SannanAbstract

Ahmed
ASSIGNMENT # 2
Office Space is a movie that very beautifully portrays the structure of an organization, clearly
showing the happy and frustrated people of an organization

Movie Summary
Introduction:
In this document summary, we will briefly discuss the movie ‘Office Space’ in which it is shown
how an organization structure works, what are the pros and cons of working in an organization of
large scale, what kind of people are working in an organization who sum up to make up a
complete structure of an organization.
After seeing the movie attentively, we observe that in an organization there are two kinds of
people, one kind is the one we call an Organization Body and the other is the ones working
below them and apparently the other ones are not very happy because of how and what the
organization is working on/as. We can very deeply understand the working of an organization
and the environment of it if we first understand the basics of an organization through research
and then review ‘Office Space’.

Motivation:
Work motivation is the process that initiates and maintains goal-directed performance. It
energizes our thinking, fuels our enthusiasm and colors our positive and negative emotional
reactions to work and life. Motivation generates the mental effort that drives us to apply our
knowledge and skills. Without motivation, even the most capable person will refuse to work
hard. Motivation prevents or nudges us to convert intention into action and start doing
something new or to restart something we’ve done before. It also controls our decisions to
persist at a specific work goal in the face of distractions and the press of other priorities. Finally,
motivation leads us to invest more or less cognitive effort to enhance both the quality and
quantity of our work performance. Thus, motivational performance gaps exist whenever people
avoid starting something new, resist doing something familiar, stop doing something important
and switch their attention to a less valued task, or refuse to “work smart” on a new challenge and
instead use old, familiar but inadequate solutions to solve a new problem (Clark, 1998).
It is crucial to note that motivation does not directly influence work performance. Instead,
motivation leads us to use our knowledge and skills and apply them effectively to work tasks. It
is the force that initiates, starts, energizes and continues the application of our experience and
expertise. Successful performance always involves the cooperation of motivation and knowledge
in supportive work environments. Without adequate knowledge, motivation alone does not
increase useful performance. Thus adequate motivation is necessary, but not sufficient for
effective performance.

Beliefs about what makes us effective cause motivation:

After more than a century of research and argument, motivation researchers and practitioners
now begin to agree that motivation is the result of our beliefs about what makes us successful
and effective. We all value the goals, working conditions and incentives that we believe will
contribute to our success. We avoid situations that will prevent us from achieving our goals. For
example, money and/or recognition are nearly universal motivators because they are widely
perceived as indicators and facilitators of success for many, perhaps most people. Whether we
call motivational tools “reinforcement”, “incentives”, “drivers”, “inducements” or by some other
quasi-technical name, they only motivate when they are perceived as making us successful or
effective. Conversely, we avoid conditions that we think will delay, inhibit or prevent the
attainment of objectives.

The variety problem. What makes motivation a complex issue is that different individuals and
groups have very different beliefs about the nature of “success” and about what supports or
prevents success? People working in teams may define success differently than when they are
working alone. Even very similar people within a culture express a dizzying variety of
definitions of “success” and beliefs about the factors that enable and inhibit success so the
variety is not only due to our increasingly multi-cultural work force.
One way to think the variety of personality types measured by the Myers Briggs scale, the
American Psychological Association’s “Big Five” and many of the other style measures is that
they measure our values. Some people value reflective, analytical and organized approaches
while others value impulsive, expressive, intuitive reactions. Some people who are confronted
with barriers decide to confront and overcome them and others quickly decide to avoid and
withdraw and so we have differences in our tendencies to “fight or flee.” Many people work for
money and/or recognition and others will work for the sheer joy of doing something well or
learning something new. Some of us are very effective at regulating our own motivation by
ignoring the de-motivators and creating the conditions that create personal success. All of us
depend on coaches and friends for occasional motivational support. Most of us work with
different values and styles in different situations. How can we make sense of such breathtaking
variety and turn it to our benefit as performance technologists?

The variety solution - universal motivators. In any given situation where we want to increase
work motivation, we must determine what will convince people to start doing something new or
different, increase their persistence at an important task and invest mental effort. They must
believe that the motivator driving their enhanced performance will directly or indirectly
contribute significantly to what they need to feel successful and effective. The motivator that
works has to cost less than the value of the increased performance and it must meet both ethical
and legal requirements. While it might appear that solutions have to be tailored to the different
“here and now” demands of individuals, in fact there are more or less universally effective
motivators and de-motivators. While organizations may need to tailor these universal motivators
and de-motivators for individuals and teams, there are finite number of powerful doable,
costeffective, ethical and legal strategies for increasing work motivation for nearly everyone. The
list begins with common organizational practices that have been found to destroy motivation for
many people and ways to eliminate them.

What Office Space tells us about Motivation: Office Space is a tasteful tutti frutti kind of a
movie where all the aspects are covered, may that be comedy, learning, humor etc. While it does
that it shows us how an organization can make its employees feel de-motivated. And the by the
above discussion we can clearly say that the organization portrayed in the movie is not a very
good one because its employees are fed up of its policies, not so flexible hours and moreover
they have no internal motivation to keep its employees at their toes. This is something an
employer and well as an employee can learn from. An employer can learn to not create such an
environment in a company and for us employees it is important to realize the environment of a
company too instead of blindly following salary package and opportunity.

Group Dynamics:
To this point, the discussion has emphasized motivational strategies that work for nearly
everyone or that can be translated to work with different people. Yet most people work in teams
some of the time and it appears that when we are in teams, we must consider additional
motivational issues. Al Bandura (1997) has devoted a considerable part of his career studying
ways to motivate people who work in groups. He has a great deal of evidence from many field
and laboratory-based studies, that team motivation includes two or three additional concerns.

Two key features of team motivation - expertise and collaboration. When people work in
teams they encounter two issues that can either help or hinder their team spirit and motivation;
first is their belief about whether other team members have the variety of skills and knowledge
necessary to achieve team goals; and, second is their expectation about whether the team will
collaborate effectively to get the job done. When teams are composed of people with different
but compatible skills, member concerns about the expertise of their team colleagues is critical to
team motivation. Each member of the team has to be viewed as able to make her/his own
contribution to team goals. When people doubt that one or more of their team members are
competent and when they believe that the capabilities of the other members are necessary to get
the job done, motivation suffers dramatically. Enhancing team motivation therefore requires that
team members must be encouraged to have confidence in each other’s ability and if that
confidence is damaged, it must be repaired quickly and effectively. Directly confronting the
confidence issue is recommended if the questioned member has expertise that is not appreciated.
If expertise is lacking or questionable, team members may have to be replaced. The best way to
prevent this problem is to address it carefully when teams are selected.
Even when teams trust each other’s expertise, team members may doubt that the team can work
together effectively. Since collaboration is an essential requirement for team success,
uncooperative, highly independent but talented players can wreck team motivation by refusing to
work effectively with other members. One solution here is to avoid assigning highly
independent people to work in collaborative teams.

Social loafing in teams. Team members who refuse to carry their weight also challenge team
motivation. This phenomenon is called “social loafing”. Some team members seem to think that
when they work collectively, they do not need to work as hard. Social loafing has been the
subject of performance research since the turn of the century. Early studies examined how much
force individuals used to pull on a rope when asked to “pull as hard as possible”. After each
person’s average pull force was noted, teams of two, three, and more people were asked to “pull
together.” In every case, when additional people were added to the rope, each individual seemed
to pull a bit less forcefully.

Correcting social loafing through individual assessment. The “loafing” effect can be
eliminated very quickly and effectively with one strategy. When we assess the individual
contribution of each member of a team, whether they are pulling a rope or designing a new
product, social loafing disappears (see Clark & Estes, 2002, for a discussion of this research).
Thus, another crucial support for team motivation is to inform team members that the
organization will assess the individual contributions of each member of every team rather than
only assessing the achievement of the entire team.

Organizational Structure and Culture:

Organizational culture generates its impact on organizational structure both through its design
and its implementation. Organizational culture realizes its impact on shaping organizational
structure through forming the interpretative schemes of the top management, which selects the
organizational structure model (James, James, Ashe, 1990). The culture creates a frame of
reference in which the organization management’s considerations and reasoning circulate in
the process of decision-making concerning the organizational structure model. The word
‘organization’ originates from the greek word ‘organon’, meaning ‘tool’. From a managerial
perspective, organizational structure is a sort of tool in the hands of management, who uses it in
order to accomplish the organization’s goals. What that tool should be like depends on the
managers’ ideas regarding what the organization is, what its role is, what its meaning is, and
what it should be like. Culture shapes the interpretative schemes of the majority of the
organization’s members, and even the management’s interpretative schemes. Culture thus
imposes on the leader and his associates a specific view on the organization, its meaning, its
purpose, and also a suitable mode of its structuring. Thus the conscious and planned shaping and
formal sanctioning of relations between individuals and groups in an organization will be
strongly influenced by the meaning that the management assigns to the said relations, which has
been imposed on them by organizational culture (ranson, Hinings, greenwood, 1980).
Organizational culture thus creates the frame of reference in which organizational structure is
designed. The organizational structure model formed in an organization must, therefore, be in
accordance with the dominant cultural assumptions, values, and norms. If, for instance, an
assumption of unequal distribution of power and the necessity to concentrate power at the top
prevails in an organizational culture, then it is very likely that a centralized organizational
structure will occur. If organizational culture imposes on employees and managers the metaphor
of the organization as a machine, i.e., as a systematized, standardized, and regulated system
which minimizes uncertainties in its functioning, then the organizational structure is very likely
to turn out as highly formalized and specialized and having functional departmentalization.

Organizational culture does not impact organizational structure only ex-ante, during the selection
of an adequate organizational model, but it also does it ex-post, during its implementation. The
nature of this impact can be twofold – positive and negative, depending on compatibility
between the new organizational structure model and the existing organizational culture. When
the new organizational structure and the existing organizational culture are compatible,
organizational culture impacts the implementation of the selected organizational structure
through the process of its legitimization. Every organizational structure directs the behavior of
employees in their everyday work. It determines the employees’ methods of conducting tasks,
the manner of their interactions with others, and the way they make decisions. Each
organizational structure model induces a different behavior in organization members. If the
behavior induced by the selected organizational structure is compatible with the values of the
existing culture it will legitimize the structure in the eyes of the organization’s members as the
proper and useful model in terms of achieving both organizational and individual interests. In
such cases the assumptions, values, and norms of the organizational culture designate the
selected organizational structure model as useful, desirable, good, or ‘right’, and thereby make it
legitimate in the eyes of the organization members. This means that employees accept the
organizational structure that is in compliance with the cultural assumptions, values, and norms as
the only one suitable for meeting their needs and goals. In that case the organizational culture
will have a positive effect on the implementation of the selected organizational model.
If the selected organizational structure is not compatible with the existing organizational culture,
it will not be legitimate in its members’ eyes. In that case either culture or structure must be
changed, depending on the manner of solving the state of cognitive dissonance. If the new
organizational structure directs employees to behave in their everyday work in a manner
incompatible with the existing cultural values and norms which they respect, the implementation
of the new organizational structure will induce a state of so-called cognitive dissonance among
employees (Fiske, taylor, 1991). This is an unpleasant and frustrating state that occurs when
values respected by an individual are not in accordance with the manner in which s/he is forced
to behave. In other words, people must work in a way they do not consider as good, correct, or
useful. Employees are frustrated by the dissonance between values and norms on the one hand,
and activities in which they are involved through implementation of the new organizational
structure on the other. People have the need to be consistent and operate in accordance with
their beliefs: hence the state of cognitive dissonance is unpleasant. Consequently, organization
members will tend to get out of this state as soon as they can. Tis can be done in two ways. First,
they can strictly follow the values and norms determined by the existing culture, and return to
their earlier behavior which complies with those values. Second, if it is for any reason impossible
for them to go back to the previous model of behavior, organization members will change their
values and norms for the sake of subsequent rationalization and legitimization of their new
behavior. In the first situation, where cognitive dissonance is solved by persistently operating in
accordance with the existing cultural values and norms, organizational culture prevails and the
new organizational structure will not be implemented. Organizational culture thus, in fact,
delegitimizes organizational structure, i.e., makes it seem useless, wrong, or inefficient in the
eyes of the organization members. Organizational culture then rises as an insurmountable barrier
for implementation of the selected organizational structure. In such cases
the newly proclaimed model of organizational structure remains a ‘dead letter’, since employees
and managers continue to work as usual, potentially adapting their behavior on a symbolic level
in order to (falsely) manifest acceptance of the new structure. The new organizational structure is
applied only formally and does not have any ramifications. It is also possible to still implement
the new organizational structure, but only partially or in a modified form which ensures
consistency with the existing cultural values. The other way of solving the state of cognitive
dissonance is for the organizational structure to prevail and the organizational culture to change;
this will be discussed later.
References:
1) ECONOMIC ANNALS, Volume LVIII, No. 198 / July – September 2013
UDC: 3.33 ISSN: 0013-3264, THE MUTUAL IMPACT OF ORGANIZATIONAL
CULTURE AND STRUCTURE.
2) Clark, R. E. (2003) Fostering the work motivation of individuals
and teams. Performance Improvement, 42(3), 21-29.
3) "Why Your Employees Are Losing Motivation." HBS Working Knowledge. Harvard
Business School, 10 Apr. 2006. Web. 14 Feb. 2012.
<http://hbswk.hbs.edu/archive/5289.html>.
4) How to Motivate People Working in Teams
Xin Jiang, School of Foreign Languages, Changzhou Institute of Technology
Tong Jiang South Road No. 299, Changzhou 213002, Jiangsu, China
5) Shanks, Nancy H. "Chapter 2." Management and Motivation. Jones and Barlett. 23-35