- 03/12/2012
- Posted by: essay
- Category: Free essays
High-performance organizations consistently outdo traditional companies by performance.
High-performance organizations support innovation and a willingness to take risks, emphasize the importance of training, presume challenges requiring many skills and abilities; they are built on teams that serve cross-functional processes; mentors and trainers are used instead of managers; employees have constant feedback that gives information about the effectiveness of their work; there are few levels of management; such organizations work closely with customers, promote flexibility and teamwork, pay for effectiveness, provide employees with information about the state of affairs of the company, build their information systems to support teams, and achieve socio-technical balance.
Job descriptions are designed so that their implementation requires many skills, training of which takes a lot of time. While people working in traditional organizations do not take important decisions and simply obey orders, high-performance organization in the making almost all the important decisions rely on the workers themselves. Also in contrast to traditional organizations, people work in teams, within which they frequently switch from one type of work to others independently deciding on the type and pace of work, in addition, they perform the entire task, but not a part of it. Thus, in high-performance organization employees see a direct connection between what they do and the success of the final product or end service (Holbeche, 2005).
The important difference is that in high-performance organizations the lowest employee is separated from the top management by not so many levels, the structure of the organization looks flat. In traditional organizations the main unit is functional, while in high-performance companies – working team. Problems are often being solved on cross-functional basis and in the process of communication between departments. The organization strives to eliminate internal borders. Line and staff functions are fully integrated.
Thus, creating a high-performance team gives opportunity to increase productivity, improve quality, improve working and living conditions of workers, reduce turnover and the number of truancy, reduce conflict, stimulate innovation, gain greater flexibility, and reduce costs from 30 up to 70% (Holbeche, 2005).
References
Holbeche, L. (2005). The High Performance Organization. Butterworth-Heinemann.
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