Organization
Design is about aligning an organization’s mission and vision with its
structure, it’s about considering relationship between workflow, responsibly,
tasks and authority and assuring they support business objectives. The
organization’s design affects employee’s productivity, communication between
each other, and efficiency. For example, having great people, well studied
mission and great leadership are not enough and don’t guarantee well
performance, as it depends as well on the an organization’s design, if the
organization is poorly designed, it will not perform well. Promotions, employee
punishment, business process and information sharing directly affect how
healthy the organization is, each of those along with many other aspects are
important for organization’s success.
Many
might argue that most of today’s organizations are bureaucratic organizations;
responsibility and authority are organized in hierarchies, this is true as
executive managers are not ready yet to relinquish control. This makes me
wonder, were those organizations really designed? Or they just evolved?
The
organization design of my previous employer was based on bureaucracy and
decision-making was centralized. The chain of command was very strict, I
remember as a system engineers I used to visit customers on daily basis and
hear complains about the level of our service or system bugs, although I
informed my direct manager about those complains, he sometimes used to ignore
them. As a reaction I used to send an email to his manager reporting those
issues as they affect the image of the company in front of customers, both
managers used to dislike such action from my side and asked me to respect the
chain of command. As well employees were not involved in the decision making
process and the authority was centralized in the hands of executive management
who were basically located in the head office. This approach resulted in
loosing business opportunities. In addition to that rules and procedures were
clear and very hard to change, although each of the employees knew what was
expected from them, however the lack of flexibility made employees focus on
their own and team goals rather than the organization’s goals.
As
this company is an IT support company with offices around the region, I would
recommend to follow a contingency model, were management should consider
revising the organization design to accommodate with contextual factors, like
competitors, customers, and their employees. Authority should be decentralized
and employees engaged in the decision making process, this will increase
flexibility, innovation and creativity. As an IT company, virtual teams should
exist to utilize their team in different branches and share knowledge between
the team. As well I would recommend them to become more collaborative and build
a page on Facebook were customers can post their queries, this will help in
resolving problems faster and give the customer a level of comfort.
Executive
managers should always forecast and plan for the best design that suits their
organization, this design should be reassessed to ensure its compliance with
organization’s missions and goals, single design might not be the best for all
times.
References:
Buchanan,
David A., & Huczynski, Andrzeg A. (2010). Organizational Behaviour.
Prentice Hall.
Marianne Tracy, (2004) "Contemporary issues in
organizations: The case for the truth – using Manfred F.R. Kets de Vries’ work
as a lens", Development and Learning in Organizations, Vol. 18 Iss: 6,
pp.4 – 6, DOI: 10.1108/14777280410564158,
Emerald, [Online]. (Accessed 11 June 2011)
McNamara, C., (n.d.), ‘Historical and Contemporary Theories
of Management‘, [Online], Available form:
(Accessed
11 June 2011)
MindTools, (n.d.), ‘Organization Design Aligning
Organizational Structure with Business Goals’, [Online], Available from: http://www.mindtools.com/pages/article/newPPM_95.htm
(Accessed
11 June 2011)
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