Building an Effective, Successful and Intelligent Organization

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Building Intelligent Organization

Perhaps a more critical question an organization should ask today, “what is the best way to create an effective, successful and intelligent organization?”. Such question perhaps become a bit easier if we roll back to the question, “what creates organizational crisis?”. The “logic of failure” may give us a clue to curtail the causal factors of failure and work on things that moves organization towards efficacy.
Probst & Raisch (2005) made an interesting argument about several underlying factors that creates organizational demise. Of the many few worth delving: culture, leadership, change and growth and more importantly their hierarchical relationship to burnout and premature aging syndrome.
This connotation is an important indication that an inward health check and stabilizations of endogenous factors thereof is relatively important to face exogenous challenges. Failure to do so may cause organizations to develop “toxicity” in the hives and corners, a pathology that may overtimes cause detrimental impact in organizational functioning rendering to a more entrenched behavior of dysfunction known as “Passive Aggressive Organizational Behavior (PAOB) (Vechhio, 2002; Chowdhury, 2008). Central to addressing such dysfunctions and building capability to thrive are six key factors: Introspection, Values, Organizational Scholarship, Effective Leadership, Viable Strategy and Goal Orientation. These key factors lubricate organizational mechanisms reducing friction while improving efficacy, agility and capability.
Introspection
Highly effective people are often open to self-examination, such introspection allows them to learn from mistake and improve upon while forging ahead. An organization is no different than an individual when comes to it’s personality construct, an introspection is essential knowing what works, what does not and factors to improve upon. It is in fact the building block of an effective organization.
Values
If there is one thing outstanding about you and fundamental to your makeup is the “Value”. It is that simple. “Values” are the essence of your presence; it influences your attitude, behavior and the worldview. Analogously, “value” defines organization’s common thread of presence, it’s culture and sense of belonging for it’s organic elements. It is in essence the “lifeblood” of your organization. This fundamental and subtle yet powerful element is what defines organizations, draws passions among employees and unite the workforce to forge ahead.
Organizational Scholarship
Creating positivity and information conflict without interpersonal skirmish has been a subject of great interest and many organizations are subtly fostering such culture to achieve efficacy. Modern organization must foster “positivity and information conflict” through cooperative yet constructive dialogues and employees should have access to information (IT services should create knowledge base infrastructure to support this) to develop or augment their scholarly aptitude. Consecutively, organizational culture of “Positivity” should support such aspiration through development behavioral competence for “Information Conflict”. Pundits of “constructive controversy”, organizational agility and scholarship encouraged such behavioral competence but without a framework and concern for pitfall may do more harm than good. People are after all people; so clash of ego is evident and may hinder progress towards organizational scholarship if careful formulation is lacking.
However, for aspiring organization, there is a solution: “DWB” (Deviant Citizenship Behavior), a framework of creative and proactive competence that I developed during my doctoral studies. It is a latent construct of behavioral competence that helps organizations develop endogenous qualities to meet endogenous and exogenous challenges effectively and thrive.
Effective Leadership
In my longitudinal studies, many respondents attributed their organizational success to leadership and conversely, the failure as well. It’s sheer importance is also vivid in organizational studies for which this social process of influence is central. Theories are abounds: you can pick ‘n’ choose a “leadership construct” among many yet no single construct is effective in today’s organizational context. Rather than being sole bearer of a single construct, you can do better with a mix. Bottom-line, you need to be passionate with emotional freedom: sounds like an oxymoron. Yes, it will definitely take best out of you. After all, restraining “ego” is not an easy task; yet if you could confine it from drowning yourself when time comes, you will do good. It will also help you being honest, humble yet decisive and flexible. These sets of behavioral attributes are important towards developing effective leadership construct and organizations should foster a culture of developing effective leadership, as it helps the entity to forge ahead of being an effective organization. It’s chicken and egg, you cannot have an effective organization without effective leaders.
Viable Strategy
Not every strategy is viable thus devising a strategy with continuity is important, one that can be reinvented as required. There should be a constant synchronization among corporate strategy, technology strategy, product, marketing and operational strategies. Perhaps a retrospection may help; ask questions like what we do best, our value-add and the opportunity. The technique of gap analysis would be helpful to create a blueprint of a viable strategy that works for your organization.
Goal Orientation
Having a strategy in place means nothing until you get every hives and corners of organization excited about it. Goal orientation is a “socio-cognitive” mechanism that creates motivation in the organization, eliminates status quo, conflicting priorities and other bureaucratic hurdles. It is essential conduit of an effective and intelligent organization.

Therefore, organizations that are open to changes and aspire to thrive in today’s competitive marketplace will find these key factors as essential conduit to attain their organizational aspiration.

Reference:
Chowdhury, D.D., 2008. Structured Approach to Improve Passive Aggressive Organizational Behavior: An Empirical Research. Lulu, Inc.
Probst, G. & Raisch, S., 2005. Organizational crisis: The logic of failure. Academy of Management.
Vecchio, P.R., 2002. Organizational Behavior : Core Concepts. Cengage South-Western.