BUSM2301 B OA Assignment 2 PDF

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BUSM2301B – Organizational AnalysisSemester 3 – 2020Assignment 2: OrganisationalProblem-Solving Group ReportLecturer: Qui Nguyen Ngoc SG – G0 7 – Team 7Members: (s3820598) (s3877650)(s3878025) (s3828023)Table of Contents I. Introduction II. Probem Statement III. Literature Review IV. Solution Develo...

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BUSM2301B – Organizational Analysis Semester 3 – 2020

Assignment 2: Organisational Problem-Solving Group Report Lecturer: Qui Nguyen Ngoc SG – G07 – Team 7 Members: (s3820598) (s3877650) (s3878025) (s3828023)

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Table of Contents I.

Introduction

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II.

Probem Statement

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III.

Literature Review

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IV.

Solution Development and Proposal

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V.

Discussion and Conclusion

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VI.

References

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VII.

Appendix: Group Reflection

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I.

Introduction: Our client is a global mining company and has their offices located across many continents, such

as in Latin America, Alaska, Congo, Asia, and four mines located in Australia. The company has grown significantly in recent years due to its acquisition of diverse development companies. However, because of the decline in the management of firms in the mining sector and the sector's additions, it has yet to achieve the goal of optimizing the company’s corporate social responsibility (CSR) activities by promoting the organization's integration. CSR is a topic of concern in society. Specifically, for our client's mining industry, it affects the society from business decisions and operations with solving social issues, ethics, protecting the environment, protecting society as well as protecting human rights and responding to customer concerns. Throughout the report, we will analyze the problems the company is facing. Additionally, this report explores the aspects of solving the problems faced by the mining industry. For this, it needs to improve collaboration with communication among all departments within the company to promote CSR and to utilize CSR to create a social impact that is profitable for the business. Therefore, through research, we will provide the best solutions based on theory and practical research in the industry with our new process model for the company to ensure that they can satisfy the community and stakeholders' requirements about behaving socially responsible.

Besides, this report also consists of our research and proposal based on the two perspectives of “functionalism” and “social relativism”, which we think are the most suitable for solving the problems, due to their strengths and limitations.

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II.

Problem Statement:

The client is having many problems with the organizational structure. However, we believe that the main issue which the mining company needs to consider carefully is the lack of corporate social responsibility (CSR) performance. Currently, the company doesn’t have support from society, which can create lots of problems regarding the environment and community. This challenge may affect the company’s performance as well as its operation process in general. A mining company relates to digging and drilling into the ground to get the desired minerals, which could have negative effects on the earth, groundwater system, and the natural landscapes nearby. The CSR will support our client to be aware of its business impacts to all aspects of the society including the economy, society, and the environment (Zorrilla, Buck, Palmer, & Pellow, 2009). Understanding the role of CSR in a specific industry could be easy to identify and generalize it to the organization. Nevertheless, finding the most effective way to implement it in real life is a difficult issue. It needs the integration of all departments as a whole to participate and enhance the society and environment (Jenkins & Yakovleva, 2006).

Our client is doing business not only in Australia but also in many other countries from Africa to Asia. Moreover, there are various phases of the development in companies that our client has repurchased. That makes the organization lacking in integration as a whole. Different business units may have different perspectives. They only focus on their responsibilities and use their ways to approach the goal as well as social responsibility. The lack of collaboration will create mismatches between teamwork, social factors, environmental factors, political factors, mission, and business model (Hashaw, 2020). From the issue of lacking integration, it may put more pressure on the company to meet the needs of stakeholders. The pressure will force our client to perform better, reduce the cost, and increase the necessary resources to standardize as a multinational organization. Besides, an effective CSR integrated with business strategy can utilize the significant resources inside the company. Additionally, our client can maximize the benefits to society and financial performance with a specific practical

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framework. As a result, this integration will support the mining company to achieve both social and business impacts to maintain its reputation to the community (O'Brien, 2001).

In an organization, constant communication and a sense of trust are believed to be important factors to pursue an efficient collaboration of all parties (Rothouse M.J. 2020). Therefore, a lack of communication between departments can strongly fail cooperation. As suggested by Rothouse M.J. (2020), one of the reasons was due to the lack of interpersonal skills of the managers, which makes it hard to open communication within a team and among all the teams together. Intending to legitimate the profit, they only focus on their internal affair and productivity to achieve the mere goal. Moreover, not equipped with enough knowledge can also lead to a lack of communication among employees, as people tend to avoid the matter that they have no sense of. Hence, as the idea of CSR may not be explicit to some people, with the help of communication, the corporation can enhance their potential and improve their social responsibility.

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III.

Literature Review:

When it comes to resolving the issue of this global mining company, two paradigms can be taken into consideration. One of them is the functionalism paradigm, while the other one is social relativism. Moreover, to run the organization properly we also need to have a suitable organizational structure and process model. In this report, we will illustrate the importance of organizational structure and process model in a business and how Functionalism and Social Relativism can contribute to the improvement of the corporation’s CSR so that the organization can satisfy the environmental awareness and community requirements.

The functionalism paradigm illustrates a perspective which is drawn from the sociology of regulation and attempts to perceive its subject matter from an objectivist point of view (Burrell & Morgan, 1979). In the scenario in which our client is required to become a socially responsible corporation, a functionalism approach will result in the company being strictly managed by the employers and obligations, which helps the employees work in order and avoid being in conflict or reducing their profit. However, since functionalism only seeks ideal profitability the client may overlook the reaction of the customers towards their CSR and the upcoming related campaigns, which can lead to a profit deduction. Moreover, as each department in the company only aims at the expected goal, it leads to a lack of interaction among all departments, which may cause conflict to happen in the future. As our client is performing the functionalism approach, we suggest that they should

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consider another kind of approach to not only enhance their CSR activities but also increase their wanted profit.

On the other hand, the application of the social relativism paradigm is a good tool for the company to pursue an interactive system. According to Burrell and Morgan (1979, p.28), the social relativism paradigm is the one that ‘sees the social world as an emergent social process which is created by the individuals concerned’. Apparently, the interaction between all parties plays an important role in helping the organization legitimize the objectives. Therefore, as an approach to the solution, the implementation of this paradigm opens a way for integration within the client to develop CSR as it emphasizes the cooperation of all departments as well as the consumers as they are, with the help of the management, are the ones who make sense of the system. However, through joint activities, different opinions and perspectives are highly collected. This can lead to confusion when making decisions and can be an obstacle on the way to achieve the final goals. Organizational structure is 1 of the 2 key factors that determine the success of a business. According to Chanki & Catarina in 2020, an organizational structure is “the total of the ways in which the work is divided into different tasks, achieving coordination”, and “impact on important outcomes in the workplace”. So, companies must focus more on the structure for more effective work when it can help companies easily organize workflow, make sure important tasks are completed on time, and communicate and operate more efficiently (Sheila Kloefkorn 2014). Moreover, when doing an organizational structure, we need to keep in mind the fact that employees will be affected by the structure of the business and they are the main factor that decides the success of the business. Therefore, in order to improve the CSR of the business, the mining company should make a logical and clear organizational structure so that all related departments could work efficiently together. On the other framework, the Process model is “a set of related tasks performed to achieve a defined business outcome” (Wenhong & Y. Alex 1999). Then, we can know that a business process model is a solid network in an organization to run the company. Therefore, when making a business process model, the company should keep in mind all the types, elements, objectives, and perspective of the model. Moreover, when selecting a business process we need to be concerned about “the three constructs, namely objectives, perspectives and characteristics” (Wenhong & Y. Alex 1999).

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Besides, companies when doing a process model need to take notice of the pitfalls of it when Michael Rosemann in 2006 had reported 22 potential pitfalls of the process model that many companies might fall into.

IV.

Solution development and Proposal:

Regarding the problem identified previously in our problem statement, the organization is under the pressure to fulfill corporate social responsibility. CSR has been one of the most important areas in environmental and social accounting research (Belal & Momin, 2009). Additionally, by presenting the concept of CSR, the organization can achieve environmental, social, and economic sustainability, as well as maximize the possible profits. Therefore, we must ensure that the corporation can respond to the environmental and community pressure by leveraging the collaboration and communication among all the departments to tackle the issue. Thus, a new process model is suggested. This proposed model will illustrate a new system in which more collaborations between the departments to improve the productivity and manifest the CSR performance is carried out. In the previous process, each department is in charge of one process which its sub-functions mainly manage. This results in the problem that one department has to conduct many tasks at the same time which may cause the results to have flaws and be inefficient. Therefore, in the new process model, the first thing we want to solve is the problem of no effective cooperation between the parties of the client. After the reallocation, departments are expected to share their workload with the ones which have suitable and connected sub-functions to impulse the efficiency and quality of the product. For example, in the original system, the Planning and Coordinating department has to take care of too many processes before the construction of mining starts. Consequently, it’s highly recommended that the budget needed for the project be planned and considered by both the Planning and Coordinating and Finance. As the ideas are shared and discussed, the final price can be decided more easily. Moreover, the action of conducting studies for future mining activities can be done by the collaboration of the R&D (Research and Development) and the Planning and Coordinating. The findings collected by the R&D team from the sub-divisions like Engineering, Geology, Exploration provide the Planning and Coordinating team with thorough

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knowledge to come up with a precise plan. Hence, R&D can help the strategies be set up and developed properly.

As the system is now processing better with the cooperation of the divisions, the way to perform an effective CSR becomes easier. However, only integrating all the parties of the corporation is not enough for efficient CSR, as the communication between our client and the community, as well as among the departments is also essential. Thanks to the Communication department with the help of the Services department, the company can easily broaden its approach to the community, which leads to public participation and consultation with them. Accordingly, by attracting public attention, our client can leverage social influence marketing to promote their products, which helps them not only to improve the efficiency of their upcoming CSR activities but also to optimize CSR to aim to profit maximization for the company. Besides, all collaborations of departments in preparation for the project will provide a better understanding of social knowledge and environmental problems, as they can support the others in research, which will also help the client to carry out better CSR performance, based on the new process model.

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V.

Discussion and Conclusion:

First of all, we believe that the biggest strength we have from our solution is a connected system with more interactions among the parties participating in the process of a project. This process illustrates the application of the social relativism paradigm as it highlights the importance of continuous interactions of the participants which is the key for objectives to be legitimized (Hirschheim & Klein, 1989). Hence, all departments under the company collaborate, creating a system in which every part links together to maximize productivity. According to Vintró & Comajuncosa (2009), the purchasing decisions of consumers will be influenced by how the company can fulfill its product and service expectations. Therefore, the weight of communication between our client and consumers is noticed and the immediate solution is conducted. With the process of

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communicating, many findings and discussions will be shared, a better understanding, sympathy, and support from one department to the others will be performed, the managers can have a variety of perspectives from not only within the working environment but also the external forces to have better knowledge to make modifications and supply better guidance. On the other hand, by having a specific manager to direct particular departments of similar functions and having sub-functions collaborate, a certain goal can be easily defined so that each team knows and focuses on their main assigned task. This shows the functionalist perspective which has the system working to achieve the final targets profit maximization and an effective CSR performance (Hirschheim & Klein, 1989). However, there exist limitations. By applying the social relativist characteristic, different perspectives are collected. However, this may lead to confusion and no unanimity in mindset. If the manager is not rational enough to come to the best decision, in the end, disagreement and conflict among the departments when cooperating will affect the process as a whole. Receiving too much feedback from different sides will place pressure on the company to behave in socially responsible ways properly. Furthermore, because with the functionalist view, the main concern is the prespecified end and the system is designed to contribute to this end (Hirschheim & Klein, 1989), the real performance throughout the whole process may not be performed. That means the employees may have known about the specific goal of the task they have and will only just care and try to finish it when the due date is near only to achieve the goal but the quality of the result cannot be guaranteed. Hence, if the quality of the product doesn’t meet the consumers’ expectations, the performance of efficient CSR will be affected. In summary, the methodology of using only the social relativism paradigm in combination with the functionalism paradigm can complement each other yet is still not ideal and realistic. Though the application of functionalism can have the client to have a specific aim to move forward, it can become a system lack of consideration with the employees since their opinions may be taken for granted and all they have to do is following the goal. That’s when the use of social relativism is needed to help all participants have their rights to speak up and share different perspectives. On the other hand, while with the social relativist way, collaboration and discussions can be conducted to boost efficiency and productivity, too many different ideas collected at once may distract the prespecified target and downgrade the quality. Thus, functionalism is applied. However, to achieve success in the industry, applying only two paradigms, which are Functionalism and Social Relativism, is not enough. The use of only two paradigms that follow the “order” will only keep the organization improving and moving forward from the existing flaws without making any changes. If our client wants to become successful in the long term, we believe that it would be more ideal to leverage all four of the paradigms as the company can have a holistic approach as well as avoid having limitations in the way they would develop. It would be impractical for a corporation, especially a global company like our client, to solely keep following one model for

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improving their CSR activities and earning profits from the beginning without having any changes and alternation, or being affected by external elements, such as community and stakeholders. Therefore, we suggest that our client take the idea of performing all four paradigms, depending on the occurrences, to extend their profits and influence under consideration for further success. By using the Radical Structuralist paradigm, our client can help make a connection between the management and the employees and obtain their support for the company as it can fulfill their expectation of an ideal workplace. Accordingly, the employees realize that there will be someone to understand their circumstances and solve the conflicts between different classes happening in the company by putting himself into the worker’s shoes. As the company can tackle the relationship issues from the workplace, their workers can be guaranteed to be satisfied with their job and contribute more to their company, in this case, which is helping to improve the company’s CSR activities and profits. Yet, the radical structuralism “has a tendency to oversimplify”, which is that it can’t see the conflict arising from the coalition. As a result, this comes back to the problem of lacking collaboration among employees, which requires the company to think of another solution for the case. Therewithal, by using a Neo-humanism approach, it would help the corporation to have more open consultations between employees, or company and community, and allow for a deeper comprehension of the information that is not seen on the surface. This information or knowledge can benefit the global company by helping to improve their both internal and external operational processes to deal with the CSR problems, including thei...