Article Review on Organizational Behavior of Chapter 11

Case Study on Chapter 11

The case of Chapter 11 shows the communication problems. As taking the new role of being a privatized social service organization, IBM should have shared with ACS its organizational values and goals through effective communication process and methods. Outsourcing becomes an easier way for companies to collected resources; however the goal has to be shared through effective communication. IBM’s privatized social services failed to meet the clients’ needs, and the reasons can be attributed to three major parts. First, IBM didn’t communicate effectively to share its goals and achieve coordinated action. Second, ACS provides clients barely any medium to communicate, which made their service really awkward and bad. As a result, it offered less-capability and less-efficiency in dealing with the clients’ cases. Third, the ignorance of establishing a systemic and multiform communication network made communication system paralyzed.

George Thompson, a former employee at FSSA said that, he didn’t call back because he was not paid for that (Griffin, 2012). As a staff working for ACS, he thought his contract for doing his job was just limited to answer phone calls, which was also supported by another ex-ACS, Angie Kennaugh, she said that her job was to get people off the phone. Obviously, IBM, as a new role of the privatized social service center, had never communicated with ACS on sharing its goals, tasks, decisions, missions and plans to its outsourcing ACS employees. There was actually no communication either on how to deal with the clients through phone calls. Without those sharing and exchanges, IBM didn’t know how ACS was dealing with clients’ phone calls and ACS didn’t know their goal of receiving phone calls, which means achieving coordinated action became impossible to attain. It was a hard task for ACS employees to be oriented based on FSSA’s goals without understanding each other. Instead, ACS was like an independent organization with separate goals in this case.

ACS received tons of criticism on collecting inaccurate and incomplete personal information and at the mean time they lost so many processing applications including the original documents. As a receiver, ACS should be able to transmit and decode the source after encoding it. Receiving all the required materials was a basis for encoding the information. But in fact, ACS lost thousands of documents which made it difficult even at the first step of encoding. In the transmission part of communication process, ACS had to consider what kind of medium was best used for transmitting different type, emergency and priority of information. In this case, ACS chose phone calling as a medium to deal with the welfare applications. In communication process, feedback is always needed, but ACS didn’t develop any verification between the clients and organization because they never called back in the case. Not

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