The official in the company’s EDP Department and the claims adjuster in the Occupational Injury Department were involved in intensive collaboration for a period of about six months. They had never previously had the opportunity to work together and did not know each other well. The EDP specialist is the head of his department, which forms a part of the company’s central financial administration, positioned immediately below head-office management. The occupational-injury claims adjuster is head of one of the company’s business units, the Occupational Injury Department, which is geographically located in another part of the town.
The EDP Department has the duty, on a continuous basis, to rationalize and redesign the forms used by the company, so that the registration of documents and correspondence within the company’s various business units is simplified and made as effective as possible.
The Occupational Injury Department has the task of handling the occupational-injury claims of its policyholders (circle of clients) in a scrupulous and accurate manner, so that clients feel that they are correctly treated. The EDP Department has a rationalizing function in the company, whereas the Occupational Injury Department has a client-oriented function in a specialized area of insurance business.
The occupational-injury claims adjuster has daily contacts with other officials in his own work group and also with members of other work groups within the Occupational Injury Department. These contacts are made primarily to discuss matters concerning occupational injuries that will enable the maintenance of an intra-departmental consensus on the guiding principles for claims adjustment. The Occupational Injury Department lives in a world of its own within the company, and has very few direct contacts beyond those with its own circle of clients. Contact with the rest of the company is extremely limited.
The EDP Department is a part of the company’s central financial-control system. The head of department has brief but regular contacts with all parts of the company, in fact more with these parts than with the personnel of parallel departments in central finance.
The primary reason why collaboration between the EDP official and the occupational-injury claims adjuster arose is that the EDP Department received instructions from management to so design its rationalization activities that insurance officials in the business units were able to increase their productivity, and thereby provide scope to accommodate a wider circle of clients (in part by offering new kinds of policies/insurance packages). The occupational-injury claims adjuster reacts with great hesitation to the EDP official’s proposal when the latter indicates management’s motive. The adjuster wants to achieve his own goal and fulfil his own function in the company, namely that of satisfying the needs of policy holders for the scrupulous administration of matters concerned with occupational injuries. He considers that this goal is incompatible with a further increase in productivity.
The interaction between the official from the EDP Department and the occupational-injury claims adjuster is complicated by factors concerned with their different locations within the organization, their different kinds of obligations and their differing “points of view” on activities in general. In other words, the two officials have to approach problems (in this case the problems of profitability) from different perspectives.
What we have discovered is the existence of conflicting goals and forces, which are built into an organizational design for activities, and which make up a platform for interaction between two officials.