Organizational Effectiveness
Understanding organizational goals and strategies, as well as the concept of fitting design to various contingencies, is a first step toward understanding organizational effectiveness.
Organizational goals represent the reason for an organization’s existence and the outcomes it seeks to achieve. The rest of this article explores the topic of effectiveness and how effectiveness is measured in organizations.
What Is Organizational Effectiveness
Organizational effectiveness is the degree to which an organization realizes its goals.
Effectiveness is a broad concept. It implicitly takes into consideration a range of variables at both the organizational and departmental levels.
Effectiveness evaluates the extent to which multiple goals—whether official or operating—are attained. Efficiency is a more limited concept that pertains to the internal workings of the organization.
Organizational efficiency is the amount of resources used to produce a unit of output. It can be measured as the ratio of inputs to outputs.
If one organization can achieve a given production level with fewer resources than another organization, it would be described as more efficient.
Sometimes efficiency leads to effectiveness, but in other organizations efficiency and effectiveness are not related.
An organization may be highly efficient but fail to achieve its goals because it makes a product for which there is no demand. Likewise, an organization may achieve its profit goals but be inefficient.
Efforts to increase efficiency, particularly through severe cost cutting, can also sometimes make the organization less effective. Sometimes a new focus on goals of cost-cutting and efficiency can hurt innovation and the company’s ability to adapt.
As an example, a regional fast food chain wanting to increase efficiency decided to reduce food waste by not cooking any food until it was ordered. The move cut the chain’s costs, but it also led to delayed service, irritated customers, and lower sales.
Overall effectiveness is difficult to measure in organizations. Organizations are large, diverse, and fragmented; they perform many activities simultaneously, pursue multiple goals, and generate many outcomes, some intended and some unintended.
Managers determine indicators to measure in order to gauge the effectiveness of their organizations.
Four key approaches to measuring effectiveness look at different parts of the organization and measure indicators connected with outputs, inputs, internal activities, or key stakeholders, also called strategic constituents. These four possible approaches to measuring effectives are discussed here Opens in new window.
The Series:
- Research data for this work have been adapted from the manual:
- Organization Theory & Design By Richard L. Daft
