Organizational Behavior Management in Large Residential Organizations

ABSTRACT

This paper suggests larger residential organizations have a unique contribution to offer people with developmental disabilities who require managed environments or research solutions to their living needs. It claims no organization should be managed to be “institutional” regardless of its size, but that size alone is not the sole determinant of self-motivated service delivery. A move toward adoption of short-term goals geared to the immediate benefit of people with developmental disabilities and away from more traditional yearly developmental goals is cited as the key to keeping residential organizations focused on the consumers of their service. However, in order to utilize the unique advantages of larger organizations, these organizations will need to solve the problems created by having large groups of people living in close proximity and managed by multiple managers. A brief review of six general steps to organizational management is offered as the outline for effective management. An emphasis is placed on a need for immediate supervisors to have upper level administrator support to carry out these six managerial steps and to receive continuous feedback from consumers and staff on the acceptability of this service. In addition, because of their large size, history of abuses, and/or lack of consumer self-advocacy, larger residential organizations appear to have a special responsibility to show how they emphasize the concerns of their consumers over the institutional concerns of organizational survival.