109SAM Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1500 words

109SAM - Essay Example Research indicates that bureaucracy is one of the key indicators for a civilized society/ organisation (Flohr, 2010). Some of the merits of democracy include: it act as a tool for ensuring success and efficiency within an organisation. It furthers helps to coordinate different people to work together to achieve a common goals. In addition, bureaucracy helps to define roles that of each person in an organisation should execute. For example, some of the key roles hire include: finance role, managerial roles, human resource roles, accounting roles, legal roles, marketing roles to mention just but a few. In addition, less time is consumed in a bureaucratic structure because there are fewer consultations involved. Bureaucracy provides the top level managers with an opportunity to exercise greater control of organisation decision and strategies this further helps towards proper implementation of organisation decisions. Bureaucratic organisation structure tends to have a clear chain of comm and as well as define lines of reporting. Other merits of democracy may be observed from the government perspective. For example in case of a country, bureaucracy helps to protect it against external and internal aggression via establishment of central intelligence units and armed forces. In above connection, it helps to sustain a strong economy through the establishment of Export-Import bank, securities as well as protection of public goods (Media and Ingram, 2013). On the contrary, bureaucracy tends to have some disadvantage. Among disadvantages of bureaucracy include; it denies the participants an opportunity to think independently and hence, discouraging creativity and innovativeness. Bureaucracy tends to be so mechanistic and rigid; this discourages adaptability to contemporary market, legal and industrial changes. In addition, in a bureaucratic organisation, employee in lower levels of management tends to be less satisfied with the decisions made by top, management because the y are not involved in making those decisions and hence they tend to lack accountability in implementing those decisions. In addition, bureaucratic structures tend to be so much centralized rather than decentralized and hence making it difficult for people with a brilliant ideas to contribute. Bureaucratic organization denies employees morale due to repetitiveness in the nature of task undertaken. This it is rare for employees to shift from one job to the other. Additionally, bureaucracy may not be suitable for a small organisation because it. In a bureaucratic organisation there is usually an aspect of goal displacement as because instead of pursuing overall organisation objectives individuals tend to pursue their own goals and interest (Media and Ingram, 2013). There are various theories of bureaucracy for example, max Weber theory, monopolistic model and the theory of acquisitive. Marx Weber theory of democracy comprises of five characteristics that include: specialization, whereb y, employees should be allotted that task that they can do perfectly. The second characteristic involves division of labor; this implies that work should be divided into smaller and manageable task. The third characteristic entails hierarchical whereby, an organisation should have a clear chain of authority where employees can report to one senior. The fourth characteristic entails standardization of operating procedures. This involves explaining employees on how they are suppose to execute the task (Spark notes, 2013). PORTFOLIO ITEM 2: Culture Cultural awareness entails the ability to think not only about ourselves but