The Hoover Commission, officially named the Commission on Organization of the Executive Branch of the Government, was a body appointed by President Harry S. Truman in 1947 to recommend administrative changes in the Federal Government of the United States. It took its nickname from former President Herbert Hoover, who was appointed by Truman to chair it.
Motivation-Hygiene Theory November 17, 2009
According to Frederick Herzberg, the determinants of job dissatisfaction include
1. working conditions
2. supervision
3. salary
2. supervision
3. salary
Herzberg proposed the Motivation-Hygiene Theory, also known as the Two factor theory (1959) of job satisfaction. According to his theory, people are influenced by two sets of factors:
| Motivator Factors | Hygiene Factors |
|---|---|
|
|
- People are made dissatisfied by a bad environment, but they are seldom made satisfied by a good environment.
- The prevention of dissatisfaction is just as important as encouragement of motivator satisfaction.
- Hygiene factors operate independently of motivation factors. An individual can be highly motivated in his work and be dissatisfied with his work environment.
- All hygiene factors are equally important, although their frequency of occurrence differs considerably.
- Hygiene improvements have short-term effects. Any improvements result in a short-term removal of, or prevention of, dissatisfaction.
- Hygiene needs are cyclical in nature and come back to a starting point. This leads to the “What have you done for me lately?” syndrome.
- Hygiene needs have an escalating zero point and no final answer.
Leadership November 17, 2009
University of Michigan studied leadership for several years and identified two distinct styles, which they referred to as job-centered and employee-centered leadership styles. Which one of the following leadership styles was identified by the Michigan University Leadership Studies as the most effective leadership style?
Ans– Employee-centred leadership
The job-centered leader closely supervises subordinates to make sure they perform their tasks following the specified procedures. This type of leader relies on reward, punishment, and legitimate power to influence the behavior of followers.
The employee-centered leader believes that creating a supportive work environment ultimately is the road to superior organizational performance. The employee-centered leader shows great concern about the employees’ emotional well-being, personal growth and development, and achievement.
By Fayol November 17, 2009
Scalar Chain November 17, 2009
In the figure given, if D has to communicate with G he will first send the communication upwards with the help of C, B to A and then downwards with the help of E and F to G which will take quite some time and by that time, it may not be worth therefore a gang plank has been developed between the two.
Fayols Gang Plank November 17, 2009
Explain about gangplank introduced by henri fayol?
Which builds the gap between management and employees. Henry fayol has derived the the theory of gangplank, where he explains about gaps arising in organization. The theory explains how to build the gap in the organization.
TSunami November 17, 2009
urbanlegends.about.com/library/bl_tsunami_pic…
Meaning of TSunami
The word Tsunami is Japanese for harbor wave. Some tsunamis may reach heights of 100 feet or more.
It can be caused by an
underwater earthquake, and
underwater landslide, or
even by an asteroid or
other large body that might crash into the ocean.
Sometimes a small underwater quake will trigger the landslide that causes a tsunami. Such waves are also called tidal waves because they inundate like high tides. But this isn’t just any ordinary wave. It can travel at 500 mph deep under the sea. That doesn’t mean that it destroys ships on its way to shore. In fact it passes right under them unnoticed. That’s because its height might be only twelve to twenty three or so inches. Or it might be noticed but not given any special attention because it might appear harmless..
But the situation changes dramatically when the wave comes closer to shore. As it enters shallow waters it begins to decelerate and gains height as it becomes compressed. Waves up to 100 feet or more in height are possible. Of course one caused by an asteroid impact might be much higher depending on the asteroid’s size. But fortunately such occurrences don’t happen as frequently as earthquake and underwater landslide caused tsunamis.
Herbert Simon November 17, 2009
Herbert Simon, a student of political science, public administration, and economics. He was born in 1916, was heavily influenced by the behavioral revolution in political science under Charles Merriam at the University of Chicago in the 1930s (Simon, 1996), and went on to win the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1978.
His major works include
Administrative Behavior (1946),
Models of Man (1957),
Organizations (coauthored with James March, 1958), and
The Sciences of the Artificial (1969).
Because he worked at Carnegie-Mellon University, his work and those of colleagues and disciples sometimes goes under the label of “the Carnegie school.” Among the major thrusts of his analysis were these:
- Public administration as normative science. Simon believed that public administrators were not should not be and could not be policy-neutral (a direct challenge to Wilsonian thinking), though their commitments to policy should be tempered by strong professional standards.
- Administrative man, not economic man. Simon rejected the classic economic assumptions of managers as economic maximizers making optimal decisions based on acquiring full information. Instead, he believed “administrative man” was more descriptive: managers are “satisficers” who seek the first satisfactory solution, based on limited information (“bounded rationality”). Although Simon’s work was a challenge to purely rational models of decision-making, ultimately his view was rationalistic, believing administrative decisions could be interpreted in terms of nested hierarchical structures in which decision-makers decomposed large problems into a series of smaller ones and routinized their solution through limited search strategies. Simon’s neo-rational theory was later challenged by other theorists who believed public-sector decisions had to be described with more emphasis on political and non-rational processes.
- Information costs. Where classical economics assumed unlimited free information available for decision-making, Simon understood all information has costs. “What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention, and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it. “
- Bounded rationality: pattern matching to develop solutions in problem space. Another corollary of the rejection of “economic man” and decision-making by optimization based on total search of all possible information, was Simon’s understanding that in reality decision-makers define “problem spaces” onto which limited information may be “mapped.” Mapping, in turn, centers on matching patterns, not indiscriminantly adding atomic fragments of data. As patterns are matched, information is mapped in “chunks” to the problem space until satisficing can occur. People remember and process data in chunks, averaging five pieces of data per chunk, not in sequential threads involving a large number of pieces. Satisficing is a form of chunk-based, non-structured search, which may be contrasted with systematic optimization/maximization (as Jones, 2003, does). Simon’s 1955 paper on bounded rationality was a basis for his receiving the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1978. Simon’s later writings on artificial intelligence build on this theme.
- Mathematical models may be constructed to describe human behavior. This was the theme of Models of Man (1957). Decision-making centers on efficiency as a norm for evaluating alternatives. This requires measurement of results. Measurement requires clear conceptual definition of desired outputs. Simon’s earlier 1938 work with Clarence Ridley was a milestone in the measurement of municipal indicators.
- Organizations as value systems. Simon emphasized the role of the manager in articulating organizational goals, in part through encouragement of cooperative behavior (cf. Barnard).
- Cognitive psychology was the focus of Simon’s later work, focusing on the use of the computer to simulate human thinking. In philosophy of science, Simon was especially interested in how theoretical (non-observable) terms arise in scientific theories and how they can be handled in axiomatization.
Luther Gulick November 17, 2009
POSDCORB. Gulick’s theory of administration was a variant of structural-functionalism, analyzing organizations in terms of seven essential functions (forming the acronym PODSCORB): planning, organizing, staffing, directing, coordinating, reporting, and budgeting. The best organizational structure followed function, hence organizations should have functional divisions around these seven functions (though not necessarily seven divisions as some might be combined structurally; however these seven functions describe the executive role worldwide). Span of control. An executive’s span of control rested on diversity, stability, and space. The more diverse the functions being supervised, the more unstable the staffing, and the less the face-to-face contact, the fewer subordinates the executive could control effectively.Gulick sought to differentiate public administration from the then-dominant “scientific management” theories of Frederick Taylor, which had provided the basis for the assembly-line modernization of industry. Where public sector scientific management saw political elements as problems to be minimized, if not eliminated, Gulick emphasized the inevitable and desirable integration of the politics and administration. Gulick was a strong influence on the later thought of Herbert Simon, discussed below. He also figured in the founding of the Brookings Institution, the International Management Association, the American Society for Public Administration, the National Academy of Public Administration, and the National Planning Association.
