Question

Capstone Course: Cases in Health Care Management

Organizational Design and Development

Reflect on your experiences with organizational design and development.

In a 3-4page essay, answer the following questions:

1. How did the structures, processes, and outcomes relate to each other to form the organization? Give examples of both positive and negative outcomes.

2. If you had been a member of the organization's leadership, what would you have done differently?

Support your opinions with evidence from your prior learning experiences and external source

You may cite particular courses or readings from prior coursework in your paper.

Your paper should be 2–3 pages in length and follow current APA formatting and citation.

Please list all Reference Support your opinions with evidence from your prior learning experiences and external, peer-reviewed sources available

Reference

Anthony R. K., Ann S. M., Duncan N. Health Services Management: Cases, Readings and Commentary (10th ed.). Health Administration Press

Answer 1

Organization is considered as an information process and design as an answer for information requirement. An organization’s strategy is its plan for the whole business that sets out how the organization will use its major resources. In other words, an organization’s strategy is a plan of action aimed at reaching specific goals and staying in good stead with clients and vendors.

An organizational structure defines how activities such as task allocation, coordination and supervision are directed toward the achievement of organizational aims. Organizations need to be efficient, flexible, innovative and caring in order to achieve a sustainable competitive advantage. Organizational structure can also be considered as the viewing glass or perspective through which individuals see their organization and its environment.

Poor organizational design and structure results in a bewildering morass of contradictions: confusion within roles, a lack of co-ordination among functions, failure to share ideas, and slow decision-making bring managers unnecessary complexity, stress, and conflict. Often those at the top of an organization are oblivious to these problems or, worse, pass them off as or challenges to overcome or opportunities to develop.

Organizations are a variant of clustered entities.

An organization can be structured in many different ways, depending on its objectives. The structure of an organization will determine the modes in which it operates and performs. Organizational structure allows the expressed allocation of responsibilities for different functions and processes to different entities such as the branch, department, workgroup, and individual.

Organizational structure affects organizational action in two ways:

• it provides the foundation on which standard operating procedures and routines rest.
• it determines which individuals get to participate in which decision-making processes, and thus to what extent their views shape the organization’s actions.

The major performance criteria are: quality of care, satisfaction of patients, human resources, efficiency and financial results. Arbitration between some of those seems to be unavoidable and will be provided the global performance model.

Organizational architecture has two very different meanings. In one sense it literally refers to the organization's built environment and in another sense it refers to architecture metaphorically, as a structure which fleshes out the organizations. The various features of a business's organizational architecture has to be internally consistent in strategy, architecture and competitive environment.

• Organizational architecture or organizational space: the influence of the spatial environment on humans in and around organizations.
• Organizational architecture or organization design: the creation of roles, processes, and formal reporting relationships in an organization.

Organizational space describes the influence of the spatial environment on the health, the mind, and the behavior of humans in and around organizations. It is an area of research in which interdisciplinarity is a central perspective. It draws from management, organization and architecture added with knowledge from, for instance, environmental psychology, social medicine, or spatial science. In essence, it may be regarded as a special field of expertise of organization studies and change management (people) applied to architecture. This perspective on organizational architecture is elaborated in organizational space.

Organization design or architecture of an organization as a metaphor provides the framework through which an organization aims to realize its core qualities as specified in its vision statement. It provides the infrastructure into which business processes are deployed and ensures that the organization's core qualities are realized across the business processes deployed within the organization. In this way, organizations aim to consistently realize their core qualities across the services they offer to their clients.

On the other hands, an organization’s structure is the way the pieces of the organization fit together internally. For the organization to deliver its plans, the strategy and the structure must be woven together seamlessly. In other words, organizational structure is a term used to highlight the way a healthcare organization thinks about hierarchy, assigns tasks to personnel and ensures its workforce works collaboratively to achieve a common goal. The goal is to avoid task overlap and workforce confusion, especially when it comes to laying a strong foundation for long-term productivity. Task overlap, a situation in which two or more employees perform the same task in different departments, costs a healthcare organization money. This creates confusion, inefficiencies and lack of accountability because no employee ultimately has a clear responsibility over who does what, where and when.

It is important to highlight that for too long, structure has been viewed as something separate from strategy. Revising structures are often seen as ways to improve efficiency, promote teamwork, create synergy, eliminate or create new department or reduce cost, including personnel. Yes, restructuring can do all that and more. What has been less obvious is that structure and strategy are dependent on each other. You can create the most efficient, team oriented, synergistic structure possible and still end up in the same place you are or worse if a good strategy is not adopted.

Organizational structure and strategy are related because organizational strategy helps a healthcare organization define and build its organizational structure. A healthcare's organizational structure is based on the result of the analysis of organizational strategy. The healthcare organization will use these results to determine its areas of concentration and how to position itself in order to succeed.

One of the first steps a company takes in its initial stages is assessing its operational environment in order to determine the conditions in which it must operate. This involves checking out the competition, consumer trends, culture and other factors. The healthcare organization will find out the strengths and weaknesses of its competition, and its economic capabilities.

The relationship between organizational structure and strategy becomes clearer when the healthcare’s organization strategy is in place. With a clear focus of what it wants to achieve, the organization will proceed to align its structure in such a manner to best achieve this. It will allocate responsibilities for optimal results, create branches, and decide whether individual efforts or group participation is the best method for it to achieve its goals. The organizational structure and strategy will also help the healthcare organization decide if the tone of the organization should be strictly formal, semi-formal or informal. All of these decisions can be made after determining the organizational strategy of the healthcare organization.

Structure is not simply an organization chart. Structure is all the people, positions, procedures, processes, culture, technology and related elements that comprise the organization. It defines how all the pieces, parts and processes work together. This structure must be totally integrated with strategy for the organization to achieve its mission and goals. Structure supports strategy. If an organization changes its strategy, it must change its structure to support the new strategy. When it doesn’t, the structure acts like a bungee cord and pulls the organization back to its old strategy.

Strategy follows structure. What the organization does defines the strategy. Changing strategy means changing what everyone in the organization does. When an organization changes its structure and not its strategy, the strategy will change to fit the new structure. Strategy follows structure. Suddenly management realizes the organization’s strategy has shifted in an undesirable way. It appears to have done it on its own. In reality, an organization’s structure is a powerful force. You can’t direct it to do something for any length of time unless the structure is capable of supporting that strategy.

The sum total of how an organization goes about its work is its strategy. Structure and strategy are married to each other. When a company makes major changes, it must carefully think out every aspect of the structure required to support the strategy. That is the only way to implement lasting improvements. Every part of an organization, every person working for that organization needs to be focused on supporting the vision and direction. How everything is done and everything operates needs to be integrated so all the effort and resources support the strategy.

It takes the right structure for a strategy to succeed. Management that is solely focused on results can have a tendency to direct everyone on what they need to do without paying attention to the current way the organization works. While people may carry out these actions individually, it is only when their daily way of working is integrated to support strategy that the organization’s direction is sustainable over time.

Top management can’t just send out a proclamation about a new strategy, direction and vision and expect everyone to follow it. To implement such a strategic shift requires a complete change within the organization itself. Strategy and structure are married to each other. A decision to change one requires an all-out effort to change the other. But that structural change must be well thought out and based on a thorough cause and effect analysis. You don’t just change a structure to change it. You have to make sure the changes will support that strategy. At the same time, you don’t just implement a better leadership and engagement approach in a company or alter the organizational chart without evaluating how that is going to effect the firm’s ability to carry out its current strategies.

Any healthcare organization, whether new or existing, continuously scans the external environment and looks for opportunities. Scanning the environment and identifying the opportunity is part of strategy. The healthcare organization, in order to encash the opportunity provided by the environment, creates appropriate structure with which to operate. This involves checking out the feedbacks, competition, trends, culture and other factors to formulate strategy. Organizational structure and strategy are dynamically related. A healthcare's organizational structure should be based on the result of the analysis of organizational strategy.