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!