Материал: Management-and-Organization-Behavior

Case Study

Mr. Srinivasa Raghavan, the Chairman of the Best Food Products Company,wastiredofbeingtheonlyoneinthecompanyactuallyresponsible for profits. While he had good vice-presidents in charge of finance, sales, advertising, manufacturing, purchasing, and product research, he realized he could not hold any of them responsible for company profits, as much as he would like to. He often found it difficult even to hold them responsible for the contribution of their various areas to company profits. The sales vice-president, for example, had rather reasonably complained that he could not be fully responsible for sales when the advertising was ineffective, when the products wanted by customers were not readily available from manufacturing, or when he did not have the new products he needed to meet competition. Likewise, the manufacturing vice-president had some justification when he made the point that he could not hold costs down and still be able to produce short runs so as to fill orders on short notice; moreover, financial controls would not allow the company to carry a large inventory of everything.

Mr. Raghavan had considered breaking the company down into six or seven segments by setting product divisions with a manager over each with profit responsibility. But he found that this would not be feasible or economical since many of the company’s branded food products were produced on the same factory equipment and used the same raw materials and a sales person calling on a store or supermarket could far more economically handle a number of related products than one or a few.

Consequently, Mr. Raghavan came to the conclusion that the best thing to do was to set up six product managers reporting to a product marketing manager. Each product manager would be given responsibility for one or a few products and would oversee, for each product, all aspects product research, manufacturing, advertising and sale thereby becoming the person responsible for the performance and profits relating to the products.

Mr. Raghavan realized that he could not give these product managers actual line authority over the various operating departments of the company since that would cause each vice-president and his department to report to six product managers and the product marketing manager,

160

as well as the president. He was concerned with this problem but knew that some of the most successful larger companies in the world had used the product manager system. Moreover one o his friends on a university faculty told him that he must expect a certain amount of confusion in any organisation and that this might not be bad since it forced people to work together as teams.

Mr. Raghavan resolves to put in the product manager system in his organisation as outlined and hoped for the best. But he wondered how he could avoid the problem of confusion in reporting relationships.

Questions

1.Do you agree with Mr.Raghavan’s programme? State the exact problem in the case.

2.What would you do to avoid any confusion in this organisation?

3.Do you suggest any other organisation model for this business? If so, present the organisation chart of the same.

***

161

CHAPTER-III

Lesson - 14 : Perception And Learning

CONTENTS:

The Perceptual Process

Factors Influencing Selection Of Stimuli

Factors Influencing Perception

Managing The Perception Process

Learning Theories

Learning Reinforcement

Review Questions

Perception is how people look at and understand the things. It is a unique interpretation of the situation rather than recoding of it. Perception is a complex cognitive process of understanding the world, sometimes not in its real form. Perception is a learning process and hence it differs from person to person. As a result, the same stimuli may produce different behaviours and responses. In managing the organizations, particularly in dealing with the people, managers should be able to understand the perceptions of the people. It is in this context, an attempt is made here to explain the perceptual process, factors influencing perceptions and managing the perceptions to the advantage of the organization.

163

Perceptual Process

Perception is the process by which people select, organize, interpret and respond to information from the world around them. This information is obtained through the senses namely, seeing, hearing, touch, taste and smell.

Perception may be defined as the process of receiving, selecting, organizing, interpreting, checking, and reacting to sensations. It is also defined as ‘a process by which individuals organize and interpret their sensory impressions in order to give meaning to their environments.’ The perceptional processes show that their functioning is affected by three variables – the objects perceived, the environment in which perception occurs, and the individual perceiving the objects.

Figure 14.1: The Perceptual Process

In the above diagram, you may find that the important aspects of perception are selection and organization. Different people perceive an object differently both in terms of what they selectively perceive and how they organize and interpret the things perceived. A person’s selection process involves factors internal to the person as well as external to him. It is, in fact, a complex set of factors that determine the perception of an individual.

Similarly, an individual organizes the selected stimuli into meaningful patterns. The interpretation of what is perceived may vary widely. For example, a wave of hand may be interpreted as a friendly gesture or it may be interpreted as a sign of threatening depending on the circumstances and the state of mind of the two people. Therefore, quite often the people perceive things differently and behave on the basis of those perceptions. Managers in organizations should understand that people’s perceptions differ and at times they also go wrong.

164