MAKERERE UNIVERSITY

COLLEGE OF BUSINESS & MANAGEMENT STUDIES

SCHOOL OF BUSINESS

COURSE UNIT: MODERN MANAGEMENT TECHNIQUES (PM 7201)

FACILITATORS: Assoc.Prof. Umar Kakumba

Dr. Peter Turyakira

GROUP ONE MEMBERS

NO. NAME REG.NO COURSE

1. KARATUNGA KENNETH 2020/HD06/16594U MPIM

2. SSEMANDA HENRY 2020/HD06/16611U MPIM

QNS. With reference to an organization of your choice, examine the nature and importance
of its organizational/Business environment.

Various Scholars have advanced various definitions of an organisation;

According to John M Pfeffer and Frank P Sherwood, an organisation is the pattern of ways in
which a large number of people, too many to have intimate face- to- face contact with all others,
are engaged in a complexity of tasks, relate themselves to each other in a conscious, systematic
establishment and accomplishment of mutually agreed purposes.

In the words of Koontz and O'Donnell, "they define an organisation as the grouping of activities
necessary to accomplish goals and plans, the assignment of these activities to appropriate
departments and the provision of authority, delegation and co-ordination."

Furthermore, G E Milward defines an organisation as a process of dividing work into convenient

tasks or duties, of grouping such duties in the form of posts of delegating authority to each post
and of appointing qualified staff to be responsible so that the work is carried out as planned."

Through the various definitions as advanced by the various scholars, it can be deduced that
organisations are made of the following aspects:
i. Groups of people
ii. Acting together
iii. In pursuit of common goals or objectives

It can therefore be noted that in its simplest of forms, organizations are groups of people
deliberately formed together to serve a purpose through structured and coordinated goals and
plans.

Basing on the above definitions and using Uganda National Roads Authority (UNRA) as the
organisation of study, it can be deduced that it’s a group of people coupled with other resources
deliberately formed together to achieve the organization’s mission which is “ To Efficiently
Develop and Maintain a Safe and Sustainable National Road Network for the Economic
Development of Uganda”.
Organizational /Business environment

Prof. Keith Davis defines business environment as the aggregate of all conditions, events, and
influence that surround and affect it.

Therefore in line with Pro. Keith Davis, UNRA’s organisational/Business environmental can be
defined as those forces or factors surrounding it and that they can affect the organisation’s
performance, operations and resources.
They include all of the elements that exist outside of the organization's boundaries and have the
potential to affect a portion or all of the organization. Examples include government regulatory
agencies, Media, suppliers, Pressure from the public, late release of funds, Court orders like
Injunctions, Technology among others.
Ganey Rodney Francis (1981) asserts that Organizations do not exist in a vacuum but rather in a
state of constant interaction with entities in their environment. These might be individuals or other
organizations such as customers, competitors, suppliers, governmental bodies.
Since UNRA makes demands on the society and the society makes demands on it, the management
must interact with and respond to these environmental factors. The sum of these interrelationships
within the organisation and between the organisation and the society is what management regarded
as business environment. (Gloria Obiageli Eruemegbe, 2015).
Man kind’s earliest definition of the environment was rooted in religious and mystic bias. In the
past, the environment of man consisted of only the physical aspects of the planet Earth (air, water
and land) as denoted by the Greek Philosopher Hippocrates.
(Harrison F., 1996) defines environment as all the conditions, circumstances, and influences
surrounding and affecting the development of the total organization or any of its internal systems.
He argued that an environment contains forces of complexity that are dynamic to varying degrees
at differences, and under different circumstances.
The organisation/business environment contains a number of factors. They are of different types
and influence the organisation/ business in different ways. Some have a positive impact while
others adversely affect organisations. A factor with a favorable effect on one organisation may
have an adverse effect on another organisation.
A crude definition of the environment is anything outside of the unit of interest
(organization/business) which affects or is affected by the unit of interest (Ganey Rodney Francis,
1981).
Therefore, an organization's environment is anything outside of the organization which in some
way affects the organization's structure or processes. It also refers to those external forces and
institutions beyond the control of an organization which affects its functioning.
It is imperative therefore that one comprehends the environment within which an organization
operates so as to enhance/leverage those different aspects /factors so as to successfully run an
organization.

Types of UNRA’s Organisational environments

UNRA’s organisational environment can be divided into two categories namely the internal and
external environment as suggested by (Lawal A.A, 2000)
1. Internal Environment:
It consists of those factors within the organisation itself that are largely a result of decisions of the
management process. According to (Moses Hubeis,Makhammed Najib, 2008) the internal
environment is a corporate environment that is in the organization and normally has direct and
specific implications on the company. (John.A.Pearce,Richard Braden Robinson, 2013) suggests
that the analysis of the company’s internal environment includes the resources, capabilities and
competencies held by the company.
(John.A.Pearce,Richard Braden Robinson, 2013) further goes ahead and divides the resources into
three parts;
i. Tangible assets which include production facilities, raw materials, financial resources, &
computers.
i. Intangible assets which are included in the brand, reputation, moral enterprise, technical
knowledge, patents, trademarks, and accumulated experience of an organisation.
ii. Capability of the organization: refers to the skills and the ability of combining assets,
people, and processes that can be used by companies to transform inputs into outputs.

2. External Environment:
(Chuck Williams, 2001) defines the external environment as all events outside the company
that have the potential to affect the company. Therefore, an organization's external
 environment consists of the entities, conditions, events, and factors surrounding the
organization that influence choices and activities and determine its opportunities and threats.
It is also called an operating environment. Examples of factors affecting an organization's
external environment include customers, public opinion, economic conditions (taxation
regime), government regulations, and public image.

In light of the above, the nature of UNRA’s organizational environment would consist of the
following aspects.
 Complex: Merriam Webster (1990) defines complex as being something made up of many
interrelated parts. With this definition, therefore UNRA’s environment is compound in
nature since it’s comprised of many forces, a number of factors, events, conditions and
influences arising from different sources which impact its operations. For example
UNRA’s environment consists of a mix of various factors both internal and external. These
factors include conflicts both internal and external, financial issues, accusations from the
media, injunctions arising from court cases, political interference, and currently the
COVID-19 pandemic which has greatly affected its operations. All these issues affect the
smooth operation of the organization’s day to day activities.

 Interdependence: The environment of UNRA as an organisation is made up of social,

economic, legal, cultural, technological, and political factors. These factors of the
environment are all inter-dependable. The absence of one causes another to delay. This is
in line with Chelsea H etal definition of Interdependence as more than one entity working
together to accomplish a common objective. For example, government’s delay in releasing
funds leads to social economic issues such delayed compensation of projects affected
persons which also leads to creation of both time and financial claims by the contractor on
the organisation since the contractor may not be able to perform as planned

 Dynamic: In UNRA, the environment is a constantly changing process as it keeps on

changing. Changes normally are normally due to change in policies, technology and also
due to politics policies. For example a new organisational structure was introduced under
 the new administration which increased the human resource thus overcoming the threat of
manpower shortage which was the case before.

 Inter-relatedness: The different factors of the organisations environment are inter-related.

For example, the proposal by the Executive to merge the organisation into the mother
Ministry. To some extent this has led to demotivation of the human resource, which has
also lead to the organisation losing some expertise in the human resource as people are
moving out the organisation for greener pastures.

 Impact: The impact of these factors of the Organizational environment is of great

magnitude. For example delays in government in releasing funds to cater for the ongoing
road projects. Its impact is high in such a way that UNRA as an organisation incurs charges
accruing from delayed payments of various Certificates araising from works executed by
the various contracted parties especially on Road projects. This is spent money with no
value gained from it. Sometimes this delayed funding could be caused by re-allocation of
part of the Organisations funds to other priority areas as deemed by the executive.

 Uncertainty/Unpredictable: Organizational environment in UNRA is largely uncertain as

it is very difficult to predict future happenings, especially when the environment changes
are taking place too frequently as in the case of information technology, changes in the
political atmosphere and also changes in policies.

Though the challenging nature of UNRA’s organizational environment, proper understanding of

factors like social, political, legal, human resource, conflicts, dynamic technology and economic
environment has helped UNRA in several ways. These include;

i. Determine Strategies and Policies:

Critical factors like pandemics for example Covid-19 has helped UNRA to come up with new
strategies for ensuring that it’s day to day activities are not put to a halt but also not compromising
with people’s lives. Strategies such as working from home, promoting SOPs as recommended by
the Ministry of health, adopting new methods of conducting meetings like using Zoom and Teams.
Also, there is also a capacity development strategy that helps its workers to acquire new skills as
demanded by the working environment.

ii. Ensure Optimum Utilisation of Resources:

Pressure from the media and the government has helped Unra to prove that there is value for any
financial resource advanced to it as an organisation and used as planned. Resources may be human,
finance, Time or other physical things like machinery.

Human resource has all been well utilized in that every worker is well deployed with is roles and
duties defined. Also the machinery in its possession has been fully utilized. This can be evidenced
by the emergency works the mentainance team is always involved in.

iii. Maintain Organization’s Dynamism and Innovation:

The unpredictable nature of an organisations environment has helped UNRA to be dynamic in

nature by preparing to any unforeseen or unpredictable changes in its activities. For example
UNRA instituted a construction and supervision team to counteract to scenario that incase a
contract for supervision services expired and that there is no more funds to pay the Supervisor of
a certain road contract, the supervision team takes over the said works.

iv. Identifying its Strengths and Weaknesses:

The fourth estate has helped UNRA in identifying its weaknesses normally through investigative
journalism, through its social accounts where the various stakeholders and other concerned citizens
highlight out what they feel is lacking. For example a weakness in the compensation team of a
certain road project was brought out by the media and the necessary action taken by the
management.

v. Identifying Opportunities and Threats:

Continuous provision of weekly project briefs to the Top Management Team has helped identify
the various hinderance to the ongoing and incoming road projects. These have been mainly
financial, technical social and political. In so doing, it has helped in identifying the potential threats
to the organisations programs and activities. Due to this, a social safeguards team has been put in
place to counteract the social problem, a design and planning department is also in place to cater
for any technical issues araising. Through Stakeholder engagements, it has also identified an
opportunity where by political leaders are brought on board and these play a very big role in
convincing the people normally to provide right of way where compensation has delayed.

vi. Realise and foresee the Impact of Socio-Cultural Factors:

Changes in the Social-cultural aspects of the environment has helped UNRA realise that apart from
the technical works involved, there is also need to put on board a social safeguards team which
will ensure that the activities involved in any road works should not interfere with the social
cultural values of any given society. This is normally done through community sensitization and
also sensitizing any contractor or supervisor on site. Normally, a nominated service providers is
instituted on almost every contract to also work hand in hand with the safeguards team.

vii. Improves Performance

When UNRA identifies its threats, weakness and also opportunities, it improves its performance
normally through the corrective actions done. An example is the Mukono-Katosi contract where
the contract was awarded to a fake company due to not doing proper due diligence as required.
This practice has since improved proper due diligence is always done before any contract is
awarded to any contractor.

viii. Enhances Public Image

With improved performance UNRA’s public image has greatly improved. It’s now able to provide
better service and serve the interest of the society. People are nowadays happy with the works that
have been so far provided by the projects being provided by UNRA. This enables in developing a
better image in market. For example UNRA carries out emergency works on failed/broken sections
of certain roads/bridges which enhances the public’s image of the organisation

In general, an organisational /business environment benefits any organisation in the following

ways;

i. Customer Focus: Environmental understanding makes the organisation sensitive to the

changing needs and expectations of consumers/public. This is further enshrined in one of
UNRA’s core values of being Customer Centric.
ii. Strategy Formulation: Environmental monitoring provides relevant information about
the business environment. Such information serves as the basis for strategy making.
iii. Public Image: A business/organisation firm can improve its image by showing that it is
sensitive to its environment and responsive to the aspirations of public.
iv. Continuous learning: Environmental analysis serves as broad based and ongoing
education for business executives. It keeps them in touch with the changing scenario so
that they are never are caught unaware. With the help of environmental learning managers
can react in an appropriate manner and thereby increase the success of their organisations.
v. Giving Direction for Growth: The interaction with the environment leads opening up new
frontiers of growth for the business firms. It enables the business to identify the areas for
growth and expansion of their activities.
vi. Change Agent: Business leaders act as agents of change. They create a drive for change
at the grass root level. In order to decide the direction and nature of change, the leaders
needs to understand the aspirations of people and other environmental forces through
environmental scanning. For example: contemporary environment requires prompt
decision-making and power to people. Therefore, business leaders are increasingly
delegating authority to empower their staff and to eliminate procedural delays.
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