MGT503 - Principles of Management GDB Solution Required

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Discussion Question:

Besides all of its characteristics, why has Weber’s Bureaucracy developed a bad reputation? How can today’s managers use bureaucratic management to streamline their organizations? Important Instructions:

1. Your discussion must be based on logical facts.

2. Your comments on the topic should not exceed 500 words.


Answer: Solution:

• Competences can be unclear and used contrary to the spirit of the law; sometimes a decision itself may be considered more important than its effect;
• Nepotism, corruption, political infighting and other degenerations can counter the rule of impersonality and can create a recruitment and promotion system not based on meritocracy but rather on oligarchy;
Even a non-degenerated bureaucracy can be affected by common problems:
• Overspecialization, making individual officials not aware of larger consequences of their actions
• Rigidity and inertia of procedures, making decision-making slow or even impossible when facing some unusual case, and similarly delaying change, evolution and adaptation of old procedures to new circumstances;
• A phenomenon of group thinking – zealotry, loyalty and lack of critical thinking regarding the organization which is perfect and always correct by definition, making the organization unable to change and realize its own mistakes and limitations;
• Disregard for dissenting opinions, even when such views suit the available data better than the opinion of the majority;
• A phenomenon of Catch-22 (named after a famous book by Joseph Heller) – as bureaucracy creates more and more rules and procedures, their complexity rises and coordination diminishes, facilitating creation of contradictory and recursive rules, as described by the saying “the bureaucracy is expanding to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy”.
• Not allowing people to use common sense, as everything must be as is written by the law.