Introduction
The job under analysis was that of an acquaintance called Lady X. She holds a position at a leading manufacturing company in the country. The name of the organisation will be withheld in order to protect the institution’s reputation and to preserve Lady X’s job. She works in the HR department as an employment officer. The company started in the early 1900s as a manufacturer. It now has several stores around the country to retail its commodities. The report will examine positions at her workplace, how they were related and some suggestions on how the interdependence can be improved will be given.
Job requirements
Lady X works as an employment officer at her organization. She is in charge of hiring new employees at the company when vacancies arise. She also reviews promotional roles. Here, she works hand in hand with employees to review positions that they can be eligible for. Lady X plays a role in firing employees as she identifies those who warrant it and forwards their names to the HR manager. She organises work permits for those who come from outside the country. Position classification is yet another task that falls under her docket. She does performance appraisals and often instates reassignments.
Individuals important to the job
The first individual is represented as Person A-the training officer. Letters of the alphabet have been used in order to maintain anonymity of the team members. He is responsible for training members of the organisations for new positions. He is relevant to the job because unless employees are properly trained then they will not be eligible for promotions or their performance will be lower than expected. Performance appraisals and promotions are all tasks handled by Lady X and the employment officer.
Person B is important to the job carried out by the employment officer because she is the salary and wage officer. She needs to consult with lady X concerning wage increments when new employees are hired or promoted. She also needs to work hand in hand with lady X in order to do position classifications. Person C is the welfare officer who handles worker’s benefits such as life insurance, leave transfer and eligibility for training.
She must consult with Lady X before dealing with training issues. Furthermore, she determines when positions will be made vacant by giving people leave transfers. She needs to check with Lady X in order to ensure that temporary replacements can be easily done if a staff member is eligible for leave. Persons D and E are both clerks who work directly under Lady X. They deal with all record collection and keeping and also identify issues that relate to hiring, promotion and appraisal.
After identification of these issues, they forward them to Lady X who acts on them. Lastly, the HR manager is the major decision maker. She is responsible for dealing with overall HR issues that are too crucial to the organisation. For instance, Lady X cannot fire an employee but can recommend that person to the HR manager. She also consults with the HR manager in order to make an overhaul of the entire HR system for recruitment or promotion.
Principal characteristics of individuals
Nature of interdependency
The six individuals that have been examined all have separate functions but they have an inherent relationship with each other because their jobs are inter-reliant. The team members all have shared goals such as ensuring peak performance through a higher rate of production and also through high quality products. They also have shared knowledge because HR matters are cross functional such as promotions, training and performance appraisals (Latoya & Murray, 2011). Lastly, the team members rely on each other in times of problem solving because some solutions can only be found in different job functions.
Other members of the organisation expect Lady X to communicate frequently with them on issues that relate to them. They also expect that she will do this in a timely way; not after she has already made the decisions. The team members expect that she will convey information which she is certain about or information that is accurate in nature.
The kind of interdependence that occurs in this team is reciprocal. In other words, the output from one job function can become the input for another function or vice versa. There is a high rate of interdependency between these six individuals such that a change that occurs in one job function is likely to affect the changes in all others. The best way for managing these teams is by reinforcing continuous information. The team members always need to be flexible because new information is always coming in and it might alter the manner in which they carry out their tasks (Gittell, 2011). This complexity of interactions only works well when those concerned realise that they need each other.
Diagram of interdependencies
The following organisation chart illustrates how these groups rely heavily on one another
Evaluation of interdependent groups
Effectiveness is often understood as the accuracy with which an organisation achieves a certain goals (Frokjaer et. al., 2000). In other words, it is a measure of how well a company achieves its goals. It is assessed by knowing how many errors occurred in the final product and is thus indicative of the quality of work done. In the case of this group under analysis, it is clear that effectiveness is one of their strengths because they always tend to achieve goals.
Efficiency on the other hand measures speed of goal achievement. Task completion time is a good measure of how effective those measures are. In this group, HR tasks such as performance reviews often take too long because of inadequate coordination (Levy & Nielsen, 1994).
Nonetheless, things still get done at the end of the day-they just need to take less time. Satisfaction refers to the comfort of the subject concerning something being done. In this case, members of the organisation seem to be only partly satisfied because some may look forward to promotions only to be told that they have to wait for a couple of weeks to find out if they are eligible.
Recommendations
The group needs to keep up its effectiveness but there is definitely room for improvement when it comes to efficiency and satisfaction. They can work on this by reorganising their data collection methods. They need to increase the rate of information sharing as well. Furthermore, their ability to react to new information should also be heightened.
Conclusion
This manufacturing company has a well organised Hr team whose members depend on each other. Their major strength lies in the fact that they always get the job done. Their only challenge is speed which compromises their efficiency and satisfaction.
References
Gittell, J. (2011). Relational Coordination: Guidelines for theory, measurement and analysis. NY: McMillan.
Frokjaer, E., Hertzum., M. & Hornbaek, K. (2000). Measuring usability: are effectiveness, efficiency and satisfaction really correlated? NY: ACM press.
Latoya, J., & Murray, J. (2011). Three types of interdependence in an organisational structure. Houston Chronicle.
Levy, J. & Nielsen, J. (1994). Measuring usability: preference vs performance. Communications of the ACM 37(4), 66-75.
Malone, T. & Crowston, K. (2010). Task interdependence. NY: Free press.