Abstract
Organisational psychology is vital in understanding psychological principles which form the links between research methods and human behavior in an organisation. Basically, organisational psychology focuses on how individuals think about themselves and activities that affect these thoughts and feelings in an organisational environment especially during selection, perfection, and persuasion procedures.
Application of organisational psychology in members of an organisation facilitates advanced stages of maladaptive behaviors studies. In Automobile industries across Australia, there are laid down structures formulated to keep staff in healthy and stable mind in their duty of serving company’s interest through regulatory ethical communication models.
These models define expected behavior, procedural patterns, and response to every deviation. As a matter of fact, stable mind performs optimally with little or no supervision. Thus, this reflective treatise attempts to explicitly present impacts of scientific management and organisational behavior theorists on the Australian automotive industry.
Impact of organisational Development theories on Australian Automobile Industry
Automobile organisation will always work alongside its staff to promote healthy communication ethics by recognizing and where necessary, supporting staff that make steady commitment in practicing accepted desirable healthy organisational communication ethics in their work departments.
This is best achieved through reliable management and proactive communication model. Since most automobile organisations in Australia are relatively developed, these aspects have been integrated in the production, distribution, and evaluation structures.
Communication in organisations can be either formal or informal. These two forms of communication are distinct though they are used simultaneously in organisations. Formal communication is the proper and defined process of communication within an organisation.
As proposed by Fayol, Communication influences innovative and deviating period of organisational economic activities including development of technology, increasing market demand, production and workflow, investment and trade patterns, competition among the rival companies, as well as to facing the threats of global financial crisis (Friedberg, 2010).
With the need to establish lean production and outsourcing, the automobile parts industry is increasingly important for global production chains. Specifically, the discursive approach in explaining and exploring shared and coordinated actions on roles and channels through which organisational framework functions in the exchange of information formally is of great essence towards understanding organisational communication.
Prosci asserts that “communication focused on a company’s strategy and direction, which originates from company executives, is funneled through the organisational chart and changed in such a way to be relevant to each department and manager” (Prosci, 2007, p. 04).
Despite communication being rated as a high corporate strategy, actionable planning is of essence to create solution oriented task and strategy implementation secession. Unfortunately, in 2008, Mitsubishi Motors Australia failed to internalize this aspect and ended up being closed since they specialized in large vehicles against the backdrop of low demand.
A learning organisation engages in active process of learning through promotion, facilitation, and rewarding collective learning results. Garvin, Edmondson and Gino in their article, “Is Yours a Learning Organisation?” published in Harvard Business Review, March 2008, described three building blocks of the learning organisation; a supportive learning environment, concrete learning processes, and practices leadership that reinforces learning.
Garvin et al., (107-8 para. 2) argue that by using the diagnostic tools, managers can assess the areas of the organisation that require urgent improvement moving the company closer to an ideal learning organisation. The managers play a significant role in setting up the learning environment for their employees.
As result, “creating an effective learning environment will allow employees to draw upon resources, thus making sense out of things and construct consequential solution to business challenges” (Friedberg, 2010, para. 8).
Applying the concepts of a learning organisation to an operating company is difficult for both academics and practitioners (Garvin et al. 109-11 par. 3). Ford Australia and Holden have endured economic meltdowns through production of user friendly and cost effective vehicles through scientific management programs within their hierarchical order of operations.
Self evaluation skills in ethics encompass actual and expected outcome. Reflectively, “by promoting the principles of specialisation, standardisation, and predictability in organisations, classical theorists were essentially attempting to minimize the occurrences of misunderstandings” (Modaff, DeWine, & Butler, 2008, p.27).
Through designing tolerance model levels, the plan at Toyota Australia has remained active in developing dependence of interest attached to an activity, creating proactive relationships, and monitoring their interaction with physical and psychological health.
Eventual, this has paid off since the workforce has learnt to appreciate the essence of teamwork. In fact, this company has one of the best sales staff in the whole of Australia. Besides, the company has remained very successful over the years but is currently facing series of problems that are associated with management models it uses.
These issues include redundancy, poor intra and inter personal communication, and monotony. As a result, they have settled on support crew, motivation, and training as intervention route (Friedberg, 2010). Reflectively, this company remains the most profitable and is responsible for the market oriented, affordable and user friendly Lexus models, that are associated with families.
To be able to carry out organisational behavior and management assessment, research and statistics are needed to understand the various behavioral patterns that exist within the scope of an organisation. Consequently, organisational psychology theorists overtly argue that cognition alters behavior.
Moreover, it is important to note that the outcomes of organisational psychology vary hugely from one organisation to the other. Therefore, research and statistics will facilitate understanding of group thoughts since according to this perspective; emotional distress is assumed to result from maladaptive thoughts expressed in specific behavior patterns (Friedberg, 2010).
This self guided approach is based on collaborative procedures that involve designing specific learning experiences to teach organisation on how to monitor automatic behavior; recognize the relationship between these behaviors and cognition, ways to test the validity of the relationships, and measures to apply to substitute the distorted thoughts with more realistic cognitions (Weick & Quinn, 1999).
Since research methods focus on the development of a range of skills that is designed to help the organisation cope with a variety of life situations, it remains indispensable to the automobile industry of Australia in practicing a proactive balance in management.
Adaptation of scientific management ensures that industries survive market swings since the same operate on optimal resource use, planning and research. Companies that lacked proper scientific management structures such as Rootes, Nissan, Volkswagen, and Chrysler had to stop production due to huge financial lose.
Reflecting on Lewin’s ‘three step theory’, the unfreezing, transformation, and refreezing determine the level of performance in an organisation. According to this theory, the first step involves realisation that a challenge exists in the organisation.
The second step involves transformation of this challenge into a development goal after which implementation step concludes by developing a solution for the challenge (Feist & Feist, 2006).
When an organisation fails to do so, chances of survival dwindles (Friedberg, 2010). Automotive industry of Australia is very competitive. Therefore, companies such as Bullet have opted for customised services to keep their production lines relevant.
Job testing is an important concept in the discipline of Human Resource Management in job selection process, especially in hiring candidates for specific job descriptions. Getting the right individuals for employment is critical to achievement of an organisation’s goals.
In fact, comprehensive and unprejudiced details of applicants’ competence and behavior would be an important value in the testing for selection procedure, especially to employers who provide job description to applicants. As opined by Maslow, in the hierarchy of needs theory, “primary needs are basic before tertiary needs and must be addressed in that order” (Spector, 2008, p. 36).
The needs include safety, physical needs, love, self esteem, and room for actualization. As seen among the stunt Automobile performer plants such as Toyota Australia, the need for actualization is the driving force for high profit margins.
Job satisfaction is as a result of a systematic and continuous environmental and personality interaction that fosters the right attitude (Spector, 2008). Thus, allocating the right duty to the right person will help achieve this in short and long term. In Holden Company, social and highly skilled employees are allocated the right duties than keeping them in a secluded environment.
When assigning duties, personality checks are necessary to promote self satisfaction while the same time, improve performance. In addition, periodic self evaluation and interdepartmental rotation ensures change of environment. Overtime, the results have been reliable, effective, and profitable to the industry (Fishbein, 1967).
Conclusively, understanding simultaneous co-existence of formal and informal communication channels presents the complexities and interrelatedness of formal and informal communication.
Despite the differences in form, these channels are dependent on each other at macro and micro level within the Australian Automobile Industry and have created visible impact in business performance and public perception.
References
Feist, J., & Feist, G. (2006). Theories of personality. Boston: McGraw Hill.
Fishbein, M. (1967). Attitude and prediction of behavior, In Fishbein, M (Ed), Readings in Attitude Theory and Measurement (pp. 477-492), John Wiley, New York
Friedberg, E. (2010). The Multimedia Encyclopedia of Organizational Theory from Taylor to Today. Web.
Garvin, A., Edmondson, A., & Gino, F. (2008). “Is Yours Learning Organization?” Harvard Business Review, 86.3, 109-116.
Modaff, D., DeWine, S., & Butler, J. (2008). Organizational communication: Foundations, challenges, and misunderstandings. Boston: Pearson Education.
Prosci, M. (2007). Change Management Best Practices Benchmarking Report. Web.
Spector, P. (2008). Industrial and organizational psychology: Research and practice. New York: John Wiley & Sons.
Weick, K., & Quinn, R. (1999). Organizational Change and Development. Annual Review Psychology, 50(3), 361-386.