Values, Design and Development of Strategic Organizations

This paper explores the connotations of concepts of social development, Organizations and values in the Indian society. Social Development has so many meanings that no coherent action seems to emerge. The Indian scene, in recent decades, is also animated by an unprecedented effloresce of all varieties of organizations : governmental, non-governmental and private voluntary ones. Some of these are definitely engaged in social development. These organizations tend to operate more as structures held together by leaders with charisma who good, cajole, tempt, reward and punish the organization members for producing outputs and results. A fully functioning organization involves two modalities – the institutional and structural, with their support systems. The institutional modality (representing coherence of philosophy, mission, and direction) requires sentient systems to sustain the process of meaning-making in organization. The structural modality (representing the congruence of concepts of business, strategy goals, etc.) requires management and administrative systems to make organizations functionally effective. In the second section, the paper provides a brief narrative on the values (normative, phenomenological, and existential) that get internalized in organizations through various mechanisms and interfaces. Thereafter, a comparative analysis of the different ethos (Indian and western) at inter-play in Indian organizations is provided. These illustrations highlight the cultural context of Indian organizations wherein both the ethos and the design are neither congruent nor convergent with the values operative in role taking processes. Hence, greater ingenuity, innovativeness and adaptiveness are needed for designing strategic organizations, Particularly for social development. It is necessary to identify the institutions needed to foster the sentient – investment of the community for initiating new organizations. Furthermore, there is a need for creating institutions of debriefing to create a shared, concrete concept of organizational reality in terms of demands and policies. The organizational model being outlined in our paper endeavours to harmoniously blend the value considerations and structural exigencies in the design of developmental organizations.