Formal organizations: structure, function, and characteristics

¶ … Bureaucracies

Strategies to Autocratic Leadership

Before analyzing the strategies of becoming an effective autocrat in the leadership field, there has to be an understanding of the tasks obliged to the formal organizations and bureaucratic groups. The study of formal organizations entails organizations that are rationally designed so that objectives and goals are achieved. The organizations in most cases have well established rules that govern its transactions, and the organizations run their duties using well-formulated regulations and stipulated procedures. Most of the bureaucratic organizations are formal in nature, due to the leadership styles that are used. Weber's theories admit a drastic increase in the development of formal organizations in Europe and the United States. Currently, formal organizations are dominative, as the regulations for development of organizations increase with global impacts. Almost all the human transactions involve organizations; ranging from educational facilities, healthcare organizations and many others.

Organizations as bureaucracies

Weber interpreted the organization to be the manner of which human activities are coordinated, in the form of the products, they produce and the services they offer in specified periods of time and space. In case of organization development, there has to be a certain way to control information, which involves written rules for effective functioning. For the University of California to annex and develop an organization, then it means development of a large-scale organization. According to the theory of Weber, large-scale organizations have to be bureaucratic in nature. Bureaucracy is just a term that simply means the rule of the officials, and was only applied by government officers, until recently when it was used to refer in relation to large organizations. Though the model has been criticized as ineffective and unrealistic by many researchers and scholars, Weber defined the bureaucratic model to be effective in the sense that, all the organization tasks and objectives are reached after regulation by strict procedures that are followed with minimal compromise. The development of organizations in the current times, therefore, calls for an understanding of formal regulations of the bureaucratic model, because the informal procedures of development hinder the effectiveness of most of the organizations.

However, the bureaucratic models have their limitations. One of the limitations is that the model relies wholly on the written rules and procedures hence could be rigid to integration of change. The model is hardly flexible, and this makes the employees and other staffs feel uneasy when working. The model is also known to have hindered the capabilities of many humans, who feel their ideas cannot be implemented due to the rigidity of the model in formal organizations.

Strategies to autocratic leadership

The autocratic approach to leadership could be defined as the leadership style where the leader takes in to consideration the objectives and goals of the organizations, and makes most of the decisions in the organization. This means the leader will be responsible for the maintenance of regulations, which are to be strictly followed in the course of duty. Reaching well-defined strategies is, therefore, centralized and linked to the duties of decision making. When developing the school for formal organizations and bureaucracies study, the leader will be responsible for the decision-making and final word during the development. Hierarchical orders are considered for the best interest, with the leader requiring enough interest to operate and coordinate the development.