United States in the early 1980s, when he was featured in a public broadcasting special. Deming’s 14 points for management focus on how organizations achieve quality. In his concept, managers have the responsibility to establish an environment with quality as the watchword and to improve processes so that quality can be achieved. Workers are inhibited in their efforts to produce high quality goods and services by the processes that are developed, implemented, and controlled by management. Only management can foster improvement in services. Deming was an advocate of continuous quality improvement, a management philosophy that seeks to improve all processes in an organization. To Deming, quality improvement was not a program to be undertaken by a quality office. It is a philosophy that is customer driven and has the goal of meeting and exceeding customers’ expectations.
Integrated Perspective
There is no one correct way to design an organization. More important is that the design or configuration selected furthers the goals of the organization. In this regard, it is useful to apply Drucker’s criteria: clarity, as opposed to simplicity; economy of effort to maintain control; direction of vision toward the product, not the process; all individuals understanding their tasks and those of the organization; focused decision making; stability, not rigidity; and perpetuation and self-renewal.
MANAGEMENT PRACTICES
The formal organizational structure that managers design and implement provides important information about the planned interrelationships among its several elements. Within the formal structure, however, is the informal “organization,” which consists of the numerous interpersonal relationships that develop outside the formal relationships established in the formal organization and that reflect the wishes and preferences of the people who work in the organization. The informal organization is characterized by dynamic behavior and activity patterns that occur within the formal organizational structure of people working together. These interactions and relationships arise spontaneously, but they are usually stable over time.
Informal groups give their members relief from monotony and boredom, offer interaction with persons having similar values, and allow achievement of a level of