Organizational weakness and threats

Introduction

For a business, threats and weaknesses are the two factors that can result in the disruption of the internal working processes, which in turn can lead to the company facing financial or another form of loss. Both of them are a disadvantage to the company but are different from one another in terms of their functions.

Threats to an organization

For a business, a threat is the ability of a foreign individual or business to negatively impact or hamper the advancements of the business towards the process of achieving goals. For a company, the threat is mostly other external companies who can affect the business of the company. For example: if a rival company launches a new product which is better than an existing product manufactured and sold by the company, hen it is most likely to acquire the market of the previous product and can cause the sales to go down. This will mean that the company will incur losses while the rival company would sell the products with little to no competition. .

Other examples of threats in an organization is the loss of market goodwill, vendor failure, change in customer preferences, the shift in market attributes, changes in customer buying habits and others. Competitive advantage can also be a considerable threat to the business of an organization. Threats need to be analyzed carefully and need to be understood before proposing solutions. A manager needs to evaluate the threats to the organization as per priority (Apruzzese et al., 2017).

Organizational weakness

For an organization, weakness is the internal flaw, which proves to be a disadvantage for the organization to achieve its goals (Abdalla, 2020). Weaknesses exist within the organization and is usually a disadvantage which will make the organization vulnerable against a threat. For example, if two companies are preparing to launch a new product in the market, the unavailability of adequate advertising channels might be a weakness for the company, as in the absence of proper advertising, fewer people will know about their product and will instead buy the product of the rival company. Weakness of a company might prove to be an advantage for their rival companies. Weaknesses can be in the form of machinery defect, technical fault or human behaviour. Often, a weakness undermines an organization’s capability to take advantage of a market situation.

Differences between weakness and threats

Both threats and weaknesses affect the company in the long run. The threat is an external factor that negatively impacts the functioning of the organization. In contrast, weakness is an internal factor that affects the ability of an organization to face a threat. Threats can be relatively more natural to identify rather than weaknesses, as weaknesses are internal (Rodrigues, et al., 2017). Also, an organization might have many threats, but the number of its weaknesses might be relatively lower. Like strength, weaknesses can be inherently present in an organization. The threat, on the other hand, can be new or emerging.

The inability to cope with a threat might result in the organization’s financial growth being stalled. Weaknesses pose no such threat, but not eliminating them might result in ow productivity of the company.

References:

Abdalla, N. (2020). From the Dream of Change to the Nightmare of Structural Weakness: The Trajectory of Egypt’s Independent Trade Union Movement After 2011. In Socioeconomic Protests in MENA and Latin America (pp. 145-168). Palgrave Macmillan, Cham.

Apruzzese, G., Pierazzi, F., Colajanni, M., & Marchetti, M. (2017). Detection and threat prioritization of pivoting attacks in large networks. IEEE Transactions on Emerging Topics in Computing.

Rodrigues, P., Sreedharan, S., Basha, S. A., & Mahesh, P. S. (2017, March). Security threat identification using energy points. In 2017 2nd International Conference on Anti-Cyber Crimes (ICACC) (pp. 52-54). IEEE.