Organisational goals – the goals that the organisation tries to achieve, intentions on which the organisation's decisions and actions are based. Organisation can also have official goals, which are meant for use outside the organisation, when organisation claims to try to achieve them, although they do not correspond to its actions.
By measurability the organisation's goals are classified into operational goals that can be formulated in the way that allows measuring of its achievement and nonoperational goals that cannot be formulated in such a way. However, according to Henry Mintzberg, no goal can be completely measurable, something is inevitably lost while moving to a measurable goal, leading to just an approximation. He offers an example that even the goal of achieving a profit cannot be measured exactly, because measurement requires a time period. Henry Mintzberg classifies the organizational goals into four groups:
According to him, although efficiency is usually defined as getting the most benefit with the least costs, in practice only measurable benefits and costs are taken into account. Thus, since the costs are usually easier to measure than benefits, and economic benefits and costs are easier to measure than social benefits and costs, efficiency as a goal leads to economising whenever the decrease of benefit is not noticeable, and ignoring of social benefits and costs.
Interaction between goals
lists five cases of reconciliation of goals:
Concentration on achieving one goal
Concentration on achieving goals in succession, in a preset order
Concentration on achieving alternating multiple goals
Concentration on achieving goals in succession, without a clear order
For example, existence of concentration on achieving one goal, with other goals being treated as constraints, has been confirmed for resellers. According to Henry Mintzberg, if some of organisation's goals are operational, when other goals are not, organisation tends to concentrate on achieving operational goals at the cost of nonoperational goals.
