Bolman and Deal

Nur Aiysha Ghazali ENGM 264 Paper #1-Bolman & Deal Bolman and Deal discuss about for frames; structural, human resource, political and symbolic. Each frame has its own characteristics, where and how the situation is applied in organization. A leader or authority of companies sometimes would apply these frames in their organization in order to tackle their employees. However, I will only discuss about 3 frames that most gave the impact to me when I read this book. The first frame that is valuable is human resources. The human resource frame talks about how organizations and people do to and for one another.

Family is the suitable metaphor for organization to describe the situation. The example given in the book was about three Nucor Corp electricians who flew and drove to Arkansas and spent 24 hours to fix the failed electric grid. This example shows that they do not need their boss to tell them to go and fix it. As soon as they heard the bad news, they promptly caught a flight and arrived there even though it was already past midnight. That action deserves some compliments-; if it happened to me, I would rather have a good sleep first and then we will see tomorrow how we are going to deal with that.

The weird thing is, on what basis they made such a sacrifice for their company? This is how the human resource frame applies. Their company invests in their employees’ workforce in order to maintain their success. The Nucor Corp pays big bonuses to their employees based on their output and company’s success, thus to catch a flight to Arkansas is just a piece of cake, considering the big gain they would get. Pareto Principle stated that 80% of the profit is made by 20% of the effective employees of an organization.

Order custom essay Bolman and Deal with free plagiarism report

450+ experts on 30 subjects Starting from 3 hours delivery

Get Essay Help

What Nucor Corp did was to make the 20% effective employees stay to work for them and they will only stay if the work they did worth the money they will get. However, not all companies behave just like Nucor does. “The Company Men” movie is a good example of how opposite they are from Nucor. The GTX authority chose to spend the money on new building and new executive offices instead of their employees. They fired their employees, including Bobby (Ben Affleck) who has quite a position in the company. Business still is all that matters to them, not charity. The human resource frame was not applied in this movie.

The human resource frame in a company applies when the authority shows appreciation towards their employee, not just giving them paycheck, but keeping their job also shows gratitude from the company. The fired employees only have one of these skills: business, administration or secretariat. Just imagine how they could survive in the real world competition and what’s worse their age usually makes it harder to apply for jobs where thousands of fresh graduates can do the same thing. Watching this movie, I have realized that my decision to take Engineering Management as a minor is a good decision.

I may graduate with Mechanical Engineering degree, but who knows there might be conflict later in my life, and the minor would actually help me get a job again. If the company that I work with does not apply human resource frame, just like the GTX, it is not a bad idea to have few different skills to survive in this concrete jungle. If I get fired in my forties, by then it should be okay to start doing consulting job, as I have gained many experiences from my previous work before. Backup plan is essential to avoid being a jobless.

If someday I have the chance to have my own company, I would try my best to apply human resource in the management, such as scholarship for the employees’ children in order to improve the mutual relationship between the authority and employees. The second frame is political frame. The political frame sees an organization as a jungle — an arena of enduring differences, scarce resources, power negotiations and conflict. For example, theory in Cyert and March book stated that small firms operate with the guide of the entrepreneur, but larger corporation has bigger responsibilities, hence they operate in another way.

These larger firms are coalitions of individuals or groups, which may include managers, stockholders, workers, suppliers and so on. It is crucial to realize that the political frame does not attribute politics to individual selfishness or incompetence. But it attributes it to the fundamental organizational properties of interdependence, enduring differences and scarcity. Bolman and Deal claimed that US space shuttles: Columbia and Challenger were brought down by politics.

A day before the launch, NASA and the Morton Thiokol Corporation, the contractor for the shuttle’s solid- fuel rocket motor made emergency conference and Thiokol engineers requested to superiors and NASA to delay the launch. However, Thiokol’s monopoly was under attack, and the corporation’s executives were not confident to risk their billion-dollar contract by cancelling shuttle flight operations long enough just to correct insignificant flaws in the booster joint design. NASA’s schedule also was falling behind, and they needed money from the Congress if the shuttle was delayed again.

Hence, to avoid all the consequences, they still launched the shuttle and it exploded right a few minutes after the take-off. The example that I can see is when we watched the downfall of Enron interview video, where one of the possible reasons of the bankruptcy point to former president, George Bush. The Enron scandal, which has laid waste to thousands of employees' life savings and revealed questionable ties to the Bush White House and members of Congress, spotlights a conflict of interest in government and shouts the need for campaign finance reform.

While Congress battles over campaign finance reform, the political parties are actually raising more soft money contributions than ever before. Soft money allows unlimited contributions to political parties from corporations, labor unions and rich individuals to national, state and local political parties. As we can see here is that the political frame applies where some bargaining must have been done between Enron and political party in order to obtain power, if the accusation is true though. If not, the greedy Enron executives must have formed coalition and made some high-risk deals and manipulation to achieve their goals.

On the surface, the downfall of Enroll in one night is due to the motives and greed attitudes behind decisions made by the executives. The company failed to report its financial affairs fully, followed by financial restatements disclosing billions of dollars of omitted liabilities and losses, leading to its collapse. It was the first time in history where a huge company like Enron can go down just in a blink of eyes, which people could have never imagined that could happen. Furthermore, strategic leaders can form coalitions with others, network informally, and negotiate and bargain to achieve agreement on certain plans of action.

Someday, if I will be a leader in an oil and gas company, even with a structure of advisors and officers, a budget and other resources, I may not be able to achieve as much success as I wish, despite having the legal power. Others are able to utilize other forms of power, including public opinion and political influence to achieve what they might want, which could be contrary to what I desire. For example, if I decide to build new factory to expand the company, the public would go mad saying how it would create air and noise pollution in their residences.

But, the thing is the land does not belong to the public. If the coalition can be made between the land owners and the authorities, then the project is possible despite the conflict arises from the public. Conflict would always arise if it is about political frame. If the conflict does not disturb the main goal of the coalition, then just let it be. The third concept is about symbolic frame. Stories and fairy tales are one of the organization symbols, for example how the leader of the company worked hard during his youth to be who he is today.

Stories carry values and serve as powerful modes of communication and instruction. Furthermore, the stories got passed down from one generation to next one, and that distinguishes the company from other companies. There can be various stories though, where it can be about the employees’ loyalty or other values related to the company. Bolman and Deal uses the example of ex-chancellor of Vanderbilt University, which John Wyatt told a very simple story that gave emphasis to the sacred side of teaching, one of the university’s core values, in an unusually dramatic way.

Also from what I have observed, Prof Jordan uses a lot of his own experience to tell stories in class. One of the stories that he told in our class last year was about one of his friend’s friend, who was a billionaire, got bankrupt and he was already old that time, what was worse, his wife left him. He quoted “There are three things you do not want to happen to you at the same time; old, broke and alone. ” I still remember it until now because it happens to society nowadays and it is indeed very true. His stories are not comforting, but the reality really hits you big time if they are based on true stories.

Just like what he did, effective organizations are full of good stories, and good stories stuck in your brain forever. Another real life example I found in a movie is where it often happens in a divorced family. The mother would usually talk about how the jobless father always gets drunk every night to the children, and eventually that leads to their divorce. The main point is not about how she bad-mouths her ex-husband, but it is more likely she is giving advice to his son to not be like that, or for the girl to not choose guys like that when she grows up.

I can see the symbolic assumption in here; what is most important is not what happens but what it means. This will be useful in my future because even though you have died, good stories about you stay. For instance, if I invent some technology to help people, the stories about how workaholic I was to serve the community, or how modest I was would go around for ages. Just imagine how many people would be inspired by those stories and more updated and advanced technology would be continued by these people. The stories would be continued generation to generation, and that is one of the ways for long-term company development.

The real life example for the statements would be the late Steve Jobs. As discussed above, all these frames are important in every aspects of life. Everyone would have to deal with these things since we all need to work in an organization after graduating. We have to know the skills to reframe the organizations where it fits in order to be an effective leader or manager. I think most successful companies applied these frames in their management to develop their company. It may seem insignificant, but Enron had its lesson, so it is not possible to happen to other organization.

Don't let plagiarism ruin your grade

Run a free check or have your essay done for you

Check my essay Hire Writer