Alternatives to Bureaucracy to Motivate Workers
There are many alternatives that are used to motivate workers beyond the conventional bureaucratic ways that was once thought of as the only way to control workers. Since the 1960's we have learned a great deal of information leading to the discovery of alternatives to bureaucratic organizations. Today, bureaucratic ideas are still widely used among organizations, however a shift in thinking occurred and the question was asked, What are the alternatives if bureaucracy it not working in an organization? According to Max Weber, bureaucracy is the most efficient and most rational known means of exercising authority over human beings (Weber, p223). Further it is reliable, precise and stable, these are all terms that are desired for large complex organizations that need to control vast amounts of employees. Bureaucracy is based on legitimate authority, those that are being controlled by others; accept oppression as part of the work along. There are several characteristics that mold a particular organization into following the bureaucracy model, such as, rules, hierarchy, salaried careers, written documents and appointment. These characteristics serve as a guideline, or an owner's manual of sorts that has a pre
conceived effect for each cause with the organization. Employees expect some kind of security and loyalty from the company even in difficult times. Again, when a company externalizes the labor costs remain low and are on a piecework type rate; one is only paid for what they sell. Many companies may use a combination of both internal and externalized labor, since risks may vary according to what is sold. Agency Theory Defined:The goal of agency theory is getting people to do the best job for the best price and least amount of risk. Another benefit is keeping critical people that are key to the operations and/or have a specific knowledge of task. The downside of externalized labor is that the contactor focuses only on the commission, and does not offer guarantees to the products that they sell. In which a commission is earned on product sales, in other words, pay is connected with performance. It costs a company a lot of money to employee a full-time person along with benefits and a retirement. The advantages to outsourcing the sales force include customer loyalty, low and stable costs and performance is evaluated by actual sales. One decision is to fill a sales district with representatives called external or with an employee sales force called internal (Anderson, p 234). These outside agents are responsible for selling products for a company but are not part of the company's integration structure. They are not salaried but are employees working on a commission only basis. The disadvantages include costly overhead, metering costs and mediocre performance. The findings in this comparison of external and internal labor sources suggest that when a company is unsure of what their employee is doing, it is cheaper to use surveillance as a control tactic.
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