THE NATURE OF ORGANIZATIONAL GOALS (A Conceptual Portrait in the Historical Interior). I. From the Personal to the Impersonal

During the last half a century, no serious attempt to make out the nature of organizational goals had been undertaken. It remains a riddle what is their peculiarity. And since the concept of organizational goal appears to be a corner-stone of organization theory, no wonder that the latter is still in want of orderliness and completeness. Under such circumstances, an explicit setting of the problem in its historical perspective, which rests on a critical analysis of the approaches to its solution advanced before, gets particularly topical. The author thoroughly traces their evolution and reveals the logic of their subsequent replacements of one by another and displays the rationales and vulnerabilities of each of them. It is shown that organizational goals are tightly interknit with individual and, to a certain extent, even depend on them. Any endeavor to separate them from each other turns out to be not merely unpromising but counter-productive, for it undermines the self-devotion of the members (workers) and essentially alienates from them the vast areas of activity not covered by formal prescriptions. Nonetheless, organizational goals are irreducible to individual ones. They are of fundamentally impersonal nature and express something more than an aggregation of personal preferences. The crux of the matter is how to determine the measure and mechanism of involving the aspirations of individual members and their groups in making and implementing the goals of the organization.

Keywords: organizational goals, personal aspirations, impersonal functions, hierarchy of goals, organization theory.