ORGANIZATIONAL EFFECTIVENESS

Organizational Effectiveness and SWOT analysis

Abstract

As part of the strategic planning process, it is generally prescribed that organizations undertake an internal audit, aimed at identifying their major skills, technologies, competencies, and resources, and existing and possible future vulnerabilities, and an environmental analysis aimed at identifying, amongst other things, existing and future societal (e.g., demographic), technological, legal, and economic developments. The major purpose is to identify the strengths and weaknesses of the organization, and the major opportunities and threats opened up by what is happening and likely to happen in its environment; hence, SWOT. The purpose of the strategic planning exercise, then, is to build on the strengths, and where possible overcome or avoid the weaknesses, by exploiting opportunities in the environment as well as defending the organization against possible threats, or even converting so-called threats into opportunities. In the positivist tradition, this analysis is presented as though objective data about the organization and its environment (see marketing environment) are present to be discovered, ignoring the fact that individuals have their own values, prejudices, and motives that can affect their interpretation of, for instance, the environment and the capabilities of the organization. Those involved in the analysis are subject to a range of cognitive biases (Hill and Jones, 2005) that include prior hypothesis bias, where decision-makers have existing strong beliefs that affect their perception and interpretation; representativeness, or the tendency to generalize from a small sample or even a single anecdote; and groupthink, where decision-makers act uniformly without questioning underlying assumptions, often under the leadership of one or more strong personalities. The power plays within organizations can also affect the interpretation of both the competencies of the organization and what is happening in the environment. Attribution for past failures (and successes) may be affected by existing attempts to secure position and resources.

Organizational Effectiveness and SWOT analysis

Introduction

Any business, may it be for profit or not for profit needs to analyze its external factors before making any strategic decisions. In today's time, different from earlier days when the non-profit organization were considered a total free service oriented organization, these organizations stand at per with the profit organizations to take their share of the resources. It is becoming even harder for these organizations as the need and demand for social action programs have gained momentum and large masses of people are realizing the need to help the humanity. Thus, these organizations are now faced with the similar, neither but nor too similar, sorts of situations as by the other profit oriented enterprises.

Before making any strategic plans and decisions, there needs to be a through analysis of the external factors. This can be done by two ways.

The SWOT analysis and the PEST analysis do that:

S-strengths

W-weaknesses

O-opportunities

Threats

The SWOT starts by identifying the organizational strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. A SWOT begins with an external analysis of the environment that is often termed as the PEST analysis.

SWOT Analysis

A SWOT analysis sets up on the outcomes of the PEST analysis, which looks at the organization's external ...