Spencer’s Reviews > Administrative Behavior: A Study of Decision-making Processes in Administrative Organisations > Status Update

the organization must be so constructed that a decision which is rational from the standpoint of the deciding individual, will remain rational when reassessed from the standpoint of the group...the basic task of administration—to provide each “operative” employee with an environment of decision of such a kind that behavior which is rational from the standpoint of this environment is also rational [to]...group values.

What is wanted is a factorization that minimizes these interdependencies and consequently permits a maximum degree of decentralization of final decision to the subsystems, and a maximum use of relatively simple and cheap coordinating devices to relate each of the decisional subsystems with the others.

The difficulties of transmission from sources of information to decision centers tend to draw the latter toward the former, while the difficulties of transmission from decision centers to points of action create a pull in the opposite direction. The task of properly locating decision centers is one of balancing these opposing pulls.

As a matter of fact, jurisdictional disputes are an important means of bringing to the top administrator significant issues of policy, and of preventing these from being decided at lower levels without his knowledge. Similarly (this bears on the third point), they are a means of informing him about the characteristics and viewpoints of his subordinates.

Formulating a problem is itself a problem-solving task...different representations of the problem will produce different proposals for solution.

Economic man purports to deal with the “real world” in all its complexity The administrator recognizes that the perceived world is a drastically simplified model of the buzzing, blooming confusion that constitutes the real world...administrators satisfice rather than maximize they can choose without first examining all possible behavior alternatives and without ascertaining that these are in fact all the alternatives

A major purpose of the planning and organizing that precedes any administrative activity is not merely to put each participant in the job he can best fill, but to permit each to form accurate expectations as to what the others are going to do.

...the concepts of systems, multiple constituencies, power and politics, and organization culture all flow quite naturally from the concept of organizations as complex interactive structures held together by a balance of the inducements provided to various groups of participants and the contributions received from them.

No plague has produced a rate of mortality higher than the rate that customarily afflicts central-office communications between the time they leave the issuing office and the moment when they are assumed to be effected in the revised practice of the operative employees.