in transformation processes, and generates
outputs. It has been argued that defining the effectiveness of an organization solely in terms of
the goals achieved is only a partial measure of effectiveness. A systems approach to OE assumes
that the organization is composed of interrelated subsystems.
Advantages:
 The organization is the frame of reference;
 Relations between organizations are a component of its definition;
 The general framework can be used in different types of organizations;
 Variability of measurement techniques in comparative evaluation is allowed;
 Guidelines for selecting empirical measures of effectiveness are provided.
Limitations:
The limitations of this approach relate to its measurement of means. Robbins (1990) suggests
that measuring specific goals may be easy compared with trying to measure process variables
such as “flexibility of response to environmental changes” or “clarity of internal
communications”
INTERNAL PROCESS APPROACH:
Description:
Internal process approach effectiveness is the ability to excel at the internal efficiency,
coordination, motivation and employees satisfaction. This approach has been developed in
response to a fixed output view of the goal approach. This approach assesses effort as opposed to
the attained effect.
Advantages:
 Organizational effectiveness is assessed as internal organizational health and
effectiveness.
 It looks at the internal activities of the organization.
 No traces of stress and strain.
 In educational institutions, helps in providing timely and sufficient information to the
students and academicians.
 Deals more narrowly with internal mechanisms of organization.
Disadvantages:

4.  It is accepted as an approach for studying is assessed predicators.
 The internal process approach could possibly be applied only where comparable
organizational outcomes can hardly be assessed accurately.
STRATEGIC CONSTITUENT APPROACH:
An effective organization is one that satisfies the demands of those constituencies in its
environment from whom it requires support for its continued existence.
• It seeks to appease only those in the environment who can threaten the organization's survival.
• For eg. Private universities and Public universities.
Assumptions:
• Organization should give importance to constituency then it can take this approach.
• Each constituency has a unique set of values, so it is unlikely that they are preference will be in
agreement.
How can manager apply this?
• 3 Major Steps
 Asking members to identify the constituents
 Evaluate the list
How dependent on it our organization is?
Does it have considerable power over us?
Are there alternatives?
 Identifying the expectations
What do they want of it?
Problems:-
1. Distinguishing strategic constituencies from larger environment is not easy to practice.
2. Identifying the expectations that the strategic constituencies hold for the organization.
Value to Managers:
• It is important for manager to understand just who it is that survival is contingent.
• Manager might ignore or upset a group whose power could significantly hinder the
organization’s operations.
EVALUATION OF ORGANIZATIONAL EFFECTIVENESS:

5. It is suggested that the underlying problem with much of the research into organizational
effectiveness and productivity within the construction industry is that it generally fails to take
account of a full range of issues which impinge on these phenomena. Therefore, it is argued that
it is inappropriate for a researcher to evaluate, for example, projects, contractors, professionals
and procurement methods solely on the extent to which they meet client objectives, i.e goals,
without considering the nature of the industry, the structure of the organization, the level of
technology and so on.
Understanding why some organizations are more effective than others requires a broad
knowledge of the contextual, technical, structural and human factors which impinge on each
organization.
Evaluating the effectiveness of organizations requires selecting the appropriate criteria.
Unfortunately, researchers have not yet agreed on the most appropriate criteria for making
evaluations of effectiveness or even the definition of effectiveness.
ASSUMPTIONS AND GENERELIZATIONS:
Two assumptions underline the goal model:
 A rational group of decision makers in the organization have a set of goals in their mind
that they wish to pursue.
 The goals are few enough in number to be administered and are defined concretely
enough to be understood by the participants.
If the assumptions are accepted, it follows that the decision makers should be able to assess
organizational effectiveness and to develop measures to determine how well the goals are being
achieved.
Although decision makers obviously are not completely rational , the two assumptions and
generalizations that flow from them should not be rejected without careful consideration. In fact,
administrative practices have been developed to enhance goal specification and goal
achievement.
CONCLUSION:
The organizational effectiveness has long been the subject of numerous studies through different
models. Nevertheless, a comparative result between some models of organizational effectiveness
in higher education shows some overlapping. regarding the main models of effectiveness, the
Cameron’s (1978) model has a close relationship with three main models, namely goal, system
resource, and process. Cameron (1981) noted out that, it pays attention to the fact that the
organization is effective as long as it can achieve the goals intended. It can obtain the resources
from the environment, and it can get along with all of its system processes in terms of the
performance of the organization.