Page 116 - DMGT402_MANAGEMENT_PRACTICES_AND_ORGANIZATIONAL_BEHAVIOUR

Unit 5: Coordination, Centralisation and Decentralisation

suppliers and other stakeholders perform interdependent activities aimed at achieving certain Notes
goals. To perform these activities, the actors require various types of inputs or resources. As
explained later in the paper the inputs may themselves be interdependent in the ways that they
are acquired, created or used. The goals to which the actors aspire are also diverse in nature.
Some of them will be personal while others are corporate. Even where the goals are corporate,
they address different sets of stakeholders and may be in conflict.
Multiple actors and interactions, resources and goals need to be coordinated if common desired
outcomes are to be achieved. Viewed from the need to maintain perspective and solve problems
that might arise from these multiplicities, coordination links hand in glove with the concept of
systems thinking. Actors in organisations are faced with coordination problems. Coordination
problems are a consequence of dependencies in the organisation that constrain the efficiency of
task performance. Dependencies may be inherent in the structure of the organisation (for example,
departments of a university college interact with each other, constraining the changes that can
be made to a single department without interfering with the efficient functioning of the other
departments) or dependences may result from processes – task decomposition or allocation to
actors and resources (for example, professors teaching complementary courses face constraints
on the kind of changes they can make without interfering with the functioning of each other).
Organisations are systems in the sense that they comprise of elements that interact to produce a
predetermined behavior or output. Change in a constituent part of a system may constrain
efficient functioning of other parts of the same system or alter required input or output
specifications. Others, especially resources, may need to be used in combination to achieve
desired changes. Looking at small parts of an interacting system involving multiple actors,
resources and goals may accentuate a problem that analysis seeks to solve. Coordination, in a
systems thinking approach fashion is called for.
The solution to coordination problems, according to coordination theory, lies in the actors
performing additional activities called coordination mechanisms. The theory maintains that
dependences and mechanisms to counter them are general in the sense that they arise in one
form or another in nearly every organisation. The theory this makes a recommendation that it
is essential to identify and study dependences in a system and their related coordination
mechanisms before decisions are made or action taken. Actors must also realize that there are
several mechanisms to manage a dependency each of which may result in different processes.
The ideal one should be based on situational factors and often involves trade offs. To summarize,
an organisation considering change (or an organisation in the process of formation) ought to
first identify inherent dependences and coordination problems likely to be faced and then
choose from alternatives the coordination mechanism that best achieves the desired goals in the
circumstances. A key point here is that coordination mechanisms are variable parts of the
organisation system and that choice of a specific mechanism has consequences for efficiency and
goal achievement.
A simplified typology of the kind of dependences that call for coordination in an organisation
may be:
1. Task-task: Tasks may have overlapping, conflicting or outputs with the same characteristics;
Common inputs for tasks may be shareable, reusable or non-reusable; the output of one
task may be the input of other tasks or a prerequisite for performing subsequent tasks.
There may be conflict in specifications that need coordination.
2. Task-resource i.e. resources required by a task.
3. Resource-resource: A situation in which one resource depends on another resource. Each
of these dependences requires an appropriate coordination mechanism to manage it.
In conclusion, solution to organisational problems, implementation of change or formation of
a new organisation involves the management of numerous dependences among tasks, resources
and goals. Dependences are best managed by coordination of the dependent parties. The choice

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