AAT Organization Functionality and Ambiguous Chain

Question: What are the challenges facing AAT and how should the Administrative Manager resolve these using key management concepts? Answer: The challenges that are facing AAT organization have been fostered by a number of factors. More often than not, when an organization is drowning the people blame the management because it is the driving force of the organization. The case study depicts a number of factors that is making the AAT to exhibit improper functionality and ambiguous chain of command. The first challenge is the organization retention of old employee is very common. Keeping in mind the dynamism that is existing in this error, dealing with old or rather same staff is a challenge. This is as a result of changing and re-designing of the business process which uses intergrated technology that the old staff have little knowledge or skills about. The implication of this is, the employee will not accept the change or will be reluctant to welcome the changes of operation to protect their status quo as depicted in the case study. Besides, the employees will not stoop too low to accept any changes or new administrative roles because they believe they will be embarrassed for being unable to deliver or deal with the current situation. Just to mention, the staff uses outdated means of communication like using Cheques to remit payment and using outdated manual bookkeeping techniques which are apparently things of the past. Probably this is making the staff reluctant to accept the changes being introduced by the new administrative manager. Notably, there is poor job design and distribution of roles. The CEO and the management team are reluctant to draw policies and guidelines that should give direction to AAT staff. The chain of command in AAT is very poor. Such that, the subordinate staff never listens to what the seniors are saying. And this aside, the top management and other managers and team leaders seem to have issues. That is why whenever the top management makes suggestions the departmental managers and team leaders take the ideas for granted but instead they come up with policies which they believe are okay for them from the departmental perspective. This seems to be a great challenge because there is collision of command, there is no specific channel of communication. As a result, there is not coordination between the various staff members. In this case, management has failed to control and exercise power to their capacity. Essentially, the management should handle information, people, giving directions, coor dinating activities, and creating a favorable environment to tame the best out of the employees. Pupion (2012, p.3) emphasizes that it is the role of a manager to be in charge of all these activities; controlling, planning, coordinating, and directing affairs within an organization, business, institution or an urgency Another key challenge is the organization lacks a centralized channel of communication. By this is I mean, the passing of information is a challenge because the organization have not adopted to an integrated system that could enable easy communication within an organization from a centralized database. The outcome for this is that, decision making is slow and there is a lot of time spent collecting information manually or calling meeting instead of adopting system software which could analyze and interpret data for the decision making. It is tiresome to coordinate the activities of a large organization like AAT and this calls for the implementation of a system that can simplify the task. Also, organization is operating with outdated rules and policies which were implemented during the conception of the organization. The organization wants to maintain the old culture and values that can never work in the current business environment. No wonder, the management is reluctant and unwilling to retrench lazy staff members, unskilled, and old employees. The organization culture of AAT has paralyzed many activities in the organization. The beliefs and norms of AAT has derived the organization into a ditch. There is poor interpersonal relationship because people are kind of working independently hence there is no centralized decisions made. Some of the staff are rude and emotional whenever they are corrected because they lack exposure and have not been properly trained to cope and work with different people. The concept of organization behavior has not sunk to their minds. Therefore, such people work sluggishly and they don`t embrace best practice at the work place. ("Organizational Learning and the Learning Organization," n.d., p.35) depicts, organizational learning is explicitly knowing things in the right manner to help us to pursue new challenges in an organization. The idea of system re-engineering and paradigm shift must come to play. Re-engineering entails identifying the points of weakness and closing the loopholes which are causing problems. From the case study, the staff should be willing to accept the change- adopting the new system of integration like a centralized database and offering employees the right training. Paradigm shift comes to play to eliminate those process or employees or are an expensive to an organization. For instance, retrenching or organizing retirements for those people who just sit in office and they are unskilled to handle new machines is the best criteria. Either way, training can be offered to those employees on how to handle the machines to avoid erroneous activities. As such, decision making would be simplified hence efficacy and efficiency will be realized. The human resource department should be up for the task of ensuring proper selection of employee keeping to pick people where they are best suited and meet the selection criteria without bias. The new staff will add ingredient or come up with new skills and ideas which could foster change in the organization hence the AAT would rise up again. Also, the administrative manager should apply the managerial techniques to solve problems within the organization. (Episode 142: Mintzberg's Managerial Roles, n.d.) argue administrative managers are the facilitators of the activities taking place in the organization. Therefore, the managers coach, a coordinator, controller, a referee, conductor, jailor, the final resort or team leader among other metaphors. The CEO of AAT is supposed to get acquainted with the various forms of rules so as to avoid communication blunder in his actions. Introduction. (n.d.) highlights, manager should distinctly classify formal rules, professional rules, standards, informal social rules and legal rules so that he comes out clear whenever making judgement or a decision. Actually, it is not only the manager who should understand these rules but also the stakeholders the whole fraternity of an organization. It is essential because if an organization is a social unit the everybody is required to understand the norms and culture of the organization. References Episode 142: Mintzberg's Managerial Roles [Video file]. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NgkQYRqxKTs Introduction. (n.d.). Making Sense of Management: A Critical Introduction Making sense of management: A critical introduction, 1-8. doi:10.4135/9781446222102.n1 Mintzberg's Management Roles - Management Skills From MindTools.com. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://www.mindtools.com/pages/article/management-roles.htm Organizational Learning and the Learning Organization. (n.d.). Organizational Knowledge Dynamics: Managing Knowledge Creation, Acquisition, Sharing, and Transformation, 286-312. doi:10.4018/978-1-4666-8318-1.ch012 Pupion,P. (2012). Introduction. Management Avenir, 55(5), 208. doi:10.3917/mav.055.0208