What is an Effective Organization?

Why are some organizations more effective than others in communicating their messages?
How can PR practitioners make an organization more effective with its publics?
Observe organizations around you and explain why some of them are perceived as successful while others as failures?

Four key approaches on effectiveness:
1. Systems perspective
> Also known as the natural systems model and the systems resource approach
> An organization is seen as a system comprised of interrelated sub-systems
> The performance of each subsystem will affect the entire system
> The PR department, as a managerial subsytem, will affect the success or failure of the organization
> Mgmt relies on PR professionals to maintain good relations with the organization's external publics
> Coomunication skills also contribute to coordination of internal operations
> Evaluation is based on systems characteristics, such as growth, equilibrium or decline
> Effectiveness is defined as the organization's awareness and successful interactions with its "environmental publics such as customers, suppliers, government agencies, and communities.... (which) have the power to disrupt or at least constrain the operation of the organization" (Yutchman and Seashore, 1967)

2. Competing-values perspective
> An integrative framework that "encompasses both means and ends ... of acquiring resources from the environment"
> An organization's survival depends on resource acquistion, resource transformation into products and release of products and services into the environment
> Useful for organizations in transition to guide them to their strategic directions
> Effectiveness is defined as "achievement vis-a-vis priorities" (Hage, 1980) which ackowledges multiple criteria for effectiveness and conflicting interests in efforts at assessing success or failure
> Different organizations use different standards to demonstrate their effectiveness, either through cohesion and morale (HR and training), adaptability and readiness (growth, resource acquisition and external support), planning and goal-setting (productivity and effciency) or information management and communication (stability and control)

3. Strategic-constituencies perspective:
> More contemporary measure of organizational effectiveness
> Emphasizes the external environment
> Focuses on interdependencies between organizations and its external environments
> Concentrates on the segments within the environment that most threaten the organization
> The standard becomes how well the organization satisfies the demands of its relevant external publics, i.e. stakeholders or organized groups that are deemed to be most critical to the organization, in terms of their potential for support or for adversarial action
> Associated with resource-dependent and population ecology approaches

4. Goal-attainment perspectives
> Also known as rational-systems model
> This approach emphasizes ends
> An effective organization is one that realizes its goal (Robbins, 1990)
> Most reasonable approach when goals are clear, time bound and measurable
> Attractive because of its emphasis on purposeful action
> The notion of self-interest is paramount within the framework of power and control in organization
> Thus, effectiveness is defined as "the degree to which an organization attains its short- (ends) and long-term (means) goals, the selection of which reflects strategic constituencies, the self-interest of the evaluator, and the life stage of the organization" (Robbins, 1990, 77)
> Four ways to be more effective:
(a) diversify to "loosen dependencies"
(b) diffuse power of CEO
(c) develop mechanisms for "scanning the environment" to identify potential external groups, to encourage information in-flow, and assist senior managers act on that information
(d) develop mechanisms for "managing conflicting demands and constraints", for example consumer affairs departments, industrial relations departments and affirmative action departments.
(Pfeffer and Salancik, 1978)

Key concepts:
1. Environmental Publics
Consumers, activists, regulatory agencies, media organizations
2. Stakeholders
Publics or other organizations
3. Dominant Coalition
A group in an organization that has the power to make and enforce decisions about the strategic direction of the company - its tasks, its objectives, its functions and structures. Its power legitimised and institutionalized through legal documents, characters of incorporation, and so forth (Holmes, 1965; Weber, 1947)
4. Boundary Spanners
Individuals within the organization who frequently interact with the organization's environmnet and who gather, select and relay information from the environment to decision makers in the dominant coalition. Communication managers and PR practitioners are mong an organization's designated boundary spanners (Aldrich and Herker, 1977). Boundary-spanning activities can be formalized through management information systems (MIS)

The nature of relationships between organizations and stakeholders emerges as a central concept in a theory of public relations and organizational effectiveness:
> Organizations must deal with other organizations on a daily basis, either competing or cooperating for economic opportunities, legislation, public policies, or media coverage
> Thus, there is a connection between the quality of communication (PR excellence) and the nature of relationships between organizations and their stakeholders

The yardstick used for measuring the quality of an organization's relationships with strategic publics:
(a) dynamic versus static,
(b) open versus closed,
(c) the degree of satisfaction with the relationship,
(d) distribution of power in the relationship,
(e) the mutuality of understanding, agreement, and consensus,
(f) plus trust and credibility

Can PR Excellence be measured in monetary terms?
Following to the norm of reciprocity, successful organizations strive to be good corporate citizens by embracing corporate social responsibility (CSR). Does it pay to "give back" to the society in the long-term?
According to Preston, responsible (corporate) behavior has an indirect effect on performance (1981, 9)
"Socially relevant behaviors" and "externally-oriented activity" are crucial in maintaining the socio-political status-quo and preserving the environment since "penalties for deviance ... (which include bad publicity, regulatory and criminal fines, private suits, and penetration of the firm by activist groups and government ... can be extremely costly" (Grunig, 1992, 86)
Socially responsible corporations do everything they can to secure market advantage (Tuleja, 1985, 187) through two key terms, "goodwill" and "long-term" (1985, 200)

Decisions and Decision-making
Definitions:
Decision - "a specific commitment to action" - Mintzberg, Raisinghani, and Theoret (1976)
Decision making - "the moment of choice among the alternative immediate acts" - Berkeley and Humphreys (1982)
Deciison making is not made in a vacuum, it is made within a social setting and it has social consequences
Decision Problem - requires the need for a decision and a definition which involves problem perception, evaluation of its strategic structure and negotiation for a selection of a resolution.

There are five distinct participant roles that are available to a communication manager:
1. Decision makers - have executive powers to define the use of outputs from the phases of the decision-making process
r. Proposers - have the power to make recommendations
3. Experts - supply input to the modeled problem structure
4. Consultants or Decision Analysts - advise on methods of problem representation
5. Facilitators - facilitates collaboration of experts and the transmission of results within and between rounds of decision making