Organisation's goals

Organisational goals – the goals that the organisation tries to achieve, intentions on which the organisation's decisions and actions are based.[1]

Organisation can also have official goals, which are meant for use outside the organisation, when organisation claims to try to achieve them, although they do not correspond to its actions.[2]

Classification of goals

By measurability the organisation's goals are classified into operational goals that can be formulated in the way that allows measuring of its achievement and nonopertational goals that cannot be formulated in such a way.[2] However, according to Henry Mintzberg, no goal can be compleately measurable, something is inevitably lost while moving to a measurable goal, leading to just an approximation.[3] He offers an example that even the goal of achieving a profit cannot be measured exactly, because measurement requires a time period (long period makes it harder to notice the changes, while the shorter period encourages improvement of measurable results at the cost of future profit).[3]

Henry Mintzberg classifies the organizational goals into four groups:[1][4]

  • Ideological goals (emerging from organisation's ideology, especially organisation's mission)
  • Formal goals (emerging from formal authority)
  • Common personal goals
  • System goals (emerging from willingness to keep the organisation in existence)

Mintzberg lists four system goals of organisations:[5][4]

  • Survival
  • Efficiency
  • Control of the environment
  • Growth

According to him, although efficiency is usually defined as getting the most benefit with the least costs, in practice only measurable benefits and costs are taken into account.[5] Thus, since the costs are usually easier to measure than benefits, and economic benefits and costs are easier to measure than social benefits and costs, efficiency as a goal leads to economising whenever the decrease of benefit is not noticeable (Mintzberg gives an example when administrator of university cuts costs of a study program, as he cannot measure how much the training will worsen), and ignoring of social benefits and costs.[5]

Interaction between goals

Henry Mintzberg lists five cases of reconciliation of goals:

  1. Concentration on achieving one goal
  2. Concentration on achieving goals in succession, in a preset order
  3. Concentration on achieving alternating multiple goals
  4. Concentration on achieving goals in succession, without a clear order
  5. Concentration on achieving all goals to some extent, as constraints

For example, existence of concentration on achieving one goal, with other goals being treated as constraints, has been confirmed for resellers (franchisees).[6]

According to Henry Mintzberg, if some of organisation's goals are operational, when other goals are not, organisation tends to concentrate on achieving operational goals at the cost of nonoperational goals.[3]

Footnotes

  1. 1 2 Henry Mintzberg, "Power In and Around Organizations", Prentice Hall, 1983, p. 245-263
  2. 1 2 Henry Mintzberg, "Power In and Around Organizations", Prentice Hall, 1983, p. 1-7
  3. 1 2 3 Henry Mintzberg, "Power In and Around Organizations", Prentice Hall, 1983, p. 171-183
  4. 1 2 Rose Kearney-Nunnery "Advancing Your Career Concepts in Professional Nursing", 6th edition, 2015, F.A. Davis Company, p. 165-166
  5. 1 2 3 Henry Mintzberg, "Power In and Around Organizations", Prentice Hall, 1983, p. 264-290
  6. ↑ Ravi S. Achrol, Michael J. Etzel, "The Structure of Reseller Goals and Performance in Marketing Channels", "Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science", Vol. 31, No. 2, p. 146-163
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