A Study of Organizational Policies

Two period data on 51 items of management policy were obtained from the top managements of 75 Indian organizations (mostly private and public sector corporations). The policy items were classified into those relating to the business strategy of the organization (sub-divided further into growth strategy related and competitive strategy related policies), structural policies (sub-divided into administrative and decision process, control, and personnel policies), and ethics and altruism related policies. The data analysis was done in the context of several organization theory issues. The administrative and decision process policies were the least stable while the ethics – altruism related policies were the most stable. The policies varied widely in their “causal power” and “causal sensitivity”, and suggested four policy archetypes: foundational policies with high causal power but low sensitivity; nodal, with high causal power and sensitivity; instrumental, with low causal power but high sensitivity; and isolated, with low causal power and sensitivity. Each major group of policies had the greatest causal influence within itself but there were exceptions to this among the sub-groups. The structural policies had greater causal power over the strategic policies than the strategic policies had over the structural policies. The nature of the couplings between policies suggested two basic processes in the formation of management ideologies, those of nucleation and metamorphosis. Successive factor analysis led to the identification of 6 pairs of contrasting “ideal type” management ideologies, namely, entrepreneurial and conservative, professionalist and traditionalist, corporate citizenship and “bottom line”, Theory Y and Theory X, altruistic and self-centered, results oriented and tender minded. The implications of the data were discussed, especially the possibility that social information processing by managers outside the organization may explain some of the findings, the implications of the data for models of invariant organizational evolution or development, the implications for strategies of organizational changing, and for contingency organization theory.