Week 5, blog 3

In chapter 11, the excerpts from Dalai Lama's statement "Instructions for Life in the New Millennium" were the best read. Below are the ones that I like the most:

1. Take into account that great love and great achievements involve great risk.
2. Follow the 3 R's: Respect for the self, Respect for others, Responsibility for all your actions.
3. Not getting what you want is sometimes a wonderful stroke of luck.
4. When you realize you made a mistake, take immediate steps to correct it.
5. Judge your success by what you had to give up in order to get it.
6. Live a good, honorable life. That way, when you get older and think back, you will be able to enjoy it a second time.

I will definitely post these in my cubicle at work. Words are so powerful that a quick glance can change the pace of our workday and change our attitudes and actions. Putting inspirational thoughts in our office is a form of communicating to inner self in a simple and clear way. It is important to have an authentic dialogue with our own self. Communication with the self is much more important than the communication we do with others.

Week 5, blog 2

In chapter 10, on page 322, the author mentions that “…employee training and development- formal and informal efforts to develop employee skill- has always been a function of management.” Based on my personal experiences with the California State University (CSU) system, I want to point out that at the CSU “employee training and development” has not been the function of management. At the CSU, there is a culture which requires the “employee” to take charge of his or her training and development. Therefore, it is common to find certain CSU employees doing the same job, in the same department for more than 15 years. The CSU employees who have progressed or moved in different job functions over the years are the ones that took charge of their own training and development.

It would be interesting to compare the CSU’s employee training and development practices with other universities in the country and bench mark best practices. If the CSU Human Resources office improves this aspect then it will improve the performance management system for its employees which tracks their success and provides specific feedback on where they must improve and training and development can be provided for those areas.

Week 5, blog 1

Chapter 9, page 279 defines “Transformational Leadership” which foregrounds organizational change and transformation as the essential task of effective leaders. Further, the text clarifies that the new type of leader is a change agent who seeks to lead an organization through an increasingly turbulent global business environment through the strategic use of communication.

I want to discuss how transformational leadership relates to the current budget crisis of the State of California. From what I read in the local newspaper and hear on the television news, it does not seem like we have true transformational leaders in Sacramento. The State’s budget crisis has huge impact on all of the state agencies that provide different services to the public. Many programs and services are being cut or reduced and the leaders in Sacramento are not using strategic communication approaches to inspire the agencies to implement this change. There is massive restructuring or reorganizing happening in different state agencies, where the chaos are continuously increasing. The time is right for the State to change the way it does business, but the leaders in Sacramento are not being inspirational, nor are they empowering state agencies and its employees. The language and the words used by the governor and other leaders in Sacramento are just mediocre, so the state employees and the public have not been really inspired to support the changes that are being planned.

Week 4, blog 4

Web lecture has a good argument about real vs. Virtual communication. I agree with the professor that there is no distinction because even if communication is done using multimedia, electronic devices, or not face-to-face, it is still real/authentic communication. Exchange of information is always a true communication regardless of geographic location or tools involved. Communication happens all the time so dictincting them as real or virtual is not wise. Communication is always real no matter who is involved and where it happens. For example, the comments we post on fellow students blog entries are real form of communication.

Week 4, blog 3

Chapter 8
Pages 248-249 talk about the terms "conflict" and "consensus".

Conflict is defined as the interaction of interdependent people who perceive oppositions of goals, aims, and values, and who see the other parties as potentially interfering with the realization of these goals.

Consensus does not mean that all members agree with a decision but feel instead that their views are adequately considered by the team.

I knew the correct meaning of conflict, but up until now I always thought that consensus meant that all members agreed with the decision. I am glad I took this class, now I know the true meaning. During my work experience in India and the U.S. I have seen many conflicts within the organizations I worked for. Employees in Indian organization resolved conflicts using feminist qualities, like interpersonal skills, providing support & responsivess, while in U.S. I have mainly seen masculine qualities in conflict resolution, like direct and assertive expressions, to the point conversations. I feel like organizational, regional, and national cultures play a vital role in how organizational members resolve conflicts.

On the other hand, the Indian organizations I worked for, I hardly saw business practices that used consensus among various stakeholders. Decisions were made and implemented without the due diligence to all the involved parties. The party that had the highest stakes ruled. In the U.S. organization, I see more time and resources are devoted to reach consensus among all the stakeholders.

Week 4, blog 2

Chapter 8
Pages 233-234 talk about the “multiple stakeholder model” that asserts that organizations ought to be concerned with the interests of many different individuals and groups and not just shareholders or stockholders of their organizations. Figure 8.1 shows a very clear visual of this model and shows how the managing process/coordination is the key middle factor in corporations.

I must admit that for the first five years of my career, I was not using thinking much about the indirect stakeholders. I always focused on the direct and immediate impacts of my job or projects that I worked on. However after starting my graduate program in Public Administration, I have started paying more attention to the implications of my job and projects on multiple stakeholders. It is very hard to have an eagle-eye view from high level to project the intended and unintended consequences of the tasks that you are working on. I am struggling because I often have to meet my deadlines and requirements of upper management within the limitations of the software products I support. Therefore at times, I may not fully service a group of indirect stakeholders per their needs. I hope to learn more techniques and skills to effectively use the multiple stakeholder model as I progress in my career and graduate program.

Week 4, blog 1

Chapter 7
Pages 200-201 talk about the history of “identity” in organizational communication. The authors define “identity” as how individuals position themselves in the world through language and action. The authors mention that historically, identity of individuals was largely fixed, unitary, and organizational bureaucracies tried to establish control over the work life of employees. Employees identified their “real” lives to be outside of work life. However the authors describe that in the recent years, there has been emergence of broad range of employee identities. These identities are fluid and multiple which tend to focus on ethics and consistency of one’s behavior. Individual seek to be authentic in both their work life and personal life.

So the question is “how are organizations handling the modern trend of fluid & multiple identities?”

From my personal experiences, I have seen that majority of the schools, colleges, and universities are providing proper platform for young generation to understand their true selves, including their behavior pattern, decision making pattern, likes, and dislikes. For example, SJSU’s Career Center offers various personality tests, coaching, and counseling to students to identify their core life values to prepare them for their multiple roles in their professional and personal life. Many companies also offer similar instruments to their employees to better orient their fluid and multiple identities and establish horizons of significance. This kind of support helps individuals to properly deal with the complexities and stress that may arise as they juggle their identities to live authentically.

Week 3, blog 4

Week 3, blog 4
The last section of the web lecture Metaphors & Culture talks about the "Fragmentation Perspective of Organizational Culture." Martin defined the fragmented perspective of culture as "a web of individuals, sporadically and loosely connected by their changing positions on a variety of issues. Their involvement, their subcultural identities, and their individual self-definitions fluctuate, depending on which issues are activated at a given moment."

I have seen the traces of fragmented culture in social context, especially families/households. A family/household is a type of social organization. I have discovered characteristics of fragmented culture in families with large number of young children, teenagers, and young adults versus families with large number of middle-aged adults and seniors adults. As the author mentions, this perspective is postmodern so obviously a key element of this perspective on culture is the age or the generation to which a person belongs to. Therefore, organizational communication and organizational culture students, researchers and scholars can really benefit by comparing companies that have high percentage of young employees with companies that do not, There will be a lot of critical information that would emerge from such study that can be further used to improve organizational communication practices.

Week 3, blog 3

Week 3, blog 3
For the blog entry on web lecture Metaphors & Culture, I will talk about “Hegemony.” Hegemony is deeply rooted in the critical approaches to organization that views organizations as instruments of domination that enhances the interest of elite members of the organization at the expense of all the other members. Hegemony refers to domination of one group over another and creation of power relationships in such a way that those who are oppressed accept and contribute to the further oppression.

From my personal experiences in the information technology field, I can see Hegemony happening more in high-tech industries where certain groups emit power through their technical know-how and know-what over those groups of employees who are not technically savvy. For examples, the group of programmers and developers who make the actual software products can create a dominating relationship with product managers and the marketing group. Due to their lack of technical knowledge and lack of posing technically challenging questions, the product managers and the marketing group is more likely to accept the explanations and demands of the programmers/developers which can continue to build on to the dominating relationship. As a result, product managers and marketing group contributes to their own oppression.

I have also seen Hegemony at SJSU, where the University Computing and Telecommunications (UCAT) department plays the dominating group over the group of department administrators, professors, and students who basically buy in to what ever is put on table for them to choose from without challenging the status quo because UCAT is in a better position to defend their technical infrastructure, products and decisions. With continual agreement to UCAT practices, the other university groups described above fuel their own oppression.

Week 3, blog 2

Week 3, Blog 2
Chapter 6, pages 181-184, talks about “healthy organizations” and how there has been an increased attention and interest from critical scholars because they believe that workplace accidents, hazards, and occupational injuries are direct results of organizational practices that value productivity and profitability over employee safety and health. Immediately after reading this section, I started thinking about various multinational companies that have production facilities in third-world countries and the kind of working conditions they offer to their employees there. In developed countries like the United States, we have regulatory agencies like OSHA that monitors workplace health and safety, but the we still see high volume of occupational fatalities, illness, and injuries every year. It is just common sense and common guess that in third-world countries the rates of occupational fatalities, illness, injuries, and physical disabilities are much alarming because these countries probably lack the proper governmental regulatory infrastructure that advocates employee occupational safety and health.

In the absence of governmental occupational safety and health regulations, what do these multinational companies do to better organize their overseas workplaces and improve organizational communication to ensure the well-being and safety of their employees? This issue also overlaps with the social responsibility of an organization towards the country they are operating in, as well as their individual employee's well-being. Although I have read numerous news articles and seen many television programs that shows the hazardous working conditions in third-world countries, I have not come across any newspaper articles or television programs that highlight the good occupational health and safety practices that some multinational companies might be conducting in third-world countries. If this is a global age and global economy that we all are living under, it is important for multinational organizations to not overlook the global occupational health and safety concerns, especially in third-world countries.

Week 3, blog 1

Week 3, blog 1
In Chapter 5, the most interesting section was about the eight common characteristics that Thomas Peters and Robert Waterman Jr. discovered during their study of organizational culture among the sixty-two financially successful companies they studied in the early 1980’s. Those characteristics are listed below:

1)A bias for Action: Active decision making without thinking for long time or relying on a lot of information to make decisions.
2)Close relations to the customer: Constant focus on customers and providing excellent customer service.
3)Autonomy and entrepreneurship: Empowering employees to take risk and responsibility of their actions.
4)Productivity through people: Quality workers equal quality products. Valuing everyone throughout the organization so no real division between management and line employees
5)Hands-on, value driven: Widely shared core values and common vision. Achievement is dependent on performance and performance is dependent on values.
6)Stick to the knitting: No diversification. Expansion & profits through focus on what they do best.
7)Simple form, lean staff: Leaner organizational structure.
8)Simultaneous loose-tight properties: Encourage individual and group decision making. Not centralized or decentralized. Adaptation to situation to get the job done.

What was most intriguing about this section was how Peter acknowledges that although the characteristics above are good reference point, they did not work for some of these companies because two decades later some of these companies could not sustain their success. If value-based systems are difficult to sustain over a long period of time, then can we say company culture, which is essentially value-based, is not a good predictor of financial success of a company? Peter has refined his thinking to also include two other characteristics, more emphasis on customers and need to manage amidst chaos, but I wish he had given few examples. I wish this was not an online class and we had the opportunity to discuss and elaborate more on organizational culture vs. prediction of financial success with the Professor and fellow classmates.

Goals

Chapter 4, page 108, discusses "goals" and how goals are viewed differently from a scientific management perspective and open-systems perspective. In the scientific management perspective, both the individuals and the organizations direct their activities towards a common goal attainment. In the open-systems perspective, goals are negotiated among the interdependent units of the organizations and they are highly influenced by environment.

In my career, I have mainly experienced differing goals among different departments. When I worked as a marketing executive for a computer education institute, our team often experienced conflict with the administrative team and the training team because our goals were different and there was little communication between these teams. My marketing team's goal was to increase awareness about our educational programs and increase enrollment. The administrative team's goal was to provide excellent infrastructure for the students and trainers. While, the training team's goal was to provide quality education. Every quarter, each team had to fight to get their budget requests approved from the management team. There was limited funding and resources, so if the teams would have communicated with eachother in advance about their upcoming quarterly needs, they could have made compromises or would have come up with tactical solutions to create a win-win situation for everyone by negotiating common goals. Each quarter all the teams would be left with unmet needs and the animosity among the different teams kept rising. From what I remember, this institute was full of young employees between the ages 18 to 30. I think we all lacked the knowledge and experience to create an open and more communicative environment!

Interdependence

In Chapter 4, page 107, the term "Interdependence" is defined as the wholeness of the system and its environment and to the interrelationships of individuals within the system. Immediately after reading the section on interdependency, I started thinking about the tragedy the California State University (CSU) system is going through. My next thought was "...wait its a tragedy that the whole California Education system is going through." California Education system is going to have the biggest and the long-term impact due to the State budget crisis, which is essentially going to impact the future of the next generation of California youths.

Each of the 23 CSU campuses is facing funding cuts in millions of dollars. As a result, the first step that all CSUs took is they started limiting enrollment. This means thousands of qualified students were denied admissions and were directed to community colleges. The community colleges are also facing similar budget cuts and lack of infrastructure to serve large volume of students. Thus, students graduating from high schools are devastated with the limited options they have for pursuing their higher education. High schools administrators are struggling to resolve the transition problems faced by their graduating students. There is this whole chain reaction of tragedy that is happening in California's Education system. It is amazing to see what a high level of interdependency there is between the housing market crash, the financial market crash, the State's budget deficits, and the universities, community colleges, high schools of California.

Human Relations approach to organizational communication

In Chapter 3, page 82, we read about the "Human Relations" approach that assumes that all people want to feel connected to something bigger than themselves which commands and summons them to significant living. Unlike the scientific management approach which focuses on division of labor and strict efficiency, this approach focuses on the cooperation among different people working together as a team to achieve excellence in all aspects of work whether it is family oriented, job oriented, community oriented or leisure oriented. Interpersonal relationships are key to the "Human Relations" approach.

The high-tech industry uses the "Human Relations" approach to a great extent. Team building exercises, group retreats, self-directed work teams, open platform to mingle with like-minded people and programs focusing especially on the employees needs are some examples that the management of these organizations use to enhance cooperation and persuade their employees to work in unison toward a common goal. With the increased attention from the management, workers get motivated to do their best.

I want to share an excellent example of organizational communication used by a local government. The City of San Jose is facing a budget deficit of approximately $78 million dollars for fiscal year 2009-2010. The city is facing some hard decisions, including program cuts and possible layoffs. Emotions are high among the 7000 city employees who are worried about their future. However, the city manager (Debra Figone) is doing an excellent job of using her communication skills to boost employee morale and put the employees at ease. My friends who work for the city, proudly claims that the weekly email memos/announcements they receive from the city manager are worded and targeted especially towards the worried employees. Each email from the city manager gives such an assurance to these employees that the city management is doing their best to protect the employees from any harsh affect of the economical turmoil. The verbiage of the emails is so well chosen that the employees feel as if the city manager is speaking to them in-person. The city manager's office is also encouraging employees to voice their concerns and opinions. By using her interpersonal skills, the city manager is ensuring that productivity and current efficiencies of city operations and services are not compromised during this difficult time.

Déjà vu to Operations Management class

Chapter 3 was a déjà vu to all the theories that I learned in my Operations Managment class during my undergraduate studies in Business Administration. I never thought I would come across the classical management theories in this class, but after reading the sections about the industrial revolution, division of labor, scientific management, bureaucracy, I can now understand that communication was simple yet critical way of giving orders, directing and coordinating work tasks, and making sure that employees and the public followed the rules and regulations.

I agree with the authors that many tenets of the classical approach to management are still alive, especially at the federal, state, and local government levels. If you examine the operations and organizational communication approaches at the department of motor vehicle, department of homeland security, social services, the judicial system, etc., you will find that the classical management is still creating efficiencies and effectiveness in the operations of these governmental organizations.

Work story

Hi everyone, I am TM and as you can see I tried blogging couple years back and then stopped. I do not like blogging but for this class I've no choice, so here I go for the next 6 weeks. I've held various different jobs in the last 12 years in the U.S. and India, such as tutoring kids, selling Avon, marketing for software & hardware training courses, conducting computer education seminars, teaching preschool, teaching English.

Currently, I work as a Sr. Software Specialist at CSU East Bay. I am taking this class as an elective for my masters degree in Public Administration. From 2003 to 04/2009 I worked at SJSU in 2 different positions. From 2003-2006, I worked at the CMS Help Desk...yes the same help desk you guys call/email for all your issues with MySJSU (PeopleSoft) website, including password resets. I was one of the two Help Desk & Training Assistant who supported 30,000+ students and 3000+ employees who use that site for various Student Administration and HR processes. That job gave me a good exposure to the university system. Then I worked as the Human Resources Information Systems (HRIS) Analyst & Trainer supporting all the various PeopleSoft HR functionalities used by SJSU.

Although I am a software specialist, communication with internal and external stakeholders is a huge part of my job so I am looking forward to learn new communication concepts and theories from this class.