Case Summary of the Bureaucratic Issue
Cigna Corporation is an organization that often turns to bureaucratic management practices characterized by hierarchy, formalization, and regulations. To elaborate, the former advances the bureaucratic issue by creating barriers to the speed and completeness of information flow, while specialization increases the cost of coordination and interaction (Besley et al., 2022). Moreover, formalization provides continuity but takes more time to record activities. As a result, hierarchy results in management with blurred responsibility, which allows the employees not to follow the company’s rules. The formalization’s drawback is replacing actual work with paperwork, while specialization fuels the problem by providing autonomy to subdivisions contradicting organizational goals. The shortcomings in practice are embodied in several destructive trends: a complication of the management system, virtualization, hypertrophied control, and violation of specialization (Besley et al., 2022). Due to the unity of management principles, they are scaled and reproduced at all levels of the hierarchy in the Cigna Corporation.
Solving Bureaucratic Problems
Managers’ attitude toward goal-setting and direct responsibilities is the primary tool for overcoming bureaucratic problems. Leaders must understand the importance of their work and manage people rather than papers. Therefore, it is necessary to begin by analyzing the tasks of each employee and identifying the constraints that hinder successful work (Knill et al., 2019). Directors should go beyond the formal job descriptions because most traditional management methods involve adding unnecessary additional functions and responsibilities. Cigna Corporation has more than ten hierarchical levels, and it is necessary to reduce them and remove managerial positions that do not affect the work context. Moreover, workers are often deprived of autonomy in decision-making, leading to the company’s inability to be flexible (Knill et al., 2019). Therefore, it is essential to provide the staff with opportunities to operate based on the company’s rules to ensure the smooth fulfillment of responsibilities within the organization.
Solution Implementation Strategies
One of the most critical aspects of tackling is the implementation strategies. It is manageable, not feverish and crisis-induced, change that keeps an organization competitive over the long term. One strategy for implementing the solutions to this problem can be instructional and methodological activities with the selected implementers. All medical and administrative staff need to be explained what is required of them and how they should perform their functions (Meier, 2019). Each performer should be given a task directly related to their job responsibilities.
Indeed, employees need to be informed about every aspect of the decision. Nevertheless, for it to be implemented, it is necessary to execute a strategy to encourage feedback with two steps. The first is to create a platform or system that allows employees to share their thoughts and ask questions of colleagues from their level. Questions are often addressed to the HR department, but managers should also be available to all employees (Knill et al., 2019). The second step is to use team feedback so that employees would follow the advice to improve their performance further.
Decision Monitoring Strategies
When performing monitoring, it is necessary to evaluate and measure both the progress of the decisions made by the organization and the conformity of the decisions made earlier to the development of the decision-making situation. Monitoring should be carried out directly during the organization’s work following the decisions made. As a rule, it is performed by the immediate superior and is based on measuring the actual results of the work performed (Rockman, 2020). The primary strategic tool of control organization is feedback. It makes it possible to realize the deviations in work and make corrective decisions. At the same time, the primary strategy for monitoring decisions is to structure tasks and discuss their execution at the end of each week. Structuring will lead to the prevalence of qualitative variables, the impossibility of using standards, and the need to resort to heuristic approaches.
The Successfulness of the Recommended Solution
The recommended solution is bound to directly and effectively impact the elimination of bureaucracy. It will be beneficial in reducing the complexity of the process by creating conditions in which the optimal behavior of employees can emerge. This approach may lead to greater organizational diversity because voluntary cooperation might allow workers to find creative solutions to problems individually (Meier, 2019). Nevertheless, despite this diversity, Cigna Corporation can become more efficient regarding resources because problems will be solved solely through interaction, skills, and creativity. Expenditure on the organization process will be more than compensated by the opportunity to abandon all the complex coordination programs favored by numerous experts.
Employee Awareness Plan
Each manager is interested in ensuring that the work of company employees and the results of their work follow corporate requirements. However, educating the employees on the organizational rules is critical to ensure their compliance (Rockman, 2020). Thus, to reduce misinformation and the effectiveness of the results, it is necessary to implement the following steps:
- Determine the content and volume of information transmitted and received;
- Convey information to the patient care, finance, support services, and human resources administrators;
- Determining lab, pathologies, and clinical directors as individuals responsible for informing nurses and other clinical workers;
- Choose the forms of information delivery and channels that exclude its distortion;
- Establish a feedback loop, a system where information flows not only from the top down but also from the bottom up.
- Create a corporate information portal, which is an array of diverse information needed by the organization’s employees to perform their job duties.
Leadership Skills to Support Strategic Execution
To support strategic execution, one needs a vision that is based on the idea of reform. Vision allows one to create an image of the new and helps to paint a picture of the future, building perspective. Equally important is goal-setting, which allows a leader to articulate his vision into a concrete, tangible result (Meier, 2019). This leadership skill allows one to see the goal clearly, not just from a distant perspective. Flexibility is likewise necessary for the process of moving toward a goal. It allows each specific situation to act most effectively. In today’s world, the value of communicativeness as a leadership quality is very high. It will allow leaders to make the right connections at a suitable time to achieve corporate goals more effectively.
References
Besley, T., Burgess, R., Khan, A., & Xu, G. (2022). Bureaucracy and development. Annual Review of Economics, 14, 397-424. Web.
Knill, C., Bayerlein, L., Enkler, J., & Grohs, S. (2019). Bureaucratic influence and administrative styles in international organizations. The Review of International Organizations, 14(1), 83-106. Web.
Meier, K. J. (2019). Theoretical frontiers in representative bureaucracy: New directions for research. Perspectives on Public Management and Governance, 2(1), 39–56. Web.
Rockman, B. A. (2020). Bureaucracy, power, policy, and the state. In The state of public bureaucracy. Routledge.