Control Flashcards
What is control?
A regulatory process of establishing standards to achieve organisational goals, comparing actual performance against the standards and taking necessary corrective action to restore performance to those standards.
When is control achieved?
Achieved when behaviour and work procedures conform to standards and company goals are accomplished
What are the steps in the control process?
- Establish standards
- Comparison
- Corrective action
In the control process, what are standards?
A basis of comparison for measuring the extent to which organisational performance is satisfactory or unsatisfactory.
Must be met to accomplish goals set by managers
What must be true of standards in the control process and how can they be determined?
- Must enable goal achievement
- Can be determined by listening to customers’ comments, complaints and suggestions, by observing competitors’ products and services, or by benchmarking
What is compared in the control process?
Actual performance to performance standards
What is true of comparison in the control process and what is an example of a way in which the information may be gathered?
- The quality of comparison largely depends on the measurement and information systems a company uses to keep track of performance
- Secret shoppers - customer service
The control process is a…
Dynamic, cybernetic process
Managers must repeat the entire process again and again in an endless feedback loop
In general, what are the methods of control in terms of timing?
- Feedback control
- Concurrent control
- Feed-Forward control
What is feedback control?
A mechanism for gathering information about performance deficiencies after they occur
What is concurrent control?
A mechanism for gathering information about performance deficiencies as they occur, thereby eliminating or shortening the delay between performance and feedback
What is feed-forward control?
- A mechanism for gathering information about performance deficiencies before they occur by monitoring inputs, not outputs
What is control loss?
The situation in which behaviour and work procedures so not conform to standards, preventing goal achievement
What are the considerations of the control process?
- Regulation costs
* Cybernetic feasibility
What are regulation costs as it relates to the control process?
- A cost associated with implementing or maintaining control
- Managers need to asses these when determining whether control is worthwhile
What is cybernetic feasibility as it relates to the control process?
- The extent to which it is possible to implement each step in the control process
- If one or more steps cannot be implemented, then maintaining effective control may be difficult or impossible
- e.g. employee discount codes leaking online
What are the methods of control?
- Bureaucratic control
- Objective control
- Normative control
- Concertive control
- Self-Control
What is Bureaucratic control?
The use of hierarchal authority to influence employee behaviour by rewarding or punishing employees for compliance or noncompliance with organisational policies, rules and procedures
What are the pros/cons of bureaucratic control?
- By encouraging managers to apply well-thought-out rules, policies and procedures in an impartial, consistent manner, is supposed to make companies more efficient effective and fair
- Perversely, it frequently has the opposite effect as managers who use this type of control often emphasises following the rules above all else
- Due to the rule and policy driven decision making, can make companies highly resistant to change and slow to respond to environmental changes
What is objective control?
The use of observable measures of worker behaviour or output to assess performance and influence behaviour
What are the types of objective control?
- Behaviour control
* Output Control
What is behaviour control and what is the logic behind it?
- A type of objective control, involving the regulation of behaviours and actions that workers perform on the job
- If you do the right things every day, then those things should lead to goal achievement
What is an example of behaviour control?
Tracking workers with GPS
What is output control?
A type of objective control, involving the regulation of workers’ results or outputs through rewards and incentives
What must be true for output control to be effective?
- Measures must be reliable
- Employees and managers must believe that they can produce desired results
- The rewards and incentives tied to outcome control measures must truly be dependant on achieving established standards of performance
What are the pros/cons of output control?
Gives managers and workers the freedom to behave as they see fit as long as they accomplish pre-specified, measurable results