motivational analysis of organizations

To the organizational entrepreneur, organizations drive industrial society but are
subject to malfunctions and breakdowns and sometimes need extensive redesign.
Organizational entrepreneurs are able to restructure the organization in radical new ways
with drastic changes in staff and procedure. They can put project teams together rapidly,
ignoring rank and status, and can manage these teams to bring projects to production
quickly.
The organization person thinks that the effectiveness of organizations comes
precisely from “going by the book”—filling role prescriptions and norms—and having a
well-structured, clearly differentiated chain of command. Such people identify with
“their” organizations and see the organization as an entity in which one progressively
becomes more and more of an “insider.” For them, a career involves three types of
movement: upward through promotion, laterally to a more prestigious function or
department, and inward to an inner circle of power and prestige.
The specialist/expert sees the organization as providing the resources—facilities,
finance, administrative backup—necessary to his or her specialty. As the specialist sees
it, organizations exist to “do things,” and the technical experts “get things done.”
Specialists see managers as mere paper shufflers.
In their approaches to their jobs, most people exhibit aspects of each of the styles
described. The question is “In what proportions and with what level of awareness?”
This instrument is composed of issues in career management. For each issue, four
options, each with a different cost-benefit ratio, are presented. The four options for each
issue represent the four career-management styles. Thus, the instrument provides a
series of rank orderings for which cumulative choices indicate preferences among the
styles.
This is a new type of instrument, not obviously tied to any specific theory or
viewpoint. Its contents relate directly to everyday dilemmas of the workplace. It is often
difficult for respondents to make a choice among the various options, which are
scrambled and posed in different ways. The respondents are given only about forty
minutes to complete the inventory so that there is little time for second guessing. The
cumulative implications of the inventory are not apparent. Usually, the inventory is
perceived as an intriguing exercise in consciousness raising, but its findings can be used
in a variety of other ways as well.
USES OF THE INSTRUMENT
The most obvious use of the instrument is to assess which style is most prominent,
which appears least, and so on. The next most obvious use is to determine what mix of
styles is favored by the organization for which the respondent works. Step three follows
naturally: to determine how well the first two match.
The next round of investigations probably will be to find out how accurate the
respondent’s perceptions are. So someone (or, better, several people) who know(s) the
respondent will rate the respondent’s most likely choices on the inventory. Then several
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The Pfeiffer Library Volume 19, 2nd Edition. Copyright © 1998 Jossey-Bass/Pfeiffer