Structural Intervention

Structural interventions also called techno structural intervention is a term for broad
class of interventions or change efforts aimed at improving organizational
effectiveness through changes in the task, structural, technological, and goal
processes in the organization.

Structural interventions include changes like:

 How the overall work of the organization is divided into units

 Who reports to whom

 Methods of control

 The spatial arrangements of equipments and people

 Work flow arrangements

 Changes in communications and technology

Types of Structural Interventions

 Socio technical systems (STS).

It is largely associated with experiments that emerged under the auspices of the Travistock
Institute in Great Britain. These efforts generally attempted to create a better “fit” among the
technology, structure, and social interaction of a particular production unit in a mine, factory or
office.

STS has two basic premises:

 Effective work systems must jointly optimize the relationship between their social and
technical parts.

 Such systems must effectively manage the boundary separating and relating them to the
environment. In such a way that effective exchanges occur with the environment along
with protection from external disruption. The implementation of STS is seen as highly
participative involving all of the relevant stakeholders like employees engineers staff
experts and managers.

 Self-managed teams.
 Several problems are typically encountered in moving towards the use of self managed teams.
Problems are like:

 What to do with the first-line supervisors who are no longer needed as supervisors.

 Managers that are now one level above the teams will likely oversee the activities of
several teams, and their roles will change to emphasize planning, expediting, and
coordinating. These managers need considerable training to acquire skills in group
leadership and ability to delegate; skills to have participative meetings, planning, quality
control, budgeting, etc.

A self-managed team is not just a group of people working together but also a genuine
collaboration. It is measured by its results, not the performance of its individual member.

Self-managed teams:

 Are more independent than other types of team.

 Help to flatten organizational structure.
 Eliminate intermediate levels of responsibility and removes the requirement for middle
management.
 Favors natural leaders.

Organizations where self managed teams have been followed extensively are Digital, Frito-lay
general electric, Pepsi- cola and many smaller organizations

 Work redesign.

Richard Hackman and Greg Oldham provided an OD approach to work redesign based on a
theoretical model of what job characteristics lead to the psychological states that produce what
they call ‘high internal work motivation.’ Their approach has the characteristics of OD; use of
diagnosis, participation, and feedback. Model suggested that organizations analyze jobs using the
five core job characteristics; then redesign of group work: skill variety, task identity, task
significance, autonomy, feedback from job.

According Hackman and Oldham organization analyses jobs using the five core job
characteristics - i.e. skill variety, task identity, task significance, autonomy and feedback from
the job.

Skill variety Related to experienced

Task identity meaningfulness of the work
Task significance

Job autonomy - Related to experienced

responsibility for the outcome of the work
Feedback - Related to psychological state
of knowledge of the result of the work activities.

The outcome of these job characteristics is:

 High work motivation
 High satisfaction
 High work effectiveness.

 Management by objectives (MBO) and appraisal.

Management by objective (MBO) programs evolve from a collaborative organization diagnosis

and are systems of joint target setting and performance review designed to increase a focus on
objectives and to increase frequency of problem solving discussions between supervisors and
subordinates and within work teams. MBO programs are unilateral, autocratic mechanisms
designed to force compliance with a superior’s directives and reinforce a one-on-one leadership
mode.

Giving an example of research at General Electric found that criticism by the supervisor tended
to produce defensive and impaired performance, that goal settings and mutual goal settings
between superior and subordinate were associated with improved performance, and that needed
to be a day to day activity. A follow up study at general electric found that appraisals went better
in a climate promoting trust, openness, support, and development.

 Quality circles.

The concept is a form of group problem solving and goal setting with a primary focus on
maintaining and enhancing product quality. It has been extensively used in Japan. Quality circles
consist of a group of 7 – 10 employees from a unit who have volunteered to meet together
regularly to analyze and make proposals about product quality and other problems. Morale and
job satisfaction among participants were reported to have increased. Quality circles contribute
toward total quality management.

 Quality of work life projects (QWL).

An attempt to restructure multiple dimensions of the organisation and to institute a mechanism,
which introduces and sustains changes over time.

QWL Features=

 Voluntary involvement on the part of employees

 Union agreement with process and participation.

 Assurance of no loss of job

 Training for team problem solving

 Use of quality circles

 Participation in forecasting, work planning

 Regular plant and team meetings.

 Encouragement for skill development.

 Job rotations.

These features include union involvement - a focus on work teams, problem solving session by
the work teams in which the agenda may include productivity, quality and safety problems,
autonomy in planning work the availability of skill training and increased responsiveness to
employees by supervision.

 Parallel learning structures (or collateral organizations).

It is consists of a steering committee and a number of working groups that:

 Study what changes are needed in the organization,

 Make recommendations for improvement, and

 Then monitor the resulting change efforts.

 Physical settings and OD

Physical settings are an important part of organization culture that work groups should learn to
diagnose and manage, and about which top management needs input in designing plants and
buildings. Sometime, physical setting were found to interfere with effective group and
organizational functioning.
Examples: A personnel director having a secretary share the same office, resulting lack of
privacy and typewriter noise, thus adversely affect the productivity of the director.

A factory Management encouraged group decision making, yet providing no space for more than
6 people to meet at one time.

 Total quality management (TQM).

It is also called continuous quality improvement. A combination of a number of organization

improvement techniques and approaches, including the use of quality circles,statistical quality
control, statistical process control, self-managed teams and task forces, and extensive use of
employee participation.

Features that characterize TQM:

 Primary emphasis on customers.

 Daily operational use of the concept of internal customers.

 An emphasis on measurement using both statistical quality control and statistical

process control techniques.

 Competitive benchmarking.

 Continuous search for sources of defects with a goal of eliminating them entirely.

 Participative management.

 An emphasis on teams and teamwork.

 A major emphasis on continuous learning.

 Top management support on an ongoing basis.

 Reengineering.
The fundamental rethinking and radical redesign of business processes to achieve dramatic
improvements in critical, contemporary measures of performance, such as cost, quality, service,
and speed. Reengineering focuses on visualizing and streamlining any or all business processes
in the organization. Reengineering seeks to make such processes more efficient by combining,
eliminating, or restructuring activities without regard to present hierarchical or control
procedures. Reengineering is a top-down process; assumes neither an upward flow of
involvement nor that consensus decision making.

 Self-Design Strategy

It is a “learning model” to help organization develop “the build-in capacity to transform

themselves to achieve high performance in today’s competitive and changing environment.

Basic components:

 An educational component consisting of readings, presentations, visits to other

companies, and attendance at conferences.

 Clarification of the values that will guide the design process.

 Diagnosis of the current state of the organization using the values as template.

 Changes are then designed and implemented in an interactive manner.

 High-Involvement and High-Performance Work Systems

High-performance and high involvement are possible outcomes in organizations that are
designed for high involvement, but may not occur if environmental conditions are unfavorable or
if the high-involvement design is poorly implemented.

High involvement organizations feature decision making moved downward as far as possible,
extensive use of self-managed teams, compensation systems that link rewards to individual and
team performance, widely shared information, participative and shared leadership, and extensive
training.

 Large-Scale Systems Change and Organizational Transformation

Large-scale systems change; mean organizational change that is massive in terms of the number
of organizational units involved, the number of people affected, the number of organizational
subsystems altered, and/or the depth of the cultural change involved.