Organizational Structure

Getting paid to do something you love can totally ruin the experience.

Odd, eh?

I am vaguely aware that there are many ways of understanding this phenomenon. Many investigators think we have more than one motivational system, and these systems compete - activating one can knock out the other.

One study I've found focuses precisely on this phenomenon. It's called Effort for Payment: A Tale of Two Markets by James Heyman and Dan Ariely, in Psychological Science (Vol15—Num11: 787-793). They were studying "homo economicus", and they wanted to see if adding compensation to a task would affect how much effort people put into a task. If humans are rational self-maximizers, they argued, then the more you pay them, the better they will perform. This is not borne out empirically. In their words:

This podcast features a 13 minute interview with Jack McCredie, Associate Vice Chancellor, Emeritus, CIO, Emeritus, and Senior Research Fellow at the University of California, Berkeley. He discusses collaboration between departments, campuses, and institutions and the issues and challenges facing system unification.

An important issue in planning, managing, and funding the broad range of information services on campuses is how to get departmental, campus, system-wide, and external organizations to work well together. Often they do not, and sometimes they actively compete.

The EDUCAUSE Center for Applied Research (ECAR), the Common Solutions Group, CNI, the UC Berkeley campus, and many other organizations have been working on developing collaborative models that provide better service and that save money.

This interview is provided courtesy of CNI and was recorded at their 2007 Spring Task Force Meeting

In most universities, academic departments are primarily designed to efficiently and effectively deliver undergraduate education in well-defined disciplines. Increasingly, this organizational structure is less relevant to graduate education and research. I would suggest an alternative model in which we were organized into “faculties.” An individual could belong to one or more undergraduate faculties and one or more faculties for graduate education and research. Faculty at very times in their careers might move to different faculties and faculties might morph into something new that would be more relevant for a given time and place without the bureaucratic complexity for creating and eliminating departments. Obviously, it would be necessary in such a model to define the responsibilities of each faculty and hold them accountable.

In this recording, Vidya sits down with Molly Tamarkin, Asst Dean of Information Technology at the Nicholas School of the Environment at Duke University.  Let's listen in as they share some thoughts on the 2005 EDUCAUSE/Gartner Update and ponder the future of HR, organizational structures and leadership development.