Effective Organisations

Effective organisations can integrate their resources in a successful concerted response to challenges of various sorts and magnitude.

Symptoms and outcomes in ineffective organisations include the following:

• Poor coordination, cooperation and collaboration between individuals, groups and external entities
• Undesired loss of headcount
• Workplace conflict
• Poor morale
• Systematic mistakes leading to unnecessary costs
• Employee stress and other workplace health issues
• Financial or service level underperformance
• Disillusioned clients
• Collateral damage to the community
• Poor ethics and moral compass
• Inability to cope with external influences on the organisation

This is a partial list of the common symptoms and outcomes.

Members of ineffective organisations usually attribute the problems to vague concepts such as ‘Organizational Culture’, ‘Employee Engagement’, and ‘Poor Resilience’. However, these concepts are very high-level and do not capture the complexity of the processes behind organisational problems.

It is easier to change an organisation if you know how it works at a detailed level. Fundamentally, an organisation’s effectiveness depends on the social-psychological processes that influence how people think, feel, and behave toward one another and their work. If organisation members do not understand these processes, they cannot influence outcomes effectively. This means that members’ actions to lead, manage, and change the organisation often have counterintuitive and disappointing results.

To change organisations, we must understand how thoughts and feelings emerge and influence behaviour. The rapidly evolving field of Behavioural Science [link to tab] can help us understand and manage these processes.

Contextual changes include shifts in the competitive landscape, varying economic trends, political and regulatory change, geopolitical events, weather patterns, war, civil conflict, pandemics, and cyberattacks.

Resilient organisations can also manage the risks associated with complex activities such as mergers, acquisitions, divestments, restructuring, new product launches and entering new markets.

When these activities do not go according to plan, often because of broader contextual effects, the organisation is subject to severe stress. However, much research indicates that executives are ill-prepared to cope with these threats.