Co-Ordination by the Administrator

Abstract

E VERYONE knows that administration is the maintaining of an organization at an acceptable level of effectiveness. A single head, working co-operatively with the staff members, assigns duties, supervises the performance of them, and evaluates the outcome. In a community, however, and I shall speak of a university frequently as a community, there are a number of organizations performing often identical, sometimes dissimilar, and sometimes inappropriate services to students. That is, specialized functions or services have grown up in separate organizations. This leads to decentralization of administration, with various organizations functioning not as part of a team or as part of a concerted and comprehensive plan, but often independently and quite frequently competitively. Any situation involving decentralization of functions automatically necessitates the establishment of a corrective which we call co-ordination. Co-ordination is, therefore, an administrative means of avoiding friction, duplication, competition, and other undesirable practices among autonomous independent organizations which operate in the same general field of endeavor. It should be noticed that it is only when there is duplication or conflict in the same general field of endeavor that co-ordination is a necessity. Obviously there is no need for co-ordination when two independent, autonomous organizations operate in fields which are unrelated. Co-ordination is an effective means of developing co-operative relationships which bring about a dovetailing of partial and specialized services into a total program or pattern of services. It is also a means of bringing about a desirable degree of coherence within a decentralized system of organizations. Co-ordination is not a static form of administrative structure. It is rather a function and a dynamic process constantly changing because of at least four factors. First, the workers' personalities, interests, understandings, and motivations change from period to period. Second, there are shifts and changes in the community with respect to the demands made upon the organizations in a particular field of endeavor. Third, the needs of individual clients change as they themselves progress from one age period to another, from one economic status to another, from one physiological status to another, and from one psychological status to another. Fourth, in any field of social endeavor the products of research and systematized experiences constantly feed into the professional practices and services, thereby changing the conceptions of the basic nature of the