Control Methods

When most people think of managerial control, what they have in mind is bureaucratic control. Bureaucratic control is top-down control, in which managers try to influence employee behavior by rewarding or punishing employees for compliance or noncompliance with organizational policies, rules, and procedures.

Most employees, however, would argue that bureaucratic managers emphasize punishment of noncompliance much more than rewards for compliance. Bureaucratic management and control were created to prevent just this type of managerial behavior.

Another characteristic of bureaucratically controlled companies is that, due to their rule-and policy-driven decision making, they are highly resistant to change and slow to respond to customers and competitors.

In many companies, bureaucratic control has evolved into objective control, which is the use of observable measures of employee behavior or output to assess performance and influence behavior. However, bureaucratic control focuses on whether policies and rules are followed, objective control focuses on observing and measuring worker behavior or output.

There are two kinds of objective control: behavior control and output control. Behavior control is regulating behaviors and actions that workers perform on the job. Instead of measuring what managers and workers do, output control measures the results of their efforts. Output control is often coupled with rewards and incentives.

Rather than monitoring rules, behavior, or output, another way to control what goes on in organizations is to use normative control to shape the beliefs and values of the people who work there. With normative controls, a company’s widely shared values and beliefs guide workers’ behavior and decisions.

Normative controls are created in two ways. First, companies that use normative controls are very careful about who they hire. Second, with normative controls, managers and employees learn what they should and should not do by observing experienced employees and by listening to the stories they tell about the company.

Although normative controls are based on beliefs that are strongly held and widely shared throughout a company, concertive controls are based on beliefs that are shaped and negotiated by work groups. Concertive control is not established overnight. In phase one, group members learn to work with each other, supervise each other’s work, and develop the values and beliefs that will guide and control their behavior.

The second phase in the development of concertive control is the emergence and formalization of objective rules to guide and control behavior. Self-control, also known as self-management, is a control system in which managers and workers control their own behavior. Self-control does not result in anarchy, in which everyone gets to do whatever he or she wants.

In self-control, or self-management, leaders and managers provide workers with clear boundaries within which they may guide and control their own goals and behaviors.

Видео Control Methods канала GreggU