Mechanically Structured Organizational Controls

Mechanically structured organizational controls

Negative side effects at the U.S. Post Office are something I dealt with for a long time when I ran my business down in Virginia. Many postal employees are great, but there are enough bad ones to negate all the good ones. Our text states “Unions further solidify narrow job descriptions by demanding fixed work rules and regulations to protect employees from the extensive vertical controls.” (Schermerhorn, Osborn, Uhl-Bien, & Hunt, 2012). This is a thought process passed down from the union to the employees and they take it to the extreme. I know one postal employee who was simply asked if she could work an extra day one week and she filed a grievance with the union. Because she knew she would win, she worked the day at her overtime rate, and when the grievance was ended she got two more days pay and a day off with pay. All this because they asked her to work before they asked another girl who had less seniority than her by less than a month, but union rules said they had to ask the other girl first and they didn’t.

Another drawback to a mechanistically structured organization is that the employee’s job functions are very rigidly structured. Although this is done for matters of efficiency, is runs counter to human nature at times. The convenience store chain 7-11 is like that, at least the corporate owned stores at least. Here in Delaware all the stores are franchised, but in Virginia and North Carolina they were corporate owned, corporate managed. This meant everything had to be as identical in each store as absolutely possible. Sometimes it was hard to tell which store I was in because so many were totally identical. The daily routines of the employees were totally structured: time tables for everything that had to be done in the store, specific times for taking out the trash, every employee’s job description hammered out to the last detail and no one could do another employee’s job task, etc. This structure...