Kate Turvy
Managing in Organizations Thought Paper
1. There are many different barriers to decision making within groups. For example, there
are barriers to disagreement which doesn’t allow us to get the Wisdom of Crowds. This
week, a group that I work within will be making a decision about which teams advance
to the final of a competition. There are a lot of data inputs and there will be one final
discussion where we ultimately make the decision. One potential barrier to decision
making here will be a barrier of social influence. Within the decision making meeting,
there are certain people who have much more organizational authority and may be able
to influence the group’s opinions. To combat this, we can assign someone the role of
devil’s advocate and also have each group member reflect on their own and submit
their opinion/perspective before the conversation. That information can be pulled
together in advance of the meeting to ensure that there isn’t one person’s opinion
influencing others.
2. I don’t think I have ever worked in an organization with a fully effective culture – there
have been aspects of each organization which feel effective, but I don’t know if I would
categorize them overall as effective. An organization which (from the outside) appears
to have an effective culture is Trader Joe’s. The customer experience is very consistent
and the staff members seem to work well together and be motivated. From what I
understand, there is a culture of promotion from within where store associates can be
promoted to manager, and this seems to help foster a sense of community. Also, from
what I have seen, their operations seem really efficient in the ways they stock shelves
and handle checkout.
3. A learning organization is one where employees continually gain skills and knowledge
that make the organization more effective and are able to transfer the knowledge
across the organization. As a manager, there are several key reasons why it is important
to run a Learning Organization, a couple of which I will outline here. First, learning
organizations are more easily able to adapt to unpredictability. With the rapid changes
in technology, I think it is more important than ever for organizations to be able to
adapt to change quickly so that they can stay competitive and evolve. Secondly, like we
talked about in previous weeks, employees like intrinsic motivation as well as extrinsic. I
imagine that an environment that encourages learning is a “benefit” to employees, as
they are operating somewhere where they feel seen and heard and can actually impact
the organization.