I have had experience with a variety of organizations, each
in a different stage of the organizational lifecycle. The first organization is
the service fraternity of which I am currently a member, Alpha Phi Omega, or
APO. During my time as an APO brother, the organization has been in a phase of
strong growth that has been reflected in the changes I have experienced in the
organization. The second organization, the American Red Cross Club, was in a
more stable, mature phase, while the third organization, Boat People, SOS, was
in the later phases of decline. Each organization was uniquely characterized by
the growth stage in which I encountered it, and with each experience I gained a
more complete view of organizational economics.
Alpha Phi Omega's
rapid growth is fueled by the influx of new members that increases with each
semester. Growth begets growth as new members tell their friends of the
benefits of joining APO, who will in turn join and tell their friends. The
structure of the organization is similar to many other fraternities of similar
size -- it is headed by a President with a board of Vice Presidents. The Vice
Presidents each preside over a different division of the organization, such as
the division in charge of social events or the one in charge of
leadership-building events. The divisions are run by committee members, chairs,
and directors. Many decisions on what events to be held were made at the
"edge" by the lower-ranked leadership, as that was believed to be the
most efficient mode of decision making. Many officer positions are highly
competitive to get, as APO's growth keeps members enthusiastic and engaged. The
changes I have seen in APO are largely reactions to the organization's growth, such
as the creation of new positions to handle the increased programming needed.
There are also concerns of handling APO's growth more efficiently, resulting in
the merging of several similar positions where having separate officers that
worked as a team was believed to cause inefficiency and underperformance due to
the transaction costs involved with working with another person.
The
American Red Cross Club's membership had largely stabilized, and growth was
neither sought nor avoided. The leadership structure was headed by a President
with several chairs working under them, such as the Education Chair or the
Philanthropy Chair. Decisions seemed to be made more at the "center"
by the upper leadership, likely owing at least in part to the fact that the
ARCC's small size meant that it was feasible for a few people to be in charge
of most decisions. The leadership structure had not changed in five years at
the time when I joined, and did not change during my time there. The
organization's stable membership numbers resulted in no new programming needed,
so there was no need for new officer positions. Also, because the ARCC had not
experienced any significant changes in a long time, this likely gave the
organization the opportunity to find the most efficient way of organizing its
leadership in a way that allowed sufficient programming and kept transaction
costs to a minimum.
Boat
People, SOS is a not-for-profit organization dedicated to helping
underprivileged Vietnamese-Americans. At the time when I was there, the
organization's staffing and beneficiary numbers were both in decline due to
decreasing funding which was driven by dwindling need for the organization's
work, as Vietnamese-Americans have been fairly socioeconomically well off in
recent years. The organization's leadership consisted of a President, his
assistant, several heads of various departments such as Human Resources, Fund Development,
and Education, and the secretaries and interns working under them. Several
departments such as Human Resources consisted of only the department head and
no one else. During my time at the organization, dwindling workloads caused
several staff members to be laid off without any replacement for better
efficiency. The President, recognizing the opportunity cost of allowing
multiple unused offices to remain unused, began renting out portions of the
organization's office suite. The company's Board put forth several suggestions
to foster the company's growth, such as expanding their mission to include
members of other minority communities, but nothing came of them, as the
organization's decisions were made from the "center" and the
President did not want to change the organization's mission due to his personal
beliefs.. Boat People, SOS's changes in leadership were essentially the
opposite of APO's -- while in both cases the organizations wanted to be more
efficient, they reached their goals by changing their number of leadership
positions in opposite directions.
All
organizations want to operate efficiently, and the organization's growth
situation often determines what the most effective path to that efficiency is.
Finding the most efficient leadership structure takes time. These case studies
of organizations I have been a part of have reminded me of the organizational
economics of growth and decline and their effect on an organization's
leadership positions. They have also given me hands-on exposure to the concepts
of center vs. edge decision making and transaction costs and I hope to study
all of these topics more in the future.
You had a choice to make in writing this post. In contrast to what you actually did, you might have written about only one of these organizations and then given more depth on that. Indeed, you never actually described what Alpha Phi Omega does, nor why people want to join it. Likewise you didn't say what is that you did when you were a member. Those factors may be so obvious to you that they are not necessary to include in the piece. But for me as a reader, without knowing these things it is hard to make headway into what you are saying.
ReplyDeleteYou then used as an organizing principle to compare the various organizations where they were in the growth life cycle of an organization. This is potentially interesting if organization growth is a measure of organization performance. In the examples that you gave, I couldn't tell if that was true or not. As each of these are service organizations, is the some other measure of "output" both in terms of volume and in terms of quality that might be considered apart from number of organization members? That would be useful to know.
You did give some structural overview of the hierarchy of the organizations. That was useful. But you could have pushed beyond that to comment on whether the structure matched the mission or if in some cases there were bottlenecks where the structure ended up not functioning well. Indeed, that could have been the focus of the post, if you had and example of that sort to work through.