Organizational Theory #2 What core competences give an organization competitive advantage? What are examples of an organization's functional-level strategies? Core competencies are those capabilities that are critical to a business achieving a competitive advantage in the marketplace. Typically, core competencies can be identified by certain common characteristics -- offering a benefit to the customer, difficult to imitate, uniquely identify the organization and easily leveraged to create many products or operate in many

Organizational Behavior In 1984, the movie The Gods Must be Crazy depicted a Kalahari bushman who finds a Coca-Cola bottle that was discarded from an airplane into the desert. The bushman does not recognize the bottle or the brand, and the situation leads to all manner of confusion among the tribe, who try to decipher the meaning of the bottle. Such a story would be rather incomprehensible today, that there would

According to the authors, this can be done if employees are given a sense of importance in the organizations. Knowledge workers are already short in supplies and most competing rivals also compete to get the best human resource in terms of knowledge workers. It is therefore essential for any organization to retain this highly skilled part of their workforce and in order to do that organizations must eliminate the

Despite their supposed differences, all of the foregoing organizational management techniques and approaches share some common themes involving getting a better handle of what is actually being done in companies and how better to manage these things. Unfortunately, another common theme these management approaches share is the inappropriate or misapplication of these approaches by managers who either do not understand how they work or by rabid managers who insist

However, this does not happen always. An organization's structure is in reality an extremely powerful control technique, as the alternative to structure will automatically favor some groups and put others in trouble. In case managers are employing structure to extend power to some groups or individuals they are not just wielding power rather are getting involved in political movement. Therefore, strategic choices relating to structure might not be coherent

76). As automation increasingly assumes the more mundane and routine aspects of work of all types, Drucker was visionary in his assessment of how decisions would be made in the years to come. "In the future," said Drucker, "it was possible that all employment would be managerial in nature, and we would then have progressed from a society of labor to a society of management" (Witzel, p. 76). The