The informal organization is the interlocking social structure that governs how people work together in practice. It is the aggregate of, norms, personal and professional connections through which work gets done and relationships are built among people who share a common organizational affiliation or cluster of affiliations. It consists of a dynamic set of personal relationships, social networks, communities of common interest, and emotional sources of motivation. The informal organization evolves, and the complex social dynamics of its members.
Tended effectively, the informal organization complements the more explicit structures, plans, and processes of the formal organization: it can accelerate and enhance responses to unanticipated events, foster innovation, enable people to solve problems that require collaboration across boundaries, and create footpaths showing where the formal organization may someday need to pave a way.
Read more about Informal Organization: The Informal Organization and The Formal Organization, Functions of Informal Organizations, Disadvantages of Informal Groups, Benefits of The Informal Organization, Business Approaches, Related Concepts
Famous quotes containing the words informal and/or organization:
“We are now a nation of people in daily contact with strangers. Thanks to mass transportation, school administrators and teachers often live many miles from the neighborhood schoolhouse. They are no longer in daily informal contact with parents, ministers, and other institution leaders . . . [and are] no longer a natural extension of parental authority.”
—James P. Comer (20th century)
“Democracy is the wholesome and pure air without which a socialist public organization cannot live a full-blooded life.”
—Mikhail Gorbachev (b. 1931)