Management Homework Help

Review the description of the three governance models given below and the Getzels and Guba description of the

social systems model as outlined in the article by Bozkus, then do the following:

1. Of the three types of governance models, which seems to come closest to the social systems model? Explain your selection.

2. Explain how the internal influences of the faculty assembly and student power can affect decision-making in each governance model.

Module 1: Content: Description and Comparison of Governance Models

The Corporate/Bureaucratic Model: Like any large organization with multi-million dollar budgets employing hundreds of staff and serving thousands of clients, today’s institution of higher education (IHE) has to be organized to manage resources efficiently and to answer for its use of those scarce resources. The bureaucratic model of management provides a useful framework within which to achieve those objectives. The Weberian bureaucracy with its clear definition of roles, hierarchical lines of authority, well defined and channeled formal modes of communication, and emphasis on documented record keeping provides the IHE with the organizational system to achieve efficiency, economy and accountability in the implementation of its programs. 

The Collegial/Shared Governance Model: American universities in the colonial times followed the faculty-controlled approach to university governance that they inherited from Europe. The colonists, however, tempered the control of the faculty with the appointment of external citizen boards to be the policy-making and supervisory units within the university. As the corporate model of the university extended its reach in the twentieth century, faculty share in the governance declined until the AAUP “published its first “Statement on Government of Colleges and Universities” in 1920, “emphasizing the importance of faculty involvement in personnel decisions, selection of administrators, preparation of the budget, and determination of educational policies. Refinements to the statement were introduced in subsequent years, culminating in the 1966 Statement on Government of Colleges and Universities. The document does not provide for a “blueprint” for the governance of higher education. Nor was the purpose of the statement to provide principles for relations with industry and government (though it establishes direction on “the correction of existing weaknesses”). Rather, it aimed to establish a shared vision for the internal governance of institutions.”

American Association of University Professors (1966). “Statement on Government of Colleges and Universities”. Retrieved 2015-01-22

The Political Model: IHE’s are regarded as loosely-coupled organizations lacking the tight controls and supervisory functions of the true bureaucracy. This allows space for differing views on governance to be heard and debated. From these debates often come fragmentation among faculty and staff with interest groups competing for power. Decision-making power may lie along the lines of professional elites with senior and long-serving faculty members demanding a major voice in policy-making and in lower level administrative decisions. Decision-making with respect to curricular issues may generate fragmentation along ethnic or gender lines with particular faculty demanding inclusion of issues germane to their ethnicity or gender in the curriculum. More recently the power of students has been felt in decisions pertaining to employment of administrators and faculty, curriculum changes, enrollment and campus security. 

Kıvanç Bozkuş, (2014)

Getzels and Guba (1957) define the administrative process as strongly related to social beha-

vior of individuals within organizations. They propose a social system theory for settings with

a hierarchy of relationships. Two components of their theory are institutions and individuals.

Each of them has two sub-components. Institutional roles and role expectations constitute the

nomothetic, and individual personality and need-dispositions constitute the idiographic

dimension of social behavior. The authors articulate characteristics of institutions and indi-

viduals. Institutions have purposes to meet specific ends, have people to achieve purposes,

have organizational structure which assign roles to people and makes rules to achieve

purposes, have norms that are represented as roles that impose specific behavior on individ-

uals, are sanction-bearing which means applying positive and negative sanctions to make

sure that norms are conformed. Roles prescribe the behavior of individuals. They refer to posi-

tional authority, complement each other, and adhere to role expectations defined by the institution.  

Personality is a combination of need dispositions that direct a person to accomplish a desired end.

In short, Getzels and Guba (1957) define social behavior as a result of the interaction between

role and personality. The amounts of contributions of these two factors vary according to

persons and actions, but never only one of them rules the behavior. One can act according

to the role more than personality while another individual’s behavior is affected mostly by

personality. For the authors, the administration process in social systems is nothing but under-

standing why organizational behavior cannot be associated with only either role or personality.